Is the US headed towards a socialist government?

[kandrathe]

I don't agree. First because in most western countries the real personal risk of a business owner is 0. Business goes bad? File for bankrupcy and start again.

This is a ludicrous statement. The people who try to start a business risk their own capital. As a business grows they may attract outside investors, which they then are also tasked to try to protect. There is a tremendous risk. On the contrary, government takes the money away from the people to spend it. Government risks nothing.

On average a government will know better what is good for it's people (as long as it doesn't make decisions based on what industry lobby groups tell to do).

This is why you are a socialist, and I am not. To me, government is a necessary evil to insure a free society. Anything more than that is repressive.

The next argument is that it is very easy to make money on useless things (so not things as bread, houses, water, cloths). And I think that once you have a crisis as big as this one, and the government will have to pay, better to let the government decide what to do (as you said the most important thing is that people get jobs, and thus money to spend, thus stimulating the economy) even though something might be useless, at least you don't let some business owner profit from it in an unfair way. And, some things might seem useless to you, but I think not being able to get a private party to step in and seeing a profit and being useless are two different things. I wonder if we would have GPS satellites if a private company needed to pay the whole track.

This is a fundamental question of freedom. If you believe that currency (money) is an expression of the fruits of your labor. Then employment is a contract between a worker (with skills) and the business (needing the skill) with the result of a wage. Should a person be able to trade that wage for benefits of their own choosing? Yes, they will need clothing, food, shelter, but they might also enjoy playing a computer game once in awhile. While not needed for survival, and perhaps frivolous, shouldn't people be allowed to choose the benefits they wish to acquire as a result of their labor? From the business side of a computer game, what could be more lucrative? You build the software once, then sell it millions of times without the need for additional labor. It's like printing money. The extension to your proposal would then be that only those things that produce "needs" should be stimulated, which ignores the reality that most employment in our modern age produces "wants". Materials sciences, industrialization, and automation have made the clothing, feeding, and housing of our people a minor part of the economy.