Supporting Socialism

THE HOUSE RESOLUTION, which recently passed by a vote of two eighty five to ninety eight, condemns the "horrors of socialism", and affirms America's rejection of socialist policies, and their connection to dictatorship, economic collapse, and mass human suffering. Pretty dramatic stuff. No wonder a few dozen congressfolks failed to cast a vote. Hell, anything as horrible as that not only ought to be condemned, it ought to be banned and destroyed. Fortunately, the hyperbolic house bill of condemnation is talking about a political system, not an economic one, a system in which some brutal dictator or political party siezes control of a country, destroys democracy, and implements a forced government controlled economy, such as national socialism (NAZIism), in which capitalism is reduced to state control of corporations, state control of the economic activity of an entire nation, as in fascism. The Republican sponsored bill which so dramatically condemns the horros of socialism fails to point out that democratic socialism, such as he sort we have in this country, is entirely different, and is to a large extent the result of populism and popular social movements. Dictatorial, autocratic socialism bad, democratic socialism good. It really is that simple. What the U.S. House of Representatives has condemned, actually, is brutal, autocratic government, Capitalism is competitive economics, socialism is cooperative economics, in a nutshell. Because human beings, as Aristotle and others have pointed out, are social animals, economic cooperation, socialism, is quite "natural", despite the often made claim that it is not. While acknowledging that humanas are social by nature, living in groups, he rejects socialim as an economic system, and embraces the individualistic profit seeking competitive system of capitalism, saying "that which is owned by everybody is cared for by nobody." Plato, his idealistic mentor, was more open to communal, public ownership. People who say, as one of my less enlightened college professors did, that socialism has never worked anywhere and never will work anywhere are perhaps thinking of third world countries where brutal strong man dictators assume government control of the economy, and declare economic equality for all while pillaging the treasury for themselves. Critics of socialism certainly are not thinking about the United States, where a socialist government infrastructure, consisting of federal pyhsical infrustructure such as highways and dams, and financial social support systems like Social Security and Medicare bolster and sustain the broader capitalistic economy by supporting and stabilizing it. Europe goes a step further, by regulating their corporate capitalism more stringently than the U.s., and by allowing the citizens to benefit from democratic socialism to a much greater degree than in America. Corporations are alive and well in Europe, but tehy do not own and control the ountry nearly to the extent that American corporations do. Conservatives often warn us that we in teh United States most crtainly do not want to become more like Europe culturally and economically. Just the opposite is true; Americans who see the benefits from Europe's progressive culture and economic policies seek to emulate them, wisely. even Adam Smith, the intellectual and spiritual father of modern capitalism, embraced socialism by asserting that "All government action favoring the poor is desirable, but no government action favoring the wealthy is desirable". Capitalism requires rules and regulations to play by. Government, using socialism on behalf of the people in general, must always protect the country from the harm which comes from capitalism out of control, enriching the few, crushing the rest of us.