So now John McCain and Sarah Palin accuse Barack Obama of being a "Socialist"! As if Socialism is the same as Communism, which unfortunately too many Americans, through lack of education and knowledge, tend to believe.
It is particularly ironic that this accusation is surfacing at a time when a Republican President (George W Bush) and Republican Secretary of the Treasury (Hank Paulson) have decided that the government must buy into the banking system in order to save it. It is also interesting that this conservative President created and promoted the biggest increase in government spending with the Medicare Part D prescription plan, passed in time for the election of 2004.Â
The fact that every industrial democracy has a national health care plan except us, and that industrial nations created Social Security and Medicare many decades before we did, should make one think could socialist type ideas be so evil? Certainly, we are not in danger of abandoning our capitalist system, but why not allow ideas that were originally socialist which have been shown to be beneficial if one looks at the evidence objectively?
For instance, it was the Democratic Socialist movement in this country that first promoted environmental protection, civil rights laws, and promotion of civil liberties, along with Social Security and Medicare. An excellent example of a Democratic Socialist today is Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who is seen as a principled, decent man who wishes to promote the American dream beyond just a small group of rich citizens. If this is the human face of Democratic Socialism, then we need to advance it. The citizens of this country need to be educated in the virtues of a mixed Capitalist-Socialist system that prevents the kind of stratification so evident in America today, where one percent of the population has half the income. This continued situation is a prescription for disaster socially and economically in the future if not rectified.