An Overview

It isn't until the white middle class feel the pinch of a recession do we start talking about socializing things. As soon as the Republicans hear a whisper of this kind of talk (or imagine it might exist somewhere), they start channeling Joe McCarthy on the old Ouija board. Suddenly, they are intentionally dense about the distinction between communism and socialism (except for the genuine morons who don't even understand how our government works). They cite the Soviet Union and Cuba as examples of the evils of communism socialism ignoring the successful, peaceful socialist capitalist democracies such as Sweden.

The essential idea behind socialism is simple. In a capitalist system, wealth and power will inevitably be owned by a few people since having money enables you to make more money. And since money represents work and property, you are able to buy more property and make more people work for you. Socialism says that before we accumulate this wealth, we should make sure that people's basic needs are taken care of... just as democracy is designed to make sure that people's basic rights are taken care of.

The fear of socialism (aside from the big red herring that was the Cold War) is based in the Protestant work ethic or what I call "fear that someone else is working less than you and is happy about it." This is why the conservatives talk about welfare and the lazy poor. (I could never understand why, if the poor were taking all of our money, they weren't rich. Maybe they just watched Brewster's Millions and think that if they spend the money fast enough, they get more. Either that or they are stashing it with the fabled Hobo Gold.) And yet no attention is given to the wealthy elite who don't work nearly as hard as the rest of us do for far more. The only answer is that makes sense is that conservatives want to become the exploiters instead of the exploited.

Conservatives talk a lot about small town values, but to me, nothing expresses small town values as much as taking care of your neighbor. You didn't do a background check to see if they worked hard enough, you just figured that if they were struggling to survive and you could do something to make it better... you did. No questions asked.

Now, don't get me wrong. I ignore the homeless just as much as the next guy... which is why I'm such a strong believer in food and housing for the poor because I have absolutely no faith that the change in my pocket is going to stop the problem. I don't know that they aren't blowing that money on alcohol, cigarettes, or drugs (not that I'd blame them), so why not have a handful of change (and that's all it would take) removed from my taxes to provide for the basic needs of the poor? After all, what chance do they have of becoming anything other than poor if they are dirty, smelly, wearing bad clothes, have no place to sleep, no medication, and no car? And I'm one good breakdown or another recession away from joining them.

Add this to the fact that every job is a small part of a business. Every employee has both cost and work value associated with it. The goal of every business is to make the most profit for the least cost. Whenever possible, a business will hire as few employees as possible for the least amount of money as possible without impairing the workload.

Therefore, the business does not need to consider the needs of the employees who depend upon their employment for survival (unless you count the fact that employees are also consumers and vital to the continued distribution of wealth, but as a rule, people value short-term personal benefits over long-term societal benefits). In fact, they don't have to be concerned with anything aside from the prosperity of the business which is why you will find amoral business behavior is usually echoed with the phrase "It's just business" as if that justifies any action.

This is not to say that a business can't be moral, only that the motivation to be moral is so abstract and relative that most people don't even think of it. Even then, in a climate where greed is considered normal (or even good according to Ayn Rand and Gordon Gekko), the morality of business is in contributing relatively small amounts of money to the very types of problems which socialism seeks to eliminate.

Granted, the practical applications of socialism are much more complex than the conceptual ones, but the same potential for abuse is not only possible in capitalism, but rampant as numerous recent scandels have yet again demonstrated. The purpose of this blog is to suggest that the inherent concepts behind socialism are ones that the United States must adopt in order to live up to our promise as leaders of the free world and moral people. I do not wish to be a "me first" nation.

Someone once said that a nation should be judged by how it treats its weakest citizen. I couldn't agree more, and I don't think anyone can claim by this standard that we are a great nation.