[Luis Dias]

I'd love so much for people to discuss single policies on their own merits, debate just different people on what to do wrt different policies and so on, but I guess people are just too self-centered and prefer to be curious on where they supposedly are, if they are to the left, down, right, up your ass, wrt some random ill-defined and miscoordinated "map".

[redsniper]

All right, go for it, say something to get the ball rolling. Or do you actually just want to complain?

[Luis Dias]

I tried to, several times. I really think we are massively underestimating how big Inequality both *is* and *is becoming*, not only for the near future but for the less near future. Capital is increasingly more and more concentrated in very few hands, more and more managed by algorithms and "artificial intelligences". Consider the rapid development of better artificial intelligences, manufacturing robots, the death of low wage (and low-middle wage) jobs and consequent rise of unemployment (and thus a struggle for low-paid jobs, increasing the inequality even more due to econ 101...).

This is very rich material to discuss, IMHO.

[redsniper]

I think education is a big issue here. As more of these low-level jobs go away, you're going to need a higher level of education to have a reasonable chance of finding a job. But then of course you can't earn the money to pay for more education, because you lack the skills and education to get a job with a decent wage, or even any job at all. Vicious cycle. So I guess the need for a better educated population is then at odds with the desire to have a more gullible and easily manipulated population. The powers that be will either have to cave and pay to improve public education (), make university more affordable (), or find some way to deal with a growing, disgruntled lower class.... which could get ugly.

Now on the other hand, I think the internet will help us fix a lot of stuff from the grassroots level. It's only going to get harder and harder to keep people in the dark, provided the SOPAs and CISPAs of the world don't get passed.

[Luis Dias]

Education helps, my wonder is if it's enough or not.

As I see it it's a race. A race between machines learning jobs from the dumbest / more repetitive landscapes of the Jobland to the most intelligent / creative parts of it and humans developing and adapting their economies and education to the parts where human skills, interactions and creativity are still way beyond even the most polyanna AI dreamers inside Google and so on.

IF the job landscape were to "stagnate" to our present levels, the middle to low wage employment would just vanish within 10/30 years, which would mean a staggering amount of unemployment, which is the current means to distribute wealth to human beings. We may say a lot of jokes and expose the bad situation of the chinese sweatshops and so on, but this kind of economy did bring up 2 billion people out of the misery hole for the past 20 years. This could be on the verge of just *ending* outright, with chinese being substituted for US and european machines.

There is a lot of room here for outright deflationary economics, bringing some sort of Moore's Law into manufacturing and all sorts of low-skill jobs. This is dynamite for the Inequality problem. OTOH, at the other end, capital will concentrate into fewer hands, as the distances diminish to an internet click, and thus people will inevitably go for the best companies in the world rather than local (Think about "Amazoning" the entire economy).

All these points make me wonder if we shouldn't start to think other means to distribute the wealth created other than jobs. There are lots of ideas regarding this problem, and they aren't all "left-wing".

[redsniper]

I think eventually we'll get to a point where we don't need everyone to work in order to keep society running and progressing and such. Of course that's a long ways off and for the time being unemployment is still a problem.

Really, the crux of the matter for wealth disparity is greed, and I don't know how the hell we can work around that. Again, education could help, like video that kicked off this thread. Get people to understand how badly they're being screwed so maybe they can vote more in their own interests or something. But still, the current status quo is so entrenched, I don't know how much awareness by itself could accomplish. We need some kind of incentive for just helping out your fellow man, but I don't know how you can make people want to do that.

[Luis Dias]

You could well discard "greed" and still the way the system is built would create by itself the enormous disparity we are seeing. Perhaps it would be slower, but I think it would still exist. Nevermind the fact that "greed" is just ambition (which is a wonderful thing) gone somewhat off the rails. You cannot have a system that shuts down greed without shutting down drive, ambition, the urge of building something new yourself.

We need some kind of incentive for just helping out your fellow man, but I don't know how you can make people want to do that.

Create a system where the incentive is natural and self-reinforcing (positive feedback loops), or a system where redistribution of wealth provides enough to everybody not to starve themselves. The latter is inevitable, I think, if we want to save civilization as we know it.

