Should Socialism Be Only For The Wealthy?
Christians have danced with socialism since the earliest Christian communities, but unfortunately for rational discussion there is a great deal more condemnation of socialism among our citizens than understanding of what it means.
Socialism is an economic system in which government uses capital to intervene in the market, presumably for the betterment of all citizens. Capitalism is an economic system in which all capital is held privately; it encourages competition, benefits those with capital and fosters inequality by increasing extremes between rich and poor.
Capitalism and socialism are descriptive terms for theoretical models and are neither good nor bad in themselves. There never has been any purely capitalist or socialist country. All modern democracies are “mixed” economies containing elements of both.
Government actions to intervene in the market to pick winners and losers, such as the Bush administration’s $700 billion financial institution bailout, are socialist interventions in a market economy; a capitalist would have let them fail, regardless of consequences.
Both Republicans and Democrats prefer capitalism in the abstract but choose socialist policies when it is in their interest to do so; the difference is that Republicans want interference in the market to favor the wealthy and Democrats prefer to spread the benefits to the poor, while both argue cynically that their priorities favor the middle class.
In recent months Republicans have advocated a number of strategies to interfere in the free market: no-bid contracts for contractors (rather than free market bidding with the market deciding winners and losers), government subsidies to sugar, tobacco and corn growers, curbs on imports to protect business from market forces and competition, tax preferences (subsidies) for the wealthy on income not earned by labor (such as dividends and capital gains), subsidizing drilling on public lands and waters without requiring payment for what the oil is worth, preventing Medicare from bidding for drugs in the free market, business demands for Federal help from the Small Business Administration when their uninsured businesses are flooded or they need investment capital to expand. Think about it: the Small Business Administration provides public money (capital) to capitalize and sustain business enterprises, a socialist approach to business supported by Republicans.
It’s all a matter of perspective. Republicans support socialism when the public money goes into their pockets. They oppose it when it goes into the pockets of the poor and the less well off. That is their right in a democracy. It is the hypocrisy of their objections to socialist policies that I find objectionable.
It's time to shift the balance from favoring the rich to favoring the poor. That’s change we can believe in.
2 April 2009