These days, the term "socialism" has been applied to a number of people, policies and institutions that are quite unlikely targets. For wanting to rearrange the tax cut allocation, Barack Obama is accused of being a "socialist" who wants to -- gasp! -- "spread the wealth around." For bailing out criminally stupid investment bankers and reluctantly buying a partial ownership stake in ailing firms, the government is also called socialist. Neither of these representations comes anywhere near actual socialism. And frankly, if we were a country that, at the very least, would accept the idea of socialist-leaning leaders and principles without launching the next wave of McCarthyism, we'd be a hell of a lot better off.
Perhaps the strangest part about these attacks is that they are picking and choosing the aspects of government and policy that they want to label socialist, while ignoring others. John McCain is spending $84 million dollars of taxpayer-provided federal funding in his presidential campaign, while Barack Obama's campaign is 100 percent privately funded -- but Obamais the socialist. John McCain wants to continue Bush's federal favor to the super-rich by maintaining the tax cuts, while Obama wants to ditch that tax break and give one to the middle class -- and yet Obama is the one giving a government handout. Both Obama and McCain criticized the lack of regulation on the financial sector, and the legally fuzzy psuedo-governmental powers of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- but only Barack Obama is a "socialist" for wanting more federal control.
Let's be perfectly clear, here. There is hardly a facet of our economy that is not, in some way, regulated by the government. We do not, nor have we ever, had a purely capitalist system. This dichotomy between socialism and capitalism that has been painted by the media and the political parties is completely false. We are a mixed economy. We always have been, and we probably always will be. The only question is in regards to the balance of regulation vs. privatization... and I think it's pretty clear where a heavily-skewed privatization balance has gotten us.
The fact of the matter is, every Western democracy has a significant degree of government control, and those nations with higher degrees of socialist tendencies -- such as the Scandinavian social democracies -- that provide a broad safety net, government-funded health care, extensive public transportation, and so on, are the nations consistently rated the highest in terms of life expectancy, health and well-being, economic and political stability, and access to services. When people in America are hurling the "socialist" label as an insult, what they're actually referring to is Stalinism. Soviet Russia. Maoist China. They are regarding socialism by only its perversions, its exceptions, rather than by its rules or its true ideological form.
Here's the kicker. The free-market-ophiles demand that we all consider the current financial crisis the exception to the unregulated-capitalism rule. They insist that this is not how the market is supposed to work, that this is some sort of mistake or malfunction. And they present the most skewed, perverted and untrue example of socialism as the only other alternative to their faith-based free-market capitalism. It's misleading, it's untrue, and if you just stop and think about it, it's entirely unconvincing.
Sarah Palin has become fond of saying on the campaign trail that now is not the time to be experimenting with socialism. I say... why not? Privatization and deregulated capitalism have failed us. Inflation and unemployment are up, the gap between rich and poor is higher than ever, food and gas prices are skyrocketing, our health care system is a crumbling disgrace, our Social Security and retirement funds are threatened, the housing market is in the toilet, credit markets are tanking... the list of free-market failures is practically endless. The way we have been doing things has quite obviously not been working.
So my question for the Republican ticket is, what better time to experiment with socialism? It's time to educate the public about what socialism really means, about the successes of other European countries, about the vast chasm of difference between Stalinism -- or Maoism -- and social democracy.
It's time to stop making socialism a dirty word, and start dirtying up capitalism, for once.