[redsniper]

Create a system where the incentive is natural and self-reinforcing (positive feedback loops)

Right, this is kind of exactly what I meant. It's just.... how?

[bobbtmann]

Create a system where the incentive is natural and self-reinforcing (positive feedback loops)

Right, this is kind of exactly what I meant. It's just.... how?

Give them XP for things. They get a certain amount of XP for organizing a club, or time spent doing community services. People who have higher XP levels can print better things off societies 3D printers.

[Luis Dias]

Substitute "XP" for "CASH" and you got yourself a solution. Good job.

[Mr. Vega]

It's fascinating to see how the issue of income distribution has become a simple matter of state-run redistribution out of compassion for the poor vs. rewarding ability. I suppose that ridiculous pigeonholing is useful to supporters of both the so-called free market and the statist branch of the socialist movement.

Classical liberalism in its original form focused on the difference between earned (productive) income and unearned (rent) income, arguing that the government should leave the activities that produce the former alone and aggressively intervene to curtail the latter, as all income not derived from the direct creation of wealth but from the privileged of owning a monopoly on a precious resource (land, water, the ability to create money via a bank charter) is parasitic and an impediment to growth. They advocated eliminating rent either through taxing the income away (which would include heavy taxes on land appreciation, interest payments above the breakeven level, capital gains, and inheritance, amongst other things), or outright nationalizing the monopolized resources in question and putting them in the public domain to minimize the cost of using them for everyone. With the added bonus of using those taxes to pay for public infrastructure and social services like free education. In other words, allow individuals to accumulate wealth if they're actually doing something productive, but once accumulated make it extremely difficult to impossible to use that wealth to acquire some income producing privilege. Under those conditions formerly entrenched class divisions will quickly break down into something much more fluid and shallow.

I'm not saying this is a perfect approach to the problem, with the biggest dispute being between classical liberals and Marxists as to weather entrepreneurial\managerial income is legitimate or just another kind of rent (Keynes sits on the fence when he calls capitalist income quasi-rent).  But the point is that this isn't just an either-or thing; there are workable approaches to achieve both equality and freedom at the same time.

The real ideological divide is between the classical liberals, Keynesians and Post-Keynesians, and on the extreme end, socialists and anarchists, on one side, and the members of the marginalist school (today called Neo-Classicals and Austrians) along with the Fascists on the other. Read the last chapter of Keynes's General Theory, particularly where he calls for the "euthanasia of the rentier". It's something Adam Smith could have written. Keynesian economics (not the neo-classical crap dressed up as Keynes, but his real ideas) was not a rebellion against Classical economics but a continuation. Contrast that with the marginalist theories that dominate public discourse today, best defined by a line from Milton Friedman,  that "there is no such thing as a free lunch." In other words, there is no such thing as economic rent, all income is earned, it's ok to tax labor and income instead of property and finance, let the banks weigh down the economy with debt so they can rake in the interest, feudalism is actually the free market, freedom is slavery, move on, nothing to see here.

[Luis Dias]

Look Mr Vega, your comment is a good one, but somewhat facetious regarding our purposes and so on. Your point about entrepeneurial/managerial income being rent or quasi-rent is exactly the point that I am talking about.

My thought on this matter is that this "quasi-rent" will dramatically increase with the possibility of a massive concentration of capital we are already witnessing, while the "earned" income will massively diminish in proportion. This will happen due to several predictable deflationary revolutions that are already in sight, and that can be boiled down to "machines will substitute people".

Three things on the above thought. First, simple examples. Driverless cars means Driverless trucks, a whole army of driverless transportation vehicles distributing everything on our economy, it will be awesome but it will absolutely destroy a whole bunch of jobs. Taxi drivers, gone. Massive manufacturing (think Foxconn's million workers et al) will, obviously, disappear. Most mechanical jobs, puff.

Second, capital will concentrate even further with AI advances.

Third, this all happened before (the industrial revolution, etc.).

However, notice that with the last revolutions, we ended up creating what is now called by the right wingers "the nanny state", which was something unthinkable in the 18th century, and now it is considered the "Standard" except for the US conservatives.

