As I was coming of age during the Cold War, the worst thing you could be was a Communist. This was a follower of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Josef Stalin, and the man he had killed in Mexico, Trotsky, first name disremembered, with an axe. Those were the bad guys. We studied Marx, evil personified. In actuality he was a German drudge who sat in a library in London and wrote about the evils of the Industrial Revolution as it unfolded around him. He had a lot about which to write. Better he'd never been born, I used to think, as a schoolboy, then we wouldn't have this boogieman to contend with; no Marx, no Marxism.
Having put on a few years, and the Cold War having ended, perhaps it's time to reconsider a bit. Lots of economists have come up with ideas that don't work. Alan Greenspan, for example, who gave us the Crash of 2008. He professed not to believe that bankers need watching because they represent "the market," which doesn't bear watching, as though people didn't need policemen to keep them behaving with the slightest bit of honesty, bankers especially, what with their hands on the treasure chest, 'n' all.
The problem with Marx's idea is that he must've assumed that people would behave better collectively than when they behaved individually. They don't. You give people some slack and they become slackers. They expect someone else to do the work while they somehow manage to reap the benefits, even if they have to steal it. Hence the rule: No work; no eat.
In Marx's parlance: Each according to his work, each according to his need. The only problem is that in a system designed by Marx, no one really wants to work for his neighbor; family, yes; but neighbors? Fergeddaboudit. That was the problem with Stalin's collectivization of Russia (killing 25 million kulaks, smallholding farmers) and Mao's collectivization of China. Stalin and Mao Tsedung killed more of their own people than any Cold Warrior ever did, implementing ideas that we think totally crazy. Deng Xiao Ping finally unloosed China from this evil dragon in 1979, setting up new economic zones that promoted manufacturing. Suddenly the suppressed Chinese population, over a billion strong, was turned loose to fend for itself, each man for himself and his family. China has since virtually exploded, in the favorable sense, as its people have been freed to think for themselves and follow suit in their own individual economic interest. This has produced other problems, of course, but starvation isn't one of them.
Marx had other bad ideas, such as his cures for economic inequality and social injustice. He advocated abolishing the institution of private property, the inheritance of property (nothing to inherit of one owns nothing), so you did not have the incentive of being able to accumulate money or property to leave for the support of your spouse, kids, and grand-children, far different than we enjoy in the West.
The fear that Marx's system, adopted in the Soviet Union, China, Albania and Cuba, plus the Iron Curtain countries of Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, etc., and the fear that these ideas might somehow creep over to the United States through immigrants put a great fear in our people of wealth, the industrialists and corporate owners and managers following our Civil War. They had something to lose: money and property. The multitude of poor might take from the few very rich.
Our Constitution has been viewed, probably correctly, as an attempt by the wealthy to protect their property from being taken from them by government power exercised by the more numerous poor. Thus our Constitution was initially very weak on democracy, providing very little protection for the voting power for the propertyless poor, blacks (slaves) and women. Who does that leave? The more wealthy. It's taken centuries of struggle to correct this imbalance.
Protection of wealth explains why our Constitution provides that no person may be deprived of life, liberty or property (5th, 14th Amends.) w/o just compensation and due process of law.
It took a special amendment to permit the federal government to impose an income tax on citizens; why? To protect those who had an income that permitted them to save money which might be taxed.
The conservative belief, that we who have something to conserve, money and property, land, bank accounts, stock shares, bonds, need protection against 'creeping socialism,' the idea that government should provide protection, a safety-net, for the innocent poor, need protection from tax and spend liberals who want to fund such programs out of our purse, has become an article of faith among Republicans, Tea-Party supports, and other seeming 'rugged individualists.'
The problem with this faith is that it its spotty. It is applied selectively. Some socialism is good, such as the bank trillion dollar bank bailouts after they risked falling off the cliff in 2008, and the trillions spent on wars to protect the oil supply in the Mideast, but not a penny for the poor, for this is evil and promotes dependency, as though we're not even more dependent on oil.
Since the U.S. is now deeply in debt to an alarming degree, loud are the calls to cut back the social welfare programs such as Social Security and Medicare, upon which so many, including me, depend.
But what about one of the biggest social welfare programs that America has? I refer to the military and the retired military. A service member, after twenty years and an honorable discharge, is entitled to lifelong medical benefits and a retirement paycheck. Do we hear voices calling for cutting back on these benefits? If so, they're so loud that we don't hear them. Retired military are often conservative types; it's okay for them to advocate in favor of cutting back civilian social welfare spending, but not military.
We're different, says the military; we're military. We fought socialism all during the Cold War, in Korea and Vietnam.
Well and good. The military is independent and not part of the economic world we live in, just as our wars are not chalked up on the national debt; the cost of war doesn't count; we just put them on the national credit card, hoping our grandchildren will pay our bills.
