Oh, No! Not Socialism!

After bringing the economy to its knees, America's conservatives are squealing like pre-teen princesses with no date for the prom. They're not hissy-fitting for those of us who have lost the wealth we have earned. They're wailing because an emergency plan to prevent economic catastrophe will take away more of their funny money.

Lately they're comparing the plan socialism. And I love it!

We know socialism. It's the principle that has everybody pay for the street in front of their house rather than making every property owner construct their own section of road. We remember Ben Franklin's socialist notion, born a hundred years before socialism, that gives us the public library down the street.

The full extend of American socialism boils down to this: we all pay for something, so that it's there for anybody who needs it. This all-for-one-and-one-for-all system leaves no one out of the picture. That's why our fire departments don't let houses burn down if the homeowner can't pay what it would cost to put out the fire.

Conservative crackpots want us to believe that the plan our President, Democrats, and some Republicans want to put in place, to clean up after the economic devastation they've brought down with their greed and corruption, is not just socialism but Marxism. And so they scream, "USSA!"

It's neither the Marxism of Marx and Lenin nor the socialism of John Stuart Mill, Oscar Wilde, George Orwell, G. B. Shaw, Bertrand Russell, and others. It's necessary.

When regulation for the common good is relaxed, capitalism, that great engine of creativity, begins to devour everything within its reach. First, the livelihoods of those without wealth. Next, those who depend on their purchasing power.

When the party in power sides with and gives free reign to those who own and control the tools of work and production, they can and usually do siphon wealth produced by you and me into their own pockets. As has happened before, in a cycle that can't do anything but end in collapse, the economy collapses.

Why would it surprise anyone, then, that the correction for imminent collapse would involve a bit of redistribution?

Yet, what has been proposed is nowhere near that Christian concept rephrased by Communists, "to each according to his need, from each according to his ability." We're so far from public ownership and government administration of the means of production and distribution of goods. We're nowhere near equal opportunities for all or egalitarian compensation.

So why are they weeping?

Our most strident demagogues are squealing "USSA," because they know that the numbest skulls among us will bob brainlessly in accord.

To most of us, though, the overused socialism bugaboo betrays thinking in want of substance. Fortunately, volume won't make up for the vapidness of their complaint this time. We know that the our social institutions and those of many of the world's nations make good use of controls for the common good to keep capitalism in its place.

The Constitution of the United States, our nation's mission statement, if you will, lists as its ultimate aim, "to provide for the general welfare." That's why we're organized as a society rather than hunting and gathering in tribes at war with each other. Conservatives, abusing the word freedom, would pull us back to the tribalism Karl Marx predicted would follow the failure of capitalism.

Let's hope we can liberate enough of what belongs to all of us from the greedy grip of the few before they wrest power from the rest of us again.

That's why I hope they continue to cry, "The sky is falling!" It shows them for the spoiled brats they are.

Labels: Bertrand Russell, communism, conservatives, G. B. Shaw, George Orwell, John Stuart Mill, Lenin, Marx, Marxism, Oscar Wilde, socialism