So the question is, what kind of a "New Society" should we build given the upcoming revolutions, given the problems we are already detecting today? Or, alternatively, what kind of ****ty society will we get, if we place our bets on those who long for the "Gilded Age" of the "roaring 20s", that think that our problems are solvable if we just destroyed our governments and pegged our currencies to a shiny metal?

Contrast that with the marginalist theories that dominate public discourse today, best defined by a line from Milton Friedman,  that "there is no such thing as a free lunch." In other words, there is no such thing as economic rent, all income is earned, it's ok to tax labor and income instead of property and finance, let the banks weigh down the economy with debt so they can rake in the interest, feudalism is actually the free market, freedom is slavery, move on, nothing to see here.

Yeah, I think that kind of sarcasm is earned by the Austerians. I wouldn't put Milton Friedman in such low terms (I actually think the guy was a genius), he wasn't a goldbug for instance, but the rest, yeah. And I'm from Portugal, so I know how it is like to be placed under the hands of Austerians.

[Apollo]

Because his economic views probably seem to lie further right on a traditional L/R scale than they actually do if you plot his views on government intervention separately.  That said, I believe we've all already indicated that the actual plot positions that you get from taking their test are somewhat divergent from reality.  I don't necessarily think their test is perfectly crafted, but I do think a 2-axis plot makes much more sense that a traditional single axis.  Apparently you do not.

You can't plot them separately. Entitlement programs, taxes, regulations, and socialism (excluding the anarchist variety) are, in and of themselves, government interventions. They are also economic policy. Therefore, Obama should be much farther to the left than my friend (and myself to a lesser degree). He still fits within the center-left area, of course, because neoliberalism is a fairly right-wing (far-right on that ridiculous scale) ideology.

Leftism and government intervention are, in most cases, directly proportional to each other. The Political Compass intentionally tries to seperate them so that leftists and moderate rightists can be smeared as right-wing extremists (at least, that's my take).

Well, yes?  That's the point - L/R scales are broken.  Your position on a L/R scale doesn't translate to a 2-axis scale because it measures different things.

If you have a fundamental problem with 2-axes versus one that's your prerogative.  I happen to like 2-axis plots for politics precisely because it gives a much more interesting analysis than simple L/R, because simple L/R scales don't actually work to compare one country to another because social views, government intervention, and economics are all confounded into a single plot point, and what takes overriding priority depends on the person doing the plotting more than any other factor (American 'conservatives' who everyone else considers far-right will always plot themselves closer to the middle, while plotting Democrats way out in left field, despite the fact that neither is supported by an actual measurement of policy.  In reality, pretty much all of the American political spectrum plots right-of-center when you use a global context.)

I have to question your logic in bringing the Compass into this thread. If it has no relation to conventional terminology than using it in that context is pointless.

L/R scales have some issues, but trying to seperate them into their individual components is a bad idea because many, many policies are economic, social, and intrusive in nature.

EDIT: Oh, and another thing: If the center is halfway between pure capitalism and pure collectivism, how could a welfare capitalist like myself be considered "center-left"? Wouldn't I be right-wing?

[Mr. Vega]

Look Mr Vega, your comment is a good one, but somewhat facetious regarding our purposes and so on. Your point about entrepeneurial/managerial income being rent or quasi-rent is exactly the point that I am talking about.

My thought on this matter is that this "quasi-rent" will dramatically increase with the possibility of a massive concentration of capital we are already witnessing, while the "earned" income will massively diminish in proportion. This will happen due to several predictable deflationary revolutions that are already in sight, and that can be boiled down to "machines will substitute people".

Three things on the above thought. First, simple examples. Driverless cars means Driverless trucks, a whole army of driverless transportation vehicles distributing everything on our economy, it will be awesome but it will absolutely destroy a whole bunch of jobs. Taxi drivers, gone. Massive manufacturing (think Foxconn's million workers et al) will, obviously, disappear. Most mechanical jobs, puff.

Second, capital will concentrate even further with AI advances.

Third, this all happened before (the industrial revolution, etc.).

