The attempted abolition of all privilege by restoring power entirely to the coercive agent behind privilege, the State, thereby converting capitalist oligarchy into Statist monopoly. Whitewashing a wall by painting it black.
[celine]
Is Socialism state-centralization of the economy, or is it any system that levels out the society?
From what I've been reading, it seems that for the early 19th-century intellectual, Sociology was any description of how the society did work, and Socialism was any prescription about how the society should work.
By that definition, all anarchists were (and still are) socialists -- even the so-called Anarcho-Capitalists.
bkMarcus, Is anarchism a socialist philosophy or is it libertarian?
[bk]
Under socialism all the means of production are the property of the community. It is the community alone which can dispose of them and which determines their use in production.
Ludwig von Mises, Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth
[mises]
Private property is eliminated, individualism goes by the board, individuality is flattened, all property is owned and controlled communally, and the individual units of the new collective organism are in some vague way equal to one another.
Murray N. Rothbard,
Classical Economics, volume II,
An Austrian perspective on the History of Economic Thought
(Aldershot-Brookfield: Edward Elgar, 1995), p. 318.
[rothbard]
It may mean, and is often used to describe, merely the ideals of social justice, greater equality, and security, which are the ultimate aims of socialism. But it means also the particular method by which most socialists hope to attain these ends and which many competent people regard as the only methods by which they can be fully and quickly attained. In this sense socialism means the abolition of private enterprise, of private ownership of the means of production, and the creation of a system of "planned economy" in which the entrepreneur working for profit is replaced by a central planning body.
F. A. Hayek,
The Road to Serfdom
(from the preface to the 1956 American paperback edition)
[hayek]
In fact, socialism must be the most ironic use of language in the history of human linguistics: it is the advocacy of the complete replacement of social interaction with political interaction, the very negation of civil society itself.
Perry de Havilland, Liberarian Alliance
[libertarianAlliance]
In its earlier and heady days, socialism was supposed to substitute "rational policies" for the supposed chaos of the market. Instead of having individuals competing with each other to produce and sell goods in the market, socialism instead would create a process by which planners could rationally determine the needs of individuals in society, then direct production and distribution toward those ends. Moreover, because planning was to be placed in the hands of economic "experts," there would be no need to deal with the interference from politicians and the special interests that they represent.
Energy Bills and Central Planning by William L. Anderson
[williamAnderson]
The point here is not simply that laws, policies, and programs can have counterproductive results. The point is that, when social processes are described in terms of their hoped-for results, this obscures the more fundamental question as to just what they actually do .... Therefore socialism, for example, is defined in this book not in terms of such goals as equality, security, economic planning, or "social justice," but as a system in which property rights in agriculture, commerce, and industry may be assigned and re-assigned only by political authorities, rather than through transactions in the marketplace.
Thomas Sowell,
Knowledge and Decisions,
Preface to the 1996 Edition
[sowell]
'Socialism', in a less-strict, but nevertheless accurate and simple form means: OPPOSITION TO CAPITALISM.
bkMarcus, Capitalism v. Socialism v. Anarchism
[bk]
'Socialism' has become a word with positive connotations and no content.
David Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom
[friedman]