Let me tell you what I think socialism is, today, Marx having gone by the boards; his system was proved not to work in practice in the Soviet Bloc, China, Yugoslavia, and Cuba (which seems to be in the process of dismantling its system as the Castro brothers, Fidel and Raul, reach their eighties and the people resort to workarounds to their communist system of no private ownership, no private hiring, etc.
Socialism, to me, is common effort, enforced by law. We don't have individual government; we have socialized government. This means that we have formed a government to face the nation's problems collectively. This is the most socialized system of all; this may be why we hear Tea Party cries that government is too big, too interfering, too involved in our lives, etc. No doubt it is when it gets in the way of what we want to do, but absent effect government, some of us are free to pollute the streams, the air, the aquifers, the farmland, kill the animals, kill the trees, kill the birds and fish, all the stuff we've been doing, actually. Those who profit by doing this do not wish to be regulated. I'd like to see them regulated. But the Tea Party says I can't, if they get their way. They call it socialism; I call it being a member of the anti-Suicide League.
The Army. Is that a bastion of capitalism, the market economy? Or is it socialism personified?
I say it's the latter. It was formed by the government of, by, and for the people to protect the nation and its people. Terrific. I'm all for it. I support Big Army and its Little Troops. No Little Troop can stand up to Big Army, I don't think. They don't have labor unions in the army, navy, air force, marines, or coast guard as far as I know. The air traffic controllers once had a union, but Ronald Reagan took care of them c. 1986, for striking.
Here's how it works today, without a draft, when we have an all volunteer army (by which I mean to include all of the service branches, named above). The army needs personnel. They get them by hiring them, out of the service budget authorized by Congress and the President annually. The personnel come from the general population of people, young men and women willing to serve, to take the risk of life and limb for their country.
They are paid, fed, housed, schooled, exercised, trained, given medical benefits when their service ends and retirement benefits for themselves and their spouses, as well. This is a pretty good deal, provided that you aren't maimed or killed in the process, which too many are. Death and injury are a function of the political leadership which puts servicemembers in harm's way, sometimes too readily. Old men risking the lives of the young; a sad tale, and never-ending, it seems. Enlistees are entitled to feel fullfilled and respect in their calling; they become all that they can be with schooling, training, and hard, respected, essential work.
So, the civilians join the military. The military activily recruits civilians and turns them into military. Then it supports them for life, those who stick, out of the general budget, an appropriation approved by Congress, meaning the people, all of us, through our elected representatives. This is both democratic and socialistic. Nothing market economy about it. We don't hire mercenary armies; that would be capitalistic. We do, however, outsource many war-related activities to private contractors, such as commissary, base security, and the like. This is capitalistic, market economy activity. Formerly handled by the military on the cheap, it is now very expensive. The troops in Iraq would like ice cream? We have 31 flavors back at the base. So we do it both ways, some capitalistic, some socialistic.
What this means is that I don't want to hear conservatives and the Tea Party arguing that social welfare programs are socialistic, as though the kind of socialism I'm describing somehow goes against the laws of God, who doesn't give a fig either way about this sort of nonsense.
No, it seems that the Tea Party and other conservative folk are going to have to come to terms with the idea that they really love socialism, truth to tell, assuming that they aren't turning a blind-eye to what is all around them.
When the banks were failing in 2008, they cried for a government bailout, which they received, "to protect the economy," it was explained. Nonsense. They damn near killed the economy with their skullduggery.
It was socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor, who could sink or swim, including the 90-year-olds, the widow, the orphan, the lame and halt.
The problem is that the military has become a sacred cow. I figure that if we can now address the Third Rail of American politics, the social welfare programs, we can also look at the military and the government paid-for engineering programs like space, mars, satellites, NASA, etc. Welfare for whites, might be an apt term.
Perhaps it's time we got real.
Part of the problem is that too many people regard this country not as a nation but as a church. Unless one hews, orthodox fashion, to what the preacher preaches, you are a heretic, disloyal, a traitor.
Disloyal to what? A traitor to what? Is someong presuming to tell you what you must and must not believe? Who is this authority? From which holy book does he draw his inspiration? The Constitution?
Which Constitution?
The one written when?
By whom?
There IS no official version; the Constitution is subject to constant revision. We keep changing it, not just by infrequent amendment, but by constant tinkering, but the Supreme Court, as it decides cases and imposes new doctrine; this is our system. There is no simple handbook or catechism, not even the document itself, which will give my two friends the answers they seek. For this, they will have to do the hard work of studying Constitutional Law in depth themselves, under decent guidance, one hopes.
They're going to have to start reading the cases.
I hope that they have the time and energy.
Good luck.
