"In a socialist economy (as defined here), there is no need for taxes because the government owns all of the corporations, and could therefore derive revenues from their profits. Moreover, in this socialist economy, the state would be the monopoly purchaser of labor and the monopoly provider of goods -- so it could set prices/wages at whatever it wanted and confiscate all wealth in that manner."

You understand very little about economics, or socialism if you believe what you wrote in the above.

Often there is no profit to "confiscate". Workers are debited, regardless what nomenclature you put on it.

In essence, when a government goes from being a protector of private property to a plunderer of it, it places itself on a course of chaos, economic ruin and its own ultimate self-destruction.

Socialism is the mechanism which transforms government from its noble role as a protector into a predator and, since many of the citizens of our fine country seem determined to plow through socialism to its bitter end, we should examine the territory through which these sad steps lead. The core result of socialism is the destruction of private property and wealth.

All socialist countries follow the same miserable path. The U.S. doesn’t have to go down this path, but it seems determines to do so.

One of the great dangers of any government by the people is that sooner or later their politicians discover they can vote largess from the public trust. Their first experiment at this bold new adventure invariably revolves around social programs enacted in the name of morality and the public good or even solving some current crisis. Who could oppose that? “After all,” it will be argued, “don’t you care about people, or the welfare of the country, or the environment?”

The lure of this argument has been absolutely irresistible from the Roman Empire to the French and Bolshevik revolutions to the Democratic socialist driven adgenda party in the America of today.

The moral argument that we can finally solve poverty, pain, sickness, and hunger with “free” money seems just to good to be true. It usually is but it sells to the public. To fund these allegedly moral programs, the assets of the gentle citizens must be quietly taxed in the name of the public good.

Protesters are portrayed as selfish “bigots, "racists", or some other disparaging epitaph blocking the road to the perfect society. After all, how could something so noble do anything bad to the country?

At first the rich are the only ones asked to pay more of their “fair share.” In the U.S. income tax originally only affected upper-bracket individuals. In this early stage, few complain and everyone seems happy, except for those nagging voices still warning of dire consequences ahead; the ones the gentle legislators wish would just shut up. Other than that they have little to fear because the gentle legislators appear to be heroes placing our feet firmly on the road to utopia. Soon they promise all the have-nots will have and those who do have, will have just a little less. After all, as we said, it’s just their “fair share.”

Ah but time rumbles onward, and the number of people dependent upon these programs swells along with the number of “free” government programs. Free things do sell, and that’s what politicians want to do: sell their programs.

As the programs swell, they become unwieldy, requiring large bloated bureaucracies to administer them to ward off the inevitable fraud and corruption that is attracted to "free things", consuming an ever greater part of the tax booty and servicing less to the originally intended recipients. In order to control the chaos of a large group of people cueing up to get something for nothing, large volumes of laws and regulations have to be written to control who gets what and where and when and who the givers and who the takers are. Now, the bureaucrats who administer these programs are also dependent on them for their livelihoods. This entrenches the program and assures its progression.

The food source (tax burden) shifts rapidly downward into the middle class, as the gentle politicians coo that only the rich are being soaked. Concomitant with the increase of taxation, the miracle of hidden taxation through monetary inflation is discovered as central banks print more and more money to allow the good times to continue over and above what direct taxation will allow.

This process of monetary inflation results in debasement of the currency, causing the citizens to work harder and harder and run faster and faster to keep up with the loss of their currency’s value and the concomitant rise of prices. It’s slow at first but accelerates along an insidious exponential path. Ultimately it destroys everything the middle class works for.

Additional “revenue streams” are created. More fees, fines, “mitigation payments” and permits are required to do almost anything, driving the cost of doing everything upwards. Coupled with this is a bewildering array of regulation and laws making the business of life more and more difficult to accomplish.

It’s a blurry transition through never-never land when the politicians still claim to be gentle but the people sense that they have gone from being protectors of the public good and private property to a plunderers of it; from morality to immorality.

The “Bastiat” transition doesn’t take place all at once but, one by one, members of the working class realize they’re toiling like mad and getting no where. What they do make is confiscated in taxes or destroyed in inflation. They have little left over and their life’s savings are being destroyed while the politicians tell them all is just fine, creating cognitive dissonance between the hardship workers experience and the good times the politicians promise.

But those friends of the dragon on the dole still insist their intentions are moral, even if its methods are not. As tax rates push ever higher into confiscatory ranges, self-preservation kicks in and the people take defensive action against what they no longer perceive as moral duty but legally-sanctioned plunder.

