Now, here's the next part of the thought experiment:

Go down that list of industries, and see if you can find one aspect of how any of them operate that is not controlled in some way by the government. Every damn thing in every one of them has some kind of regulation attached to it. Maybe we've gotten so used to the idea that everything down to the width of bathroom stalls in a corporate office should be the province of Washington that trying to point it out is like describing "wet" to a fish.

If you're involved in any major industry on that list, you can't fart without getting some kind of permit, and your remaining freedom to act is often measured only in whether or not it has occurred to the government yet to clamp down on a specific action.

There's a hell of a range between "no" regulations and "absolute" regulation, and I can make a case for any one of the industries on that list that we are a lot closer to the latter case than the former. We're long, long past the point where we're protecting workers from unshielded machinery, and now we're telling businesses what kind of light bulbs to use.

If the government can tell an industry how it's going to do everything it does, the government "runs" that industry, whether it "owns" it or not. This makes the whole "socialist" argument moot.

I've used this example before: If you own a car, but I get to tell you what gas to buy, what tires to use, how far you can drive it, what areas are off limits for you to drive, how many passengers you can carry, what color the car can be, who you can get to repair it, and what side of the street you can park it in at night, does it really matter who has the pink slip?