| − | '''Socialism''' is an economic system where the means of production are seized and monopolized by the government with compensation to the builders of the [[capital]], and where investments, production, distribution, income, and prices are determined by government laws that regulate the transfer of money, goods (including capital goods), and services primarily through taxation and regularized and institutionalized aggressive coercion. | + | '''Socialism''' is an economic system where the means of production are seized and monopolized by the government without compensation to the builders of the [[capital]], and where investments, production, distribution, income, and prices are determined by government laws that regulate the transfer of money, goods (including capital goods), and services primarily through taxation and regularized and institutionalized aggressive coercion. |
| | As a political ideology based on the distribution of wealth, socialism stresses the privileges of the many over the rights of the few, but in practice when socialist economic principles are forced onto a nation by a totalitarian government a new upper class appears which imuch better offer than the lower class. A prime example is the [[Soviet Union]] ''(see [[Nomenklatura]])''. | | As a political ideology based on the distribution of wealth, socialism stresses the privileges of the many over the rights of the few, but in practice when socialist economic principles are forced onto a nation by a totalitarian government a new upper class appears which imuch better offer than the lower class. A prime example is the [[Soviet Union]] ''(see [[Nomenklatura]])''. |