However, notice that with the last revolutions, we ended up creating what is now called by the right wingers "the nanny state", which was something unthinkable in the 18th century, and now it is considered the "Standard" except for the US conservatives.

So the question is, what kind of a "New Society" should we build given the upcoming revolutions, given the problems we are already detecting today? Or, alternatively, what kind of ****ty society will we get, if we place our bets on those who long for the "Gilded Age" of the "roaring 20s", that think that our problems are solvable if we just destroyed our governments and pegged our currencies to a shiny metal?

Contrast that with the marginalist theories that dominate public discourse today, best defined by a line from Milton Friedman,  that "there is no such thing as a free lunch." In other words, there is no such thing as economic rent, all income is earned, it's ok to tax labor and income instead of property and finance, let the banks weigh down the economy with debt so they can rake in the interest, feudalism is actually the free market, freedom is slavery, move on, nothing to see here.

Yeah, I think that kind of sarcasm is earned by the Austerians. I wouldn't put Milton Friedman in such low terms (I actually think the guy was a genius), he wasn't a goldbug for instance, but the rest, yeah. And I'm from Portugal, so I know how it is like to be placed under the hands of Austerians.

One: I hate to go all Marxist, but um, if you're going to fully automate manufacturing and stuff, you still need to find some way to pay your consumers, otherwise there's no one to buy all these wonderful goods.

The luddites said in the 1800s that machines would throw everyone out of work...didn't happen. Productivity increased and they found something else for the workers to do. That America is experiencing such a massive structural job shortage (beyond the effects of the recession) is simply because the industry was shipped overseas (which the robotics boom will hopefully bring back). I'm not saying that what you're predicting can't happen or won't eventually happen, but each time someone predicts it I'm reminded of how many times it's been wrong.

Two; Here's my counter: does capital need to be so highly concentrated now? Ignoring the fact that the current level of wealth inequality is totally unprecedented and can probably only occur in an economy totally dominated by the rentier class, I need to ask whether why you need capital concentrated in a society with such high productivity and per-capita income. You could argue it was necessary a century ago for wealth to be concentrated in such few hands so heavy industry could be built up in the first place and there just wasn't enough on hand at the time if you scattered it, but now? Is this really the most efficient arrangement?

I'll go further. For a capitalist to obtain rent from capital requires capital to be scarce relative to needs or wants. Um, if productivity keeps rising, why does that need to be true? Why can't capital be built up to the point that it ceases to be scarce? This is exactly what Keynes talked about when he advocated for the Euthanasia of the Rentier; he argued this would actually happen after enough full employment accumulation in an economy without asset price bubbles (ie, all investment goes directly to production). Of course, a few economists have pointed out that the conditions Keynes specified for this process to occur require that rent income already be zero, but still. Why do things have to develop the way you're predicting?

Just because economic development has followed certain patterns over the recent past does not mean it will continue to do so. And the nature of our society depends on and varies with its institutions more than you may think.

Three: Milton Friedman, hoo boy...where to start? I want you to find and read Debunking Economics by Steve Keen. Amongst many other things, it chronicles how Friedman and Lucas repopularized Neo-Classical beliefs about money and markets in the 1970s after Keynes had pointed out that they didn't hold up once you include the issue of an uncertain future in the model. They got around this issue by assuming that people could predict the future -literally, that was their assumption- and called this theory "Rational Expectations". Reading Keen explain each step of their reasoning is laugh-out-loud funny - it's like reading the economic equivalent of the witch burning scene in Monty Python in the Holy Grail. I hate to break it to you, but only the craziest Austrians like von Mises and Rothbard top him in the use of woo.

[Mr. Vega]

After reading Apollo, I need to correct some definitions here.

Leftist- you like equality. You might want to government to redistribute, or you might be an anarchist who wants a decentralized but egalitarian society, but as long as you want equality, you're of the left.

Rightist- Authoritarian is the usual description, but you're starting with the belief that a certain level of inequality is good, justified, or necessary. How much inequality you want is yours to decide.

