Yuck! Socialism!

[mqbush]

The right’s horror of “redistributing the wealth” through taxation, that "slippery slope to socialism,” is oh so detached from sense. Every nation is- and has to be- socialist to a great extent. Whenever taxes levied on citizens and businesses pay for disaster cleanup, police, roads, the creation of the internet,-that’s socialism.

Currently in America we’re socializing business losses while privatizing business gains. Currently in America we’re fighting tooth and nail against any kind of public stabilization of health care, while socializing the moving of businesses from America to foreign countries. If socialism can be thought of as evil, it has to be America’s version of socialism that’s bad, not the foundational idea of everyone chipping in to build where building is needed.

Those interests that are invested in this parasitic American form of socialism make sure that any socialism that benefits the public, that returns citizens’ taxes with value added, is regarded as something disgusting and un-American. There is far too much obsession with imagined legions of lazy people with no self-respect. There’s nowhere near enough hostility directed at the ugly reality that we’ve been reduced to thinking like gazelles on the Serengeti: Whew! I got away from the lion THAT time, thanks be to God that my old pal Joe tripped….The richest country on the planet, and the public is reduced to this. Reduced to this because politicians are deathly afraid of bumping up taxes, and they make it sound like it’s impossible to save Social Security, Medicare, anything public, when a minor bump-up would save them all.

Some people see any taxation as unjust confiscation, tyranny. The no-tax people seem not to comprehend how totally business depends on socialized courts, socialized roads, socialized subsidies. The no-tax people fixate neurotically on Joe, who tripped, whom the government protects, as governments should. When the earnings of workers go to corporations as subsidies or bailouts or profits, with no return with value added, THAT redistribution of wealth is praised. But if a corporation or wealthy individual is taxed like we are, that’s tyrannical, confiscatorial redistribution of wealth, evil socialism.

It’s not right that well-funded PR agents working for the wealthy get so many of us to view life in simplistic video-game terms of deserving winners and deserving losers, and to call this “the American way.” That’s insulting, and disrespectful of all the good people who care for others instead of seeing them as enemies to profit from as body-count points. Those people who haven’t tripped yet are able to view survival as a video game with glowing phosphor dots mistaken for reality, a contrived game with unnatural movements and bizarre premise, a game that grants the obsessive devotee a snarling “YES!” as reward for mastery of pathological behavior.

By the flimsiest theory, anyone can be a hedge fund manager and get rich. But that theory is posited by those managers as a rationale for grabbing their hundreds of millions of annual income extracted from mogul wannabes. Practically speaking, the closest that 99% of us could get to being hedge fund managers is to be gardeners budgeting the master’s allowance for boxwood hedge maintenance. The job is distasteful, the story goes, so of course the Wall Streeter should be well-compensated. But so is garbage collection and public toilet cleaning unpleasant, jobs that actually have social utility, yet these jobs are poorly compensated, while the Wall Streeter does nothing really useful, and is outrageously rewarded.

People make their decisions. “I would never sell drugs to kids, no matter how rich I could get doing that.” “I would never pimp children, no matter how rich I could get doing that.” “I would never be a hedge fund manager, no matter how rich I could get doing that.” But those sick enough to profit from these activities make out like bandits, and this is the worst situation we could allow to occur on our watch, to corrupt our young, our society, our future. It takes a community to raise a child, and our community has been taken over by the ideological drug pushers, the pimps, the Wall Streeters. It’s time for some community organizers to get us working together to drive out the corruptors.

[timeforpeace]

1. We've been redistributing wealth for a long time now, as consensus to do so is arrived at.

[Vidar]

2. K&R.

[Zoeisright]

3. Excellent synopsis and welcome to DU!

Very well done.

[starroute]

4. Every society needs some method of