The rich catch on and move their assets offshore and sometimes themselves out of the reach of the dragon; they expatriate. They have the means to structure their finances in such as way as preserve wealth.

Unfortunately, the middle class doesn’t have this option, so it fights by engaging in evasive maneuvers. Citizens cheat on taxes, and seek to conceal taxable assets.

As the ravages of taxation and inflation eat out the middle class’s substance, a vibrant underground economy springs up, utilizing barter, cash, foreign currencies, precious metals or other means to conceal taxable activity. Regulatory laws are flouted as people try to “see what they can get away with.” Often times this underground economy has an organized crime component vis a vis the former Soviet Union.

But politicians are more than happy to be seen as dragon slayers, and create a series of scapegoats for the problem, transferring blame for the mess and enacting a new series of programs to supposedly fix the problem. In reality, they just delay the pain.

As it becomes ever more difficult for small businesses to function in the poisoned atmosphere of taxes, fees, fines, regulations and prosecutions, more of the middle class throws up its hands and goes elsewhere or becomes part of the the dependent poor. Small business goes out of business or operates illegally. As inflation devours life savings, people are wiped out. Retirees have a difficult time getting on as their lifetime achievements are destroyed. Most of the middle class slides inexorably down the slope into poverty.

This enables pretexts for seizing the assets of citizens. Businesses are nationalized. Wage and price controls are instituted. Property ownership is forcibly transferred from those who oppose the dragon to those who support it. Retirement plans are brought under the “protection” of government and their owners left with government-issued IOUs.

As the security of property ownership declines, investments flee and the economic environment becomes unstable, no one wants to invest where earnings will be heavily taxed, or even the possibility of direct confiscation on the allegation of having violated a plethora of unknowable, unobservable laws. Doing business is just too dangerous.

As doing business becomes dangerous, investments die, jobs go out of existence, increasing the pain of the working lower and middle classes. Small business is always the primary creator of employment and it is the most abused. In the end, the rich are never soaked, the middle class is destroyed and the poor finally discover that... there is no free lunch.

Faith in government dissolves along with faith in the currency. Widespread flouting of law is common and tax payments quit. If it gets bad enough, crime flourishes, both organized and random. The domestic economy collapses into a depression and the currency just collapses.

By this time there are several violently outraged groups of people: the first group consists of those who have been dependent on the government for their free programs, and once it reneges on its promises to provide these, they are outraged at the violation of their imagined rights to a free lunch.

The second group is the middle class, who have been beaten to death to feed the needs of the government. They have lost all their livelihood and property. This is the point where many revolutions occur. Sometimes the revolutions are non-bloody and occur only at the voting booths; sometimes they are bloody and violent. It is a dangerous time because the chaos caused by the breakdown of economic and political order coupled with the collapse of morality often requires brute force to restore order, and brute force is the fertile ground for dictators and the destruction of rights.

One of the great ironies of history is that those who started the mess and benefitted greatly from it are rarely ever called to pay for the crimes and carnage they caused. The George Soros' of the world.

No country trapped in socialism goes through all the events described above, which is a composite of past histories. It can turn itself at any time providing it is prepared to discipline itself the undergo the pain required to get off the public dole, much like coming off an addiction. Few societies ever want to face that, so they condemn themselves to all these stages. And the longer they wait to enact the necessary changes, the worse the pain becomes.

From currency, to energy, to property rights, issues today are clouded with so much static and partisan bickering that the average person has little real comprehension of what is happening. Frequently Democrats (Left wing ideologs) blame the moral right and fiddle while Rome burns.

America is truly at an economic and moral crossroad, having already started down the sad road to socialism.

Therefore, it is up to what actions are moral, legal and necessary to see us, our families and friends safely through the tempest. But as a ray of hope, it is here where Americans in times past have always shown themselves most noble.

According to the philosopher Ayn Rand in her essay “What is Capitalism?,” capitalism is “a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned.”

Rand continues:

The recognition of individual rights entails the banishment of physical force from human relationships: basically, rights can be violated only by means of force. In a capitalist society, no man or group may initiate the use of physical force against others. The only function of the government, in such a society, is the task of protecting man's rights, i.e.., the task of protecting him from physical force; the government acts as the agent of man's right of self-defense, and may use force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use; thus the government is the means of placing the retaliatory use of force under objective control.

It is the basic, metaphysical fact of man's nature—the connection between his survival and his use of reason—that capitalism recognizes and protects.

Capitalism is the only moral social system.