Socialism and America

.

The Republican Party appears, from the outside, to be in a flat spin.  They're attacking the Democrats, attacking their own moderates, their party chairman, and now they're apparently attacking long-held views of whether Franklin Roosevelt helped to control the fallout from the Great Depression of 1930 (or whenever).

In their anxiety, they're accusing practically everyone of being a Socialist, including the President.  American society, of course, has been conditioned to regard Socialism as a great evil, and Capitalism as its opposite.  In actual fact, Socialism is a very broad idea, and the opposite of Capitalism is Communism, which of course the US opposed enthusiastically for many decades and successfully destroyed in its embodiment as the USSR.

I don't know as much about these things as I should, but in the absence of a really learned source that I could refer conveniently, let me take a stab at defining these ideas.

Capitalism:  This is the idea that wealthy individuals and families should use their accumulated wealth to create things that they can sell, accumulate more wealth, and in the process create jobs and goods that the society at large can enjoy.  This is what we have today.

Communism:  This is the idea that the people will form a party, called the Communist Party, and will elect its officials, and the Party will run everything.  The Party will decide who will work in what jobs, and will assign rights and duties to all citizens, and provide sufficient resources to everybody.  To each according to their need, from each according to their ability.  In principle, everyone has to work, so this is called the dictatorship of the workers.  Today only North Korea and Cuba have held to this ideal.

Socialism:  This is the idea that the Government will provide many of the basic requirements of citizens using taxation, and through a government sector.  The usual services are: National Defense, Education, Housing, Support for Widows and Orphans, Flood and Famine Relief, and supports for the Arts.  The US has done this for more than a century.  Then, too, in many countries, the Government also provides: Transportation, and Health Services.  In the US, of course, these two have lagged behind most other countries, except in certain places such as New York, Washington D.C., and some progressive cities, as far as subsidized transport is concerned, and at a very minimal level, for health.  Already, the US provides health for newborn infants and their mothers (the Well-Baby program, and Food Stamps).

Capitalism and Socialism are by no means mutually exclusive philosophies, unless Capitalism is interpreted to mean that Business owners should be allowed to keep all their revenue.

Somehow, though the US has adopted many of the principles of Socialism, it has worked well for politicians of all parties to pretend to oppose Socialism, because the economic elite (which has often been able to outvote the working class and the lower middle-class) equates government services with heavy taxes.  Of course, this is reasonable; it is the wealthy (whose incomes are higher than $250 thousand a year) who pay most of the taxes.  (A lot of this money, too, inevitably gets soaked up by an inefficient bureaucracy, mostly through waste, but often through petty pilfering of public funds.  Pilfering is probably widespread in all walks of life, but somehow it is more criminal when waste is traced to the Government than when it is discovered in private businesses.)  Despite this negative attitude, nobody attacks programs such as Social Security, the Well Baby program, the State and National Parks, the Department of Education, etc etc as Socialism, though these are all the kinds of activities that Socialist governments engage in.  So despite the labeling of Socialism as a no-no and a bad word, the US has been a socialist country ever since WW2, at the very least, and that is why life in the US is as good as it is.  Why can a rich capitalist depend on his workers being able to get to work, being able to perform their job, be able to fly out to Bermuda on vacation, make sure that his investments in South America are safe, and that his kids have a good education?  Because of the roads that the government maintains, the education that the government subsidizes, the aviation system that the government manages, the airports that the government partially funds, the armed services and the intelligence agencies and their covert operations that the government bankrolls, and the student loans that even the wealthiest parents take out for their kids.  Socialism is part of the comfort of the very rich, as well as everybody else.

The fact of the matter is that some of those complaining most loudly are those who have struggled to bring themselves to the point where they were able to depend on their investments to keep them in a certain style, until the Stock Market crashed.  Now they're faced with heavy regulations that will prevent the wonderful ride that the Stock Market enjoyed before the crash.  The success of the Health Reform process seems to predict success on that Banking Regulation front also, unless the Administration can be swiftly discredited, in time to poison a serious attempt at Financial Reform.

Let's call these wealthy conservatives the Super-250K-ers.  Being unemployed is not a major problem to them, because their investments will keep them alive, as long as taxation is moderate.  (And as long as there is not an even worse Depression.)  What they do not realize is that the rest of us lose health insurance when we lose our jobs.

They also do not understand that preventing Financial Reform will not guarantee another skyrocketing Stock Market.  The only way for anyone to exploit an unregulated financial system is to have a clever way of jumping off the investment bus just before a bust.  There is just no legal way to do this.  Slow steady growth on Wall Street is good for most of us, even the millionaires.

Health Reform, if it is allowed to be implemented properly as envisaged, will help even the Super-250K-ers in one way: if they lose everything in the next Depression, they will still have health care.  It's funny how the wealthy keep imagining that they will never hit the wall, with all the evidence to the contrary.

Arch