In the news, on TV, in our message boards, we've been throwing around isms a lot lately- Communism, Socialism, etc. If Obama called his national health care plan "socialized medicine," for example, it would immediately drop in support, except for his youngest voters, who were born AFTER "Red Dawn" was in theatres.
Those questions and comments ignore the central question: will your proposed plan @#%*&@!! work!?. Many of FDR's probably-socialst policies stabilized the economy, got people back to work, and laid a safety net for millions of Americans.
But when we're talking about financial policy, Communism and Conservatism have one glaring, gaping flaw:
They're counting on people to be good.
A friend of mine grew up in one of the Soviet satellite nations, and even he can admit that on paper, Communism is a great idea: everybody fed, everybody secure, all working for the good of all. But if it sounds like a flaky hippie pipe dream, that's because it largely is: the word, and particularly government, are populated with assholes. They come to power because of the perks- the gifts, the preferential treatment, the pay, the nice benefits.
Communist governments almost invariably turn into the Party elite holding to as much money, resources, and comfort as they can get their hands on, while the rest of the population distills their underwear into vodka and burns their furniture for warmth. Eventually these weakened nations collapse, due largely to internal corruption eating away at the government until nothing gets done anymore.
Reagan didn't destroy the Soviet Union: it destroyed itself.
The flaw in Communist thinking was, of course, that people play nice and are willing to share.
Conservatism is actually, financially speaking, a lazier form of Communism: whereas the Commies thought that they needed a heavy-duty government infrastructure to ensure that wealth would move from the rich down to the poor, the Republicans actually thought that it would happen all by itself.
The rich are inherently good, you see- and they'll get bored having all that money. Eventually they'll start donating that money to charity, creating private firms to help with health care and education and business. They'll create jobs, and small businesses, and loan their money out to people.
Or, perhaps, as is more likely, they'll hoard their money, move it outside of the US economy into foreign bank accounts, and let it accrue interest that their no-account children will be able to live on forever. One generation does the work, and, with the Estate Tax destroyed, every subsequent generation gets away with giving back as little to the American economy as possible.
Government is, at the very least, a check on people- imagine the uproar if the Republicans wanted to abolish law enforcement, instead saying that the "invisible hand of revenge" would take care of crime from now on? Of course that's idiotic- we need rules and guidelines and watchmen to make sure that people don't start acting like jerks all over each other.
So it is with business and health care and food and toys and everything else: we need things in place to stop people from being dicks to each other. Nothing more, nothing less.