Centrist - what you get called when the media wants to praise you for appearing to be in between two arbitrary points. In the center? The center of what? Where are the two extremes located? Mussolini's politics were somewhere between Hitler and Stalin. I guess that makes him a centrist! You can be in between something literally anywhere on the left-right spectrum. It means absolutely nothing. It's a marketing term. Used primarily to create the illusion of disagreement that requires a centrist to go and 'solve'.

Liberal - you think people should be free(er). You might advocate this by having the government get out of your business, or you might call for government intervention to prevent others from violating your civil and economic freedoms. You might focus on negative liberty (free from coercion) or positive liberty (free to fufill one's potential, unburdened by the cost of education, for example), but you just have to focus on freedom. Of course most people who actually take freedom seriously in this era consider both the oppressive power of the state and the oppressive power of concentrated wealth, but there's plenty of room for disagreement. Liberalism is a big tent to those who take it seriously (ie, not Democrats).

Conservative - you believe in traditional values. So, in other words, you happen to be in favor of whatever you think are traditional values. If these traditional values include say, liberty and freedom from having to subject yourself to wage labor (like say, THE PLATFORM OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY WHEN ABRAHAM LINCOLN WAS PRESIDENT), you can be a conservative and be the most ardent left-liberal at the same time.

[Apollo]

After reading Apollo, I need to correct some definitions here.

Leftist- you like equality. You might want to government to redistribute, or you might be an anarchist who wants a decentralized but egalitarian society, but as long as you want equality, you're of the left.

Rightist- Authoritarian is the usual description, but you're starting with the belief that a certain level of inequality is good, justified, or necessary. How much inequality you want is yours to decide.

Centrist - what you get called when the media wants to praise you for appearing to be in between two arbitrary points. In the center? The center of what? Where are the two extremes located? Mussolini's politics were somewhere between Hitler and Stalin. I guess that makes him a centrist! You can be in between something literally anywhere on the left-right spectrum. It means absolutely nothing. It's a marketing term. Used primarily to create the illusion of disagreement that requires a centrist to go and 'solve'.

Liberal - you think people should be free(er). You might advocate this by having the government get out of your business, or you might call for government intervention to prevent others from violating your civil and economic freedoms. You might focus on negative liberty (free from coercion) or positive liberty (free to fufill one's potential, unburdened by the cost of education, for example), but you just have to focus on freedom. Of course most people who actually take freedom seriously in this era consider both the oppressive power of the state and the oppressive power of concentrated wealth, but there's plenty of room for disagreement. Liberalism is a big tent to those who take it seriously (ie, not Democrats).

Conservative - you believe in traditional values. So, in other words, you happen to be in favor of whatever you think are traditional values. If these traditional values include say, liberty and freedom from having to subject yourself to wage labor (like say, THE PLATFORM OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY WHEN ABRAHAM LINCOLN WAS PRESIDENT), you can be a conservative and be the most ardent left-liberal at the same time.

Most of what you say is correct. However, note that most leftism uses the power of the state to force a measure of equality. That's what I mean when I say they're directly proportional.

All other things being equal, a capitalist society will be freer than a socialist society.

EDIT: Oh, and a rightist who wants equality but hates government intervention more is still a rightist. A democratic state can also be right-wing.

[General Battuta]

After reading Apollo, I need to correct some definitions here.

Leftist- you like equality. You might want to government to redistribute, or you might be an anarchist who wants a decentralized but egalitarian society, but as long as you want equality, you're of the left.

Rightist- Authoritarian is the usual description, but you're starting with the belief that a certain level of inequality is good, justified, or necessary. How much inequality you want is yours to decide.

Centrist - what you get called when the media wants to praise you for appearing to be in between two arbitrary points. In the center? The center of what? Where are the two extremes located? Mussolini's politics were somewhere between Hitler and Stalin. I guess that makes him a centrist! You can be in between something literally anywhere on the left-right spectrum. It means absolutely nothing. It's a marketing term. Used primarily to create the illusion of disagreement that requires a centrist to go and 'solve'.

