To be honest, there's a lot about socialism that really does suck. Like not being able to attend a high school football game in Texas because the tyrant in charge is so angry at anyone with an Arab sounding name, he actually thought for a minute that Al Jazeera English flew kamikaze missions into American buildings.
It sucks when an elderly man leaves his phone on a table at the Mall of America food court, is later questioned, along with the rest of his American family, by the FBI, and even after the entire situation is cleared, still has an 11-page police report on file with the Minneapolis police as well as an FBI report documenting his "suspicious person" incident at the mall, even though he wasn't even there when his suspicious phone was observed.
It sucks when you're told who you're allowed to marry or what kind of birth control you can or can't use. It sucks when the only way to be right, to fly below the suspicion and scrutiny, to not have your patriotism questioned is to just be like everyone else around you...dress like them, pray like them, talk like them, think like them.
It sucks to have to wear a uniform and proclaim your allegiance to something lock, stock, and barrel even when you know there are cracks in the gild, aspects you feel could be improved, or things that are just flat out wrong.
So, yeah. If that's what you mean by socialism, then it sucks, but that's not socialism, that's tyranny, fascism, or, in the case of those particular examples, an ignorant citizenry run amok in an age of fear, right here in the good old, capitalist US of A!
And what is the target of this fear-mongering of late? That's right, the evils of socialism, even though most of those trying to spread fear of it seem to have never really known what it means.
Why would anyone fear making the world around you a better place through collective funding and coordination of effort? It's a lot closer to what the founders of this nation had in mind than the Corporate Republic we seem to have ended up with. After all, they decided to form a union, collectively. They knew that a lot of the infrastructure a nation needs is better achieved through collective efforts. It wasn't about giving away half of anything to anyone who didn't work for it, it was about efficiency and effectiveness. There are simply some things that don't make any sense for individuals to repeatedly spend their efforts on when they can be accomplished as a group better, faster, cheaper.
The highway system in this country is kind of cool, and it was, for the most part, a socialist undertaking. Pretty much everyone in America relies on it for supplies, for customers, for their complete existence. Ditto for the railroads. After years of discussion, no private enterprise was willing to take the risk on such a large undertaking, so our government did. That's right! The single biggest influence in the industrial expansion and the tying of a young nation's two separate halves together was the result of Big Government speculation when private industry wanted nothing to do with it. Of course all our Big Government did was give away land, low interest loans, and further subsidize the endeavor. And, of course, the minute the recipients of that land and loans and cash started making their own profit from those subsidies, they started complaining about having to pay the loans back, and having to pay taxes on the profits they now only made thanks to that Big Government investment, but hey, who are we to call them hypocrites as long as they use the words "big government" in their whiny complaints? Ayn Rand seems to have forgotten that "the producers" balked at building railroads on their own for years until government took it on for them. Only after the Transcontinental was built were Dagney and Hank able to forget and exploit the rail and steel industry for their own profit and pleasure.
The electrical grid in this country is pretty cool too. As is the stability of our government, the protection of our military, the reliability of police and fire services...and all manner of other socialist endeavors we seem to take for granted when pretending we (meaning some rugged individual) built this. The truth is, no individual built any of it without the support of collective advantages this nation provides. We, as a nation, built the infrastructure that so many of us now take for granted. It made more sense that way. And whenever WE do something together, it's called socialist. I don't know what you thought it meant, but it's really not all that bad. So the next time you want to spread fear about some misguided idea of what socialism is, spread it about that socialist snow plow clearing your street at 4 a.m. the socialist cop walking your daughter to her car after the closing shift, or the socialist EMT saving your loved one's life, or all those socialist troops defending our way of life.
When you really think about it, it's rarely the "socialist" who wants something for nothing. Socialists understand that taxes pay for all of these things we now take for granted. It tends to be the so-called capitalists who want those advantages without having to pay for them. It's capitalists who start a business in the US, where these advantages make it possible, but then move their headquarters overseas in order to avoid paying taxes that paid for the advantages they took for granted and now no longer want to pay for. The railroad barons were cool with socialism when it gave them cheap loans and land, but as soon as they became wealthy from that government benefit, they started complaining about having to pay back the loans, and pay taxes on the immense wealth the government's investment helped create for them. They got theirs, no one else should! It's always private industry who expects government to bail them out when they mismanage everything from their own by-products and pollution to their general finances, but they never want to pay the taxes that allow government to be there for them when it reaches a breaking point.
So the next time you go mindlessly repeating something you heard from Bill O'Reilly about socialists expecting something for nothing, remember that GE paid NO taxes while taking full advantage of the benefits our nation provided. Remember the next time a school levy shows up on a ballot, that you can read said ballot thanks to the free, public (socialist) education that was there for you, but which you now think is some kind of handout for the rest of the country's kids. Remember that our founding fathers, by "forming a more perfect union," understood that collective (socialist) efforts made a lot of sense and provided advantages for all of us, and that we should all continue to pay for them...not expect them for free!
Luth
Out
