I’m obsessive enough to blog daily–since January 2003–but this is one of those days that was long enough (with travel, meetings, and various kinds of work) that my brain is now completely out of power. Back online tomorrow.

This is my wife, Laura, a reading specialist, with our dog Barkley, age 8 months.

This is a very interesting report of a meeting convened by Beth Noveck, the new director of the White House open government initiative. Participants included many of the best scholars and practitioners in the field, and the discussion summary is available for all to see. Beth apparently began by saying, “We’re looking for ideas and recommendations on how to create a more transparent, participatory, and collaborative government.”

Meanwhile, the civilian service agenda continues to move forward. There was money for AmeriCorps in the stimulus package, and the GIVE Act (HR 1388) is moving in the House. [Update at 5:30 pm: it passed today.] This is the equivalent of the Senate’s Kennedy-Hatch Serve America Act. It would dramatically enhance the quality and quantity of service opportunities and would direct federally-funded service toward three major social objectives: carbon reduction, health care, and high school dropout prevention.

I see these as two important planks of a “civic platform.” I have spent considerable amounts of my own energies in support of transparency and online engagement, on one hand, and service, on the other. In fact, my first national summit on service was in 1988, when I was an undergraduate; and my first full-time job was at Common Cause, where I worked on disclosure issues.

But I think these two planks are inadequate on their own. They will enlist specific subcategories of Americans in civic engagement. Certain people will get very excited about commenting on federal policy in interactive websites; others will spend a year of their lives tutoring or building houses. The vast majority of citizens, however, will do neither. Besides, neither commenting/discussing nor direct service exhausts the types of work that active citizens should do. In the worst case, the active commentators online will develop ideas that no policymaker can enact, and the AmeriCorps volunteers will provide direct assistance without addressing deep social problems. Both groups may be discouraged.

Other important planks should include:

• National (and also local) discussions of issues that involve recruited citizens who represent the population as a whole.
• Training programs and conferences that help federal civil servants to collaborate day-to-day with community-based groups.
• Changes in key federal policies such as the Federal Advisory Committee Act to encourage and improve events like public hearings.
• Grants programs within the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education, and the National Science Foundation that promote citizen work.
• Greater focus on the acquisition of civic skills in the US Department of Education and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (lately known as NCLB).

Finally, I would describe all the workers who are paid from stimulus funds–including the majority who work in the private sector–as active citizens and would call on them to discuss, plan, collaborate, and serve.

The New York Times asked Barack Obama whether he was a “socialist.” He said no and then called back, saying, “It was hard for me to believe that you were entirely serious about that socialist question.” The word is incendiary in American politics, and the president was obviously taken aback and perhaps concerned that his answer had not be forceful enough. But those of us who are not automatically appalled by the word “socialism” can reasonably ask whether we are on a socialist path. After all, the government is considering owning banks and providing universal health care.

I don’t think there’s a consensus definition of the word; distinguished thinkers have used it in various ways. From a rigorously libertarian perspective, any taxing and spending is socialist unless it is essential to protect individual freedom. So any government that funds things other than the police, courts, jails, and the military with mandatory taxes is socialist. But that means that every functioning government is socialist; the only question is to what degree. In the United States, marginal tax rates are much lower than they were in the 1950s, but are likely to rise by the equivalent of a few percent of GDP.

In short, if the tax rate is the issue, than we are less socialist than we’ve been for most of the 20th century and less socialist than other countries, but every society is socialist. Since this conclusion seems unhelpful, I would define the word in a more radical and precise way. A socialist society, in my view, is one in which “the people” own the major productive assets, things like farms, factories, and service industries. “The people” cannot own something in the same way that I own my cell phone. Private ownership means that my wishes directly affect the object; I can use, alienate, or destroy the object pretty much at will. “The people” cannot do that, because they are plural. If they disagree, they do not all get what they wish. And even if they are unanimous, each may not feel that his or her preferences caused the outcome.

Still, it is plausible to talk of public or popular ownership in several situations. A government can own a productive asset and can represent the people through a combination of regular competitive elections, negotiation among parties, and freedom of speech and debate. Or the workers in a given firm or farm can own it as voting shareholders. Worker ownership might be considered popular ownership of the economy as a whole, if everyone were a worker somewhere. In the Communist Manifesto, 6 out of 10 planks related to state or worker ownership of productive assets.

By this definition, the functioning societies of today do differ in how socialist they are. It is common for European democratic governments to own and directly manage major industries, such as arms manufacturers, railway lines, and oil companies. There is very little such ownership in the United States.

Nor is “socialism” (so defined) even a remote possibility here. The most radical proposal for health care reform–which no one gives any serious chance of passing–is Single Payer, under which the government would fund health care. But the doctors, hospitals, and drug companies would still be private enterprises and would compete for customers. The government may end up possessing banks, but only by default and for the shortest possible time. That sounds like “hot-potato socialism,” if it is socialism at all.

I happen to be quoted/filmed in this FLYP cover story, which contains lots of good, basic information about today’s young voters. But I recommend it for a different reason: it’s a great example of multimedia journalism, complete with charts, text, music, and embedded videos. I’m more of a linear, one-paragraph-at-a-time kind of reader, but this format is obviously compelling and I’m not sure I’ve seen anything like it before.