The US government is an insurance company with an army."

The quote in the title originates with Bush treasury official Peter Fisher.  In some ways, the army also serves an insurance function.  It is also ostensibly there to reduce the risk of violence and invasion.  When you look at what government spending is for, most of it is to reduce risk (insurance) and most of the rest of it is to invest in future productivity.  Education and infrastructure are investments and otherwise, the government mainly spends money on health, pensions, defense, and income security (welfare & disability). 
The purpose of government is to fix market failure, and the main fix the median voter wants is to reduce risks. 

National Debt is NOT like Personal Debt

Krugman explains that government debt never has to be repaid and we mostly owe it to ourselves.

Deficit-worriers portray a future in which we’re impoverished by the need to pay back money we’ve been borrowing. They see America as being like a family that took out too large a mortgage, and will have a hard time making the monthly payments.

This is, however, a really bad analogy in at least two ways.

First, families have to pay back their debt. Governments don’t — all they need to do is ensure that debt grows more slowly than their tax base. The debt from World War II was never repaid; it just became increasingly irrelevant as the U.S. economy grew...

Second — and this is the point almost nobody seems to get — an over-borrowed family owes money to someone else; U.S. debt is, to a large extent, money we owe to ourselves.

This was clearly true of the debt incurred to win World War II. Taxpayers were on the hook for a debt that was significantly bigger, as a percentage of G.D.P., than debt today; but that debt was also owned by taxpayers... So the debt didn’t make postwar America poorer. In particular, the debt didn’t prevent the postwar generation from experiencing the biggest rise in incomes and living standards in our nation’s history.

Read the full updated post at Medianism.org

US Socialism In WWII

The military is socialist!  Wars are intrinsically socialist activities and the US reached peak socialism during WWII.  The federal government spent about half of total US spending to fund the war as you can see in the graph below, and the government made many additional regulations and interventions.   

For example, according to the History Channel, in 1944:

...as World War II dragged on, President Franklin D. Roosevelt orders his secretary of war to seize properties belonging to the Montgomery Ward company because the company refused to comply with a labor agreement.
In an effort to avert strikes in critical war-support industries, Roosevelt created the National War Labor Board in 1942. The board negotiated settlements between management and workers to avoid shut-downs in production that might cripple the war effort. During the war, the well-known retailer and manufacturer Montgomery Ward had supplied the Allies with everything from tractors to auto parts to workmen's clothing--items deemed as important to the war effort as bullets and ships. However, Montgomery Ward Chairman Sewell Avery refused to comply with the terms of three different collective bargaining agreements... In April 1944, ...Roosevelt called out the Army National Guard to seize the company's main plant in Chicago. Sewell himself had to be carried out of his office by National Guard troops. By December of that year, Roosevelt was fed up with Sewell's obstinacy and disrespect for the government's authority. (...Sewell's favorite insult was to call someone a "New Dealer"--a direct reference to Roosevelt's Depression-era policies.) On December 27, Roosevelt ordered the secretary of war to seize Montgomery Ward's plants and facilities in New York, Michigan, California, Illinois, Colorado and Oregon.
In his announcement that day, Roosevelt emphasized that the government would "not tolerate any interference with war production in this critical hour." He issued a stern warning to labor unions and industry management alike: "strikes in wartime cannot be condoned, whether they are strikes by workers against their employers or strikes by employers against their Government." Sewell took the fight to federal court, but lost.
For much of the 20th century, Montgomery Ward, ...reigned as one of the country's largest department store and mail-order retail chains.