Liberal - you think people should be free(er). You might advocate this by having the government get out of your business, or you might call for government intervention to prevent others from violating your civil and economic freedoms. You might focus on negative liberty (free from coercion) or positive liberty (free to fufill one's potential, unburdened by the cost of education, for example), but you just have to focus on freedom. Of course most people who actually take freedom seriously in this era consider both the oppressive power of the state and the oppressive power of concentrated wealth, but there's plenty of room for disagreement. Liberalism is a big tent to those who take it seriously (ie, not Democrats).

Conservative - you believe in traditional values. So, in other words, you happen to be in favor of whatever you think are traditional values. If these traditional values include say, liberty and freedom from having to subject yourself to wage labor (like say, THE PLATFORM OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY WHEN ABRAHAM LINCOLN WAS PRESIDENT), you can be a conservative and be the most ardent left-liberal at the same time.

Most of what you say is correct. However, note that most leftism uses the power of the state to force a measure of equality. That's what I mean when I say they're directly proportional.

All other things being equal, a capitalist society will be freer than a socialist society.

Boy, there's a nonsense statement grounded in nothing.

[Mr. Vega]

After reading Apollo, I need to correct some definitions here.

Leftist- you like equality. You might want to government to redistribute, or you might be an anarchist who wants a decentralized but egalitarian society, but as long as you want equality, you're of the left.

Rightist- Authoritarian is the usual description, but you're starting with the belief that a certain level of inequality is good, justified, or necessary. How much inequality you want is yours to decide.

Centrist - what you get called when the media wants to praise you for appearing to be in between two arbitrary points. In the center? The center of what? Where are the two extremes located? Mussolini's politics were somewhere between Hitler and Stalin. I guess that makes him a centrist! You can be in between something literally anywhere on the left-right spectrum. It means absolutely nothing. It's a marketing term. Used primarily to create the illusion of disagreement that requires a centrist to go and 'solve'.

Liberal - you think people should be free(er). You might advocate this by having the government get out of your business, or you might call for government intervention to prevent others from violating your civil and economic freedoms. You might focus on negative liberty (free from coercion) or positive liberty (free to fufill one's potential, unburdened by the cost of education, for example), but you just have to focus on freedom. Of course most people who actually take freedom seriously in this era consider both the oppressive power of the state and the oppressive power of concentrated wealth, but there's plenty of room for disagreement. Liberalism is a big tent to those who take it seriously (ie, not Democrats).

Conservative - you believe in traditional values. So, in other words, you happen to be in favor of whatever you think are traditional values. If these traditional values include say, liberty and freedom from having to subject yourself to wage labor (like say, THE PLATFORM OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY WHEN ABRAHAM LINCOLN WAS PRESIDENT), you can be a conservative and be the most ardent left-liberal at the same time.

Most of what you say is correct. However, note that most leftism uses the power of the state to force a measure of equality. That's what I mean when I say they're directly proportional.

All other things being equal, a capitalist society will be freer than a socialist society.

EDIT: Oh, and a rightist who wants equality but hates government intervention more is still a rightist. A democratic state can also be right-wing.

No, someone who wants equality but hates government intervention is a left libertarian. Right and left have nothing to do with freedom directly. You might argue that equality is a necessary precondition for freedom, or that equality in the real world requires the government to violate our liberty, but again, that's up for discussion. The definitions are not. Left = equality, right = not equality.

Here are some more definitions for you:

Socialism- An economic system where the workers run the workplaces (especially the factories) and make all of the the economic decisions, including for investment. Notice the lack of mention of the government. Government ownership of the economy is not socialism, regardless of whether or not the government claims to own it in the people's name. State socialism is a contradiction in terms, invented by Lenin and Trotsky to legitimize their dismantling of the democratic worker organizations that sprung up in the wake of the Russian Revolution, and the concentration of all power in their own hands. The west was happy to call this socialism because it equates socialism with one of the horrors of the 20th century and not its real meaning, the democratic ownership of industry. Socialism is workers control.

Capitalism - An economic system which separates society into workers and capitalists. The capitalists are endowed with control of the physical production capital of the society and make the crucial decisions of when and what to produce by way of private investment. The funds to invest are provided by a banking sector with the power to create purchasing power ex nihilo to award to entrepreneurs, allowing the economy to (potentially, if this power to create credit is not misused to inflate the price of existing assets instead of creating new ones) grow faster than would otherwise be possible if investment were funded only by existing income. Workers are paid wages for operating the capital and (at least nominally) influence production by deciding what produced goods to purchase with their wages.

