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Here's my viewpoint on the juxtaposition between socialism and capitalism.

almost everyone agrees that social security is a form of socialism; but have you ever pondered it in terms of capitalism? Here's an exercise for you. Call up a manager of annuities at a bank and ask her how much you would have to invest at age 65 to fund an annuity equal to your SS check (along with all the little bells and whistles that are attached.) If you can get the manager to do some number crunching, you will be absolutely amazed. I haven't done this exactly, but I just went on line and did some looking around.

To fund an annuity of $1500 for the lifetime of a male aged 65 and with a 50% residual annuity for his spouse 10 years younger you would need to put up about $1 million up front. And this is only a poor approximation of SS because it does not include COLAs.

Put another way, that hypothetical person has for his lifetime control of $1 million in assets. In theory he could find someone who would pay him a million bucks for his annuity.

Does that, in effect, make the average joe much richer than he or she thought? I submit to you the answer is yes. And how much of that did he pay in? Assume about 14 percent of salary over 40 years at an average of perhaps $50K a year. $280,000, give or take. And he controls almost four times that for the rest of his life. Of course he is a capitalist, at least in my book.

It is the definition of the men who created the idea of socialism.

The first "self-conscious socialist movements developed in the 1820s and 1830s. The Owenites, Saint-Simonians and Fourierists provided a series of coherent analyses and interpretations of society. They also, especially in the case of the Owenites, overlapped with a number of other working-class movements like the Chartists in the United Kingdom."[73] The Chartists gathered significant numbers around the People's Charter of 1838, which demanded the extension of suffrage to all male adults. Leaders in the movement also called for a more equitable distribution of income and better living conditions for the working classes. "The very first trade unions and consumers’ cooperative societies also emerged in the hinterland of the Chartist movement, as a way of bolstering the fight for these demands."[74] A later important socialist thinker in France was Pierre-Joseph Proudhon who proposed his philosophy of mutualism in which "everyone had an equal claim, either alone or as part of a small cooperative, to possess and use land and other resources as needed to make a living".[75] There were also currents inspired by dissident Christianity of Christian socialism "often in Britain and then usually coming out of left liberal politics and a romantic anti-industrialism"[69] which produced theorists such as Edward Bellamy, Frederick Denison Maurice, and Charles Kingsley.[76]

The first advocates of socialism favoured social levelling in order to create a meritocratic or technocratic society based on individual talent. Count Henri de Saint-Simon is regarded as the first individual to coin the term socialism.[77] Saint-Simon was fascinated by the enormous potential of science and technology and advocated a socialist society that would eliminate the disorderly aspects of capitalism and would be based on equal opportunities.[78][unreliable source?] He advocated the creation of a society in which each person was ranked according to his or her capacities and rewarded according to his or her work.[77] The key focus of Saint-Simon's socialism was on administrative efficiency and industrialism, and a belief that science was the key to progress.[79] This was accompanied by a desire to implement a rationally organised economy based on planning and geared towards large-scale scientific and material progress,[77] and thus embodied a desire for a more directed or planned economy. Other early socialist thinkers, such as Thomas Hodgkin and Charles Hall, based their ideas on David Ricardo's economic theories. They reasoned that the equilibrium value of commodities approximated prices charged by the producer when those commodities were in elastic supply, and that these producer prices corresponded to the embodied labour – the cost of the labour (essentially the wages paid) that was required to produce the commodities. The Ricardian socialists viewed profit, interest and rent as deductions from this exchange-value

I think if you accept Social Security as being socialist, then you are accepting the erroneous label of Conservatives. It would be socialist if people did not make contributions and then have their draw dependent on their contribution average over the years. (There ARE some socialist aspects like SSI Disability Income, etc. but the main activity is NOT socialist.)

In it's current form, it is much more like an annuity: Definitely a capitalist investment vehicle. In fact I think you could buy just such an annuity from an insurance company, though they would charge you enough to make a handsome profit.

It invests in US T-Bills, so most of us who can collect really don't need to have a fixed-asset allocation in our retirement portfolio. Silly to buy more T-Bills when you already have so much invested in them.

No, my friend, it emphatically is not. Why I continually object is that you prefer one of many sources of socialism as the "official" version - that of Marx - who deliberately imported the term into his manifesto to obfuscate its meaning. In the majority of Europe, "socialism" is accepted as meaning the State providing directly for the needs of the people - social democracy. Practically every state in the world is a "mixed" economy.

Wikipedia. (I use Wikipedia as an easy reference to access, and because it cites sources.) Nearly none of the early "socialist" thinkers considered the elimination of individual or even collective/communal property as being necessary to the establishment of a "socialist" society. Socialism has always included a variety of interpretations.

By the late 19th century, and after further articulation and advancement by Karl Marx and his collaborator Friedrich Engels as the culmination of technological development outstripping the economic dynamics of capitalism, "socialism" had come to signify opposition to capitalism and advocacy for a post-capitalist system based on some form of social ownership of the means of production.By the 1920s, social democracy and communism became the two dominant political tendencies within the international socialist movement.Socialism proceeded to emerge as the most influential secular political-economic worldview of the twentieth century,and while the emergence of the Soviet Union as the world's first nominally socialist state led to socialism's widespread association with the Soviet economic model, many economists and intellectuals have argued that in practice the model functioned as a form of state capitalism, or a non-planned administrative or command economy. Socialist parties and ideas remain a political force with varying degrees of power and influence in all continents, heading national governments in many countries around the world.

It shouldn't be a head scratcher to figure out just exactly what the Democratic Party stands for.

Same thing with every issue.