so·cial·ism  (ssh-lzm)
n.
1. Any of various theories or systems of social organization in which the means of producing and distributing goods is owned collectively or by a centralized government that often plans and controls the economy.
2. The stage in Marxist-Leninist theory intermediate between capitalism and communism, in which collective ownership of the economy under the dictatorship of the proletariat has not yet been successfully achieved.

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

Let's pick this apart a bit... If socialism is government ownership of the means of production, what is the means of production? Well, land for one. Pretty much everything we have in this world at one point or another comes from the land. Who owns the land? You? Probably not, maybe you own a home, but if you drill for oil or mine for gold in your back yard you are probably going to wind up in a bit of trouble. This is because very few American's own land, they own Real Estate. The distinction is very important here when we attempt to shatter this false image that you are actually a free people.

Unless you have allodial title to your land, you do not own it. Webster's first dictionary (1825 ed) says allodium is "land which is absolute property of the owner, real estate held in absolute independence, without being subject to any rent, service, or acknowledgement to a superior. It is thus opposed to feud." Feud? Did you know that you were a serf, subject to a Lord, in your own house? Well, you are.

Real Estate is a concept known as "Fee Simple" ownership, Megarry's "The Law of Real Property" defines Fee Simple as "The most extensive tenure allowed under the feudal system - short of outright ownership - allowing the tenant to sell or convey by will or be transfer to a heir if the owner dies intestate. In modern law, land held in many common law states is held in fee simple. This is as close as one can get to absolute ownership in common law."

What is ownership anyway? Webster's New World Law Dictionary  defines ownership as "The total body of rights to use and enjoy a property, to pass it on to someone else as an inheritance, or to convey it by sale. Ownership implies the right to possess property, regardless of whether or not the owner personally makes constructive use of it."

So it doesn't really matter if the government is actively using your property or not, if they have the legal authority to exercise control over your property, they are implying some sort of ownership. The government owns your land, they can tell you what use you may or may not make of it, they can take it whenever they want, and do whatever they want to do with it.

Since land is the primary means of production, and the government in reality owns it, we are by simple definition, at least partly a socialist country.

But I realize that by this simple fact alone you might not consider the United States to be a socialist country, and allowing people to own land in allodial title in America would be a very controversial subject that I am not going to address in this article. So let us explain a little further...

The United States Constitution, Article 1 Section 1 says "All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives." The act of legislation is the act of making laws, but Congress at some point got sick of making all those laws and made regulatory agencies to do the work for them, this is unconstitutional of course, but don't expect the supreme court to help you there. In any case, Congress creates these unelected positions of power and they go about exercising control (implying ownership) over all the other means of production.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is a great example because of current events. In Congress, the House of Representatives passed H.R.2454, the American Clean Energy And Security Act of 2009, better known as "Cap & Trade", but after some emails were exposed and other controversies proving that data was being manipulated to support false claims of global warming, the Senate seems unlikely to pass the act, probably because they don't want to be voted out of office. The EPA has no such concerns because they were never elected to begin with. So the Whitehouse has announced "If you don't pass this legislation, then ... the EPA is going to have to regulate in this area," the official said. "And it is not going to be able to regulate on a market-based way, so it's going to have to regulate in a command-and-control way, which will probably generate even more uncertainty."

Basically, the EPA will make it illegal to produce Carbon Dioxide, then grant special privileges to certain entities to produce it. This is particularly troubling, since you exhale carbon dioxide all day every day. Pretty much everything else we do in this world creates carbon dioxide also, every time you start your car, turn on a light, make a phone call, or use your computer, carbon dioxide is one of the results, since pretty much all of our energy production is made by burning fossil fuels. If done, this will authorize the complete control of pretty much everyone and everything by an unconstitutional, unelected, agency.

But this isn't the first thing the EPA has ever done, far from it. The EPA has 7079 dockets of rules listed on Regulations.gov, each with a whole list of rules inside of it, none of which require the approval of any elected body.

If ownership is the right to use or exercise control over property, the EPA owns pretty much everything.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is one of my favorite examples. Though they are meant to serve as a restraint on pharmaceutical companies and agribusiness, in reality they have served quite a different purpose, to make these companies frighteningly powerful.

They prevent competition for one. You cannot sell a medicine in the United States without the approval of the FDA. This sounds good to a lot of people because it pretends to keep medicine safe, though this is fully absurd if you know anything about the world we live in because hardly a year goes by where there isn't some lawsuit against the pharmaceutical companies for some bad medicine doing some horrible thing. What you need to understand here is that by requiring permission from government to make and sell medicine, what you have actually done is outlawed the production of medicine! By getting permission from the government to produce medicine, they are essentially acquiring a license to break the law.

I could go on all day listing regulatory agencies and listing their orwellian powers, the Departments of Agriculture, Education, Energy, Labor etc... Hundreds of billions of dollars for unelected, unconstitutional, agencies which usurp legislative authority and call it "Regulation".

This is a form of socialism which we have expanded rapidly over the last 70+ years. It started well before then, but it was full speed ahead under FDR, and his "New Deal" programs, many of which were more communist than socialist.

Who cares? You! Why? Because Socialism is only a transitional stage prior to communism. People are acting like we are under the threat of possibly becoming a Socialist Country, but we have been a socialist country for a very long time.

When Karl Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto, he was no fan of capitalism, but his problem wasn't so much with the capitalist as it was with the bourgeois socialist, and it is one thing I share in common with Karl Marx. Because the bourgeois socialist uses his special privileges from the government to maintain his or her status at the expense of others. This abuse of power was the whole point of the Communist Manifesto and the reason for the demand to abolish private property. If there is no private property, then theoretically there is no reason for power to be abused, since primarily the bourgeois socialist abuses his power for the purpose of obtaining property.

What Marxists fail to recognize, for one, is that you can never really abolish private property. Human beings acquire property for themselves and protect it, it is a natural human behavior, and a fundamental right of humanity. Additionally, it isn't necessary to abolish private property to defeat the bourgeois socialist, true capitalism, true economic liberty, defeats the bourgeois socialist without infringing on anyones rights. Just stop granting special power to people and the problem is solved right there.

People get bent out of shape about profits of oil companies, pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies, etc... This is why you have all these proposed laws before Congress to have government take these things over, it isn't to put the means of production into the hands of the state, this happened a long time ago, it is to abolish private property altogether, the direct redistribution of wealth. Thats what Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, Welfare, and Food Stamps are. That is what Socialized Medicine, and Cap & Trade will be.

What these people fail to realize is that if it wasn't illegal to drill for oil, then the oil companies wouldn't be quite so powerful, and energy wouldn't be quite so expensive. If it weren't illegal to produce and practice medicine, then the pharmaceutical companies wouldn't be quite so powerful and medicine wouldn't be quite so expensive. If it weren't illegal to sell insurance, then insurance companies wouldn't be quite so powerful, and insurance wouldn't be quite so expensive.

The problem isn't that we are becoming socialist, the problem is that we have been socialist for decades, and we are about to become communist.

The solution isn't to abolish property, the solution is to abolish these regulatory agencies, and similar laws which allow the bourgeois socialist to oppress the people, and allow true Freedom in America, not only in our individual lives, but in the markets as well.