SOUND OFF! 12/11/21 – Socialism

Right-wingers bellow and scream constantly about the “evils” of socialism. They declare that they will do all they can to keep the U.S. from becoming socialist. Yet they benefit every single day from the “evils” of socialism.

So, all you righties, you don’t want socialism? Good. Let’s take away everything that can be regarded as socialist. No more public schools, public libraries, public transit, public parks, public works, municipal or county fire and police departments. Don’t like government intrusion? Good – no more workplace health and safety regulations. No more minimum wage, no more overtime pay. No more laws making sure that the water you drink is potable, or the food you eat is reasonably uncontaminated, or the drugs you take are reasonably pure. No more environmental statutes to keep harmful pollution out of the air you breathe.

You hear about socialism, and trot out Venezuela and the poop-show it has become – while conveniently ignoring countries where socialism works. No mention of Canada, or Norway, or France, or Sweden, or numerous other countries that practice the “evils” you fear. Not a peep about the fact that 500,000 to 600,000 U.S. residents declare bankruptcy every year due to medical bills, and certainly not that 75% of them had health insurance.

You say that the Left want everybody to get everything for free without contributing. Utter hogwash. They aren’t seeking free health care and college, just affordable health care and college. They’re calling for everybody to have the opportunity to work, and for everyone to be paid a living wage. The Left is not anti-business; they are for making sure that the working class – the very lifeblood of this country and its economy – can make ends meet. They are not about regulating everything to death, just passing reasonable regulations to keep our air and water and land clean and making sure that workers are paid fair wages so they can pay their bills and feed their families without government aid.

You tout the so-called virtues of deregulation. In reality, this is the hoary cliché of putting a fox in charge of the henhouse. Did you really think that Big Business would govern itself fairly? Corporations will do what is good for their bottom lines, and their rank-and-file workers and the environment and human rights be damned.

For a few years I supported the Libertarians. Then I realized they were really just GOP Lite. They parrot the line “Government is best when it governs least” without thinking about the consequences. Minimal government means minimal protection for working people from exploitation, minimal protection for the environment, minimal protection for civil and human rights. It means a return to the Gilded Age, when a handful of ultra-rich snobs control nearly all of the money and the 99+% struggle for scraps.

Time and again, the countries that top the list of the happiest nations are among the most socialist. Nor are those people getting all that stuff for free – they pay taxes, but the rich and big corporations pay their fair share. Also, those countries don’t have obscenely bloated military budgets, paying for weapons and systems of questionable value and reliability. People in properly socialist countries don’t worry about being bankrupted by medical bills, or saddled with ballooning student debt. Children get nutritious lunches in school for free. Parents get months of family leave. Meanwhile, the “great” United States forces women to return to work shortly after giving birth, refuses to raise the minimum wage a nickel, refuses to make daycare affordable so mothers can work, subsidies mega-corporations that are already profitable, gives the ultra-rich huge tax breaks and lets them invest in overseas tax havens, etc., etc., etc.

Too many people have been brainwashed into thinking that socialism is communism. Far from it. Communism is just socialism that has caught rabies, and it is undesirable. Democratic socialism, on the other hand, seeks to strike the right balance between the private and public sectors, maintaining individual freedom while protecting people and the environment. You can still have your own car and house and cow, but you share other commodities and services. Your taxes pay for someone else’s health care, and his or hers provide your children with schooling. Government is not best when it governs least – it is best when it governs where it should, and does not govern where it should not.

Besides, many of these minimum-government advocates are hypocrites. They want gub-mint out of everything except for our private parts. They howl about “cancel culture” while practicing the same. Many of them want to pervert the US of A into an autocracy, and furthermore, one in which only people of the “correct” color, gender, creed and sexual identity have power and rights. That is NOT a government “governing the least.”

The right is “I, me, mine” while the left is ‘we, us, ours.” Right-wingers emphasize individual rights and liberties while ignoring the fact that we all depend on each other. They harp on the myth of the rugged individual – which is the subject of a future essay. We cannot survive as a society, and not even as individuals, without the support of our fellow human beings.