The Real News: Paul Jay Interviewing Gar Alperovitz: 'Is Public Ownership the Solution?'

Source:The Real News- with a look at state ownership of the economy.

"Gar Alperovitz: When it comes to banking and other critical sectors, public ownership is the only solution" 

From The Real News

What they're talking about in this video are the big banks in America. With Gar Alperovitz arguing that the big banks in America are too big, that eventually the U.S. Government will have no choice but to nationalize them, because they're too big to regulate and are too important to let fail. That's simply not true. 

If banks become too big, there are two big things that government could do to solve that problem: you break them and create more competition and pass a law that says banks can control no more than this percentage of the banking market. And you force them to buy bankruptcy and financial insurance, so when they're facing financial difficulties, they don't get taxpayer funded bailouts, but instead collect from their insurance that they pay into, to get them through their crisis. 

My only other point here is that Gar Alperovitz was throwing around socialist, liberal, and progressive, as if they're all the same things, when he was talking about government nationalizing the big banks in America. 

The fact is the basic, classical definition of socialist (at least) is someone who believes in nationalizing private property and state ownership of property, at least as it relates to the economy, 

A Progressive is someone who believes in progress. Not the same thing as Socialist. 

A Liberal is someone who believes in liberal democracy and the individual rights that come with liberal democracy. Basically the opposite of state ownership of private property.