Free market - a term with any number of definitions. By the original definition given by Smith, Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill, a free market is a market free of any economic rent, be it caused by government interference or by private exploitation of monopolies. They key here is that in an economy free of rent, prices fall to their floor - the cost of production, because there is no additional overhead businesses must pay to produce a good beyond the direct price of the labor and capital used in its production. The irony is that classical liberals actually believed that the government had to intervene in some way to remove rent from the equation - the only question was how to do it while minimizing the side effects to the rest of the economy.

The popular modern definition of a free market is an economy with literally no government interference. One type of overhead is eliminated, while the other is allowed to grow freely. Such a free market has never existed, ever, certainly not in western societies, which all developed with heavy state intervention (who do you think paid for the development of the first computers? Or the internet? Certainly not the private sector). However, such a definition is used as a positive strawman to justify the actual economic system in which we live, in which the development of new technologies is paid for with public funds until said technology can be sold at a profit, at which point the patents are carted off to private sector monopolies who can sell at high prices to consumers who already paid for the development costs with their tax dollars, thus ripping them off twice.

Also notice that the original definition of free market does not require the concentration of the means of production in relatively few hands, as in capitalism. In fact, a believer in the free market might consider such an arrangement hostile to the free market.

[Mr. Vega]

If you all haven't gathered this by now, if Adam Smith were alive today I am one hundred percent certain that he would be an advocate for the Occupy Movement. It attracts all kinds of radicals, but if there's one central message the movement has its that our politicians are helping the banks screw over the economy for their own benefit, which is a message any classical liberal would be happy to get behind.

[Apollo]

Boy, there's a nonsense statement grounded in nothing.

Nothing other than the fact that attempts to implement socialism on any sort of a large scale have (almost?) invariably used the state's power. Look at Cuba, Soviet Russia, and all the other communist dictatorships.

(nice ad hominem there)

However, I will admit that, on paper, many socialist ideologies do advocate for a very high degree of personal and economic freedom. It's just the implementation that ends up increasing government control.

No, someone who wants equality but hates government intervention is a left libertarian. Right and left have nothing to do with freedom directly. You might argue that equality is a necessary precondition for freedom, or that equality in the real world requires the government to violate our liberty, but again, that's up for discussion. The definitions are not. Left = equality, right = not equality.

A laissez-faire capitalist who acknowledges that system's flaws but hates government intervention more is a left-winger?

Socialism- An economic system where the workers run the workplaces (especially the factories) and make all of the the economic decisions, including for investment. Notice the lack of mention of the government. Government ownership of the economy is not socialism, regardless of whether or not the government claims to own it in the people's name. State socialism is a contradiction in terms, invented by Lenin and Trotsky to legitimize their dismantling of the democratic worker organizations that sprung up in the wake of the Russian Revolution, and the concentration of all power in their own hands. The west was happy to call this socialism because it equates socialism with one of the horrors of the 20th century and not its real meaning, the democratic ownership of industry. Socialism is workers control.

That's one theoretical form of socialism. The attempts that have been practiced on a large scale in real life, on the other hand, have utilized state control of the means of production to achieve that end.

As for the "it's not socialism because it doesn't fit the democratic definition" argument, ideologies have many different forms. You can't exclude one because you don't like it.

Capitalism - An economic system which separates society into workers and capitalists. The capitalists are endowed with control of the physical production capital of the society and make the crucial decisions of when and what to produce by way of private investment. The funds to invest are provided by a banking sector with the power to create purchasing power ex nihilo to award to entrepreneurs, allowing the economy to (potentially, if this power to create credit is not misused to inflate the price of existing assets instead of creating new ones) grow faster than would otherwise be possible if investment were funded only by existing income. Workers are paid wages for operating the capital and (at least nominally) influence production by deciding what produced goods to purchase with their wages.

No major problems with that, although I question your use of the term "capitalist". Anyone who supports capitalism is a capitalist, not just a member of the upper class.