Nobody was talking about meat inspectors when I referenced the ghastly record of socialism, and you know it.

I'm talking about a worldview that sees human beings only as cogs in a collective rather than individuals. A worldview that sees individual rights as something to be discarded when inconvenient, and wealth as something that is gathered unto the State and distributed as the State sees fit.

As far as killing goes, it is a small step, or more precisely, a ratcheting series of small steps, from believing that one's life and property belong to the collective, to deciding that some of those lives can be dispensed with when they become a problem. Maybe it isn't gulags or death camps. Maybe it's just forced abortions, or the euthanasia of inconvenient elderly or sick. Or maybe it just begins as countless small intrusions into your life in matters that State should never have had a say in. One thing I have observed is that the progression is usually just in one direction.

It's should be a matter of judgement just where that line is drawn, to be decided politically, not by ideological abstract principles.

You damn well better have ideological abstract principles in there, or you have simple mob rule--politics without principles. The Rule of the Opinion Poll. America's Founders, whatever else you may say about them, were political philosophers.

Without ideology, power flows to the thugs. Pragmatism rules, and a government can justify any action by the needs of the moment. You'd better hope the "Age of Ideology" isn't over.

Modern capitalist philosophers have a very precise idea of what government's role is in protecting people from force and fraud. None of it involves looting the wealth from one group and passing it to another group to buy political power, which currently accounts for much of the current Federal budget. Or to put it a bit more plainly, taking a load of cash off of a corporation and handing it out to favored constituents is not exactly "protecting" those who have no economic power from those who do.

I could go into the detailed definition of the difference between economic and political power. The main gist of it is that only one of them has a gun.

Remember, regardless of how you feel about socialism, history has demonstrated that if it weren't for the abuses of capitalism, there wouldn't be any socialists in the first place.

Whatever Czarist Russia was, it wasn't capitalism. Commerce controlled by a royal elite is not much different than commerce controlled by a politburo.

You don't need capitalist "abuses" for socialists to raise their heads. You just need raw envy. The core principle of socialist economics is "you have more than I think you need. I need it more than you do. Therefore, I get to take it away from you." This is not only the creed of the socialist, it's the creed of the guy who holds you up at the ATM machine. This is not entirely coincidental.

No abuses are necessary for this. Simply the ancient human desire to get something they haven't earned.

This was Ayn Rand's view on the proper nature of government. You'll note that there's not a lot of verbal fog here, or fancy academic tap-dancing. Those are tools usually used by those who want to disguise the aforementioned wealth redistribution as some high social purpose.