Is the United States Moving to Socialism?

Marxism came out a reaction to the bleak, satanic mills of the Victorian Industrial Age. Today, we have the cratering of retirement accounts, an aging population with inadequate health and nursing care, high schoolers who have been priced out of a college education, and offshoring of employment. While no one discounts the engine of wealth that is capitalism, is is difficult today to also discount the harm done to countless people by unregulated capitalism.

I think there is a distinction between the regulated capitalism of the New Deal and Great Society and the socialism of World War II England and Italy.

The middle ground, which I see the United States embracing, is not socialism but subsidiaritism, the principle that there are actions that cannot be executed at the individual or family level must be executed at a higher level. "The principle of subsidiarity goes back to Pope Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum and holds that government should undertake only those initiatives which exceed the capacity of individuals or private groups acting independently. . . The principle of subsidiarity was developed in the encyclical Rerum Novarum of 1891 by Pope Leo XIII, as an attempt to articulate a middle course between the excesses of laissez-faire capitalism on the one hand and the various forms of communism, which subordinate the individual to the state, on the other."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity

This of course is a denial of the slogan chanted by McCain of "Country First." No, it is the individual who must be first, with government entities actiing only when the rights of individuals cannot survive. As to what exactly those rights are, of course, the heart and soul of political communal struggle.