Socialism .vs. Capitalism. Is this a war or a marriage?

I love to smile inside at times when I think about the years of my early adulthood when I was raising babies and trying to find my way.  At the time, my very dear friend was raising his own babies, so we often spent time together raising our babies and exploring the joy of beer.

John Sherffius is the creator of this.

We were close, close friends from middle school, so our influence on each other is immense.  I can recall how he came to be deeply involved with unions.  As a politically charged young person, I found myself standing outside of a grocery store during a strike and I jumped right in with the workers to fight the good fight.  At the time, I don't think my friend cared much about stuff like that but he joined me anyway.  As we departed I explained to him what I believed about unions then, and what I believe about them now.  Unions dictate work standards for everyone, even those who do not pay the cost for their existence.

Unions rose out of a natural reaction to capitalism run amok.  A great example of the importance of unions is our current insurance debate.  The reason that 85% of the insurance market is employer based insurance is not because employers are so considerate of people, but because companies who did not have unions ran the risk of becoming unionized if they did not move to meet union level standards.  They still do.

As a result of unions in this country, every company tries to stay ahead of employee dissent that could result in a unionization effort.  The rise of unions and the cost of having them does not and did not destroy companies, it just forced them to see the cost of doing business in a broader perspective.  This broader perspective allows 85% of America to currently work for a company that subsidizes each employee in order to pay for the current socialized health insurance program called group insurance.

If companies can justify paying this expense right now (it will go away in 2015 for most ), do you think it will be hard to pay for increased wages when this expense goes away?  Companies take any expense, increased supply cost, increased wages or whatever and treat it like all expenses; as a cost of doing business. That's it.

Most socialism is just a cost of doing business that we disperse among the masses to ease the pain.  Sometimes we call it taxes, other times we call it fee's, but in the end whether its paid out in the form of group insurance or military spending, or food stamps, it is socialism nonetheless.

Socialism demands pragmatism.  Group insurance is pragmatic.  Generally American socialism is not pragmatic but reactionary and therefore expensive as hell. As a result of American socialism, the forces of capitalism and competition have learned to lurk for opportunity to consume  the crumbs and waste from this reactionary beast.  The big crumbs fall from military and healthcare socialism.  Other forms of socialism nip at the edges of our wasteful government but don't consume nearly as much as the big two.

Military waste abroad will be consumed by private security firms and other corporations (have you heard about camp leatherneck). The rest needs to go away to deal with our deficit a bit.  Since war is such a major industry in this world, the military has become an example of socialism and capitalism playing twister. Good luck unraveling those two lovers.  Before the ACA, that's what was happening in healthcare.

In the end, socialism and capitalism are like a husband and wife.  Both compete for power even though they already know who is the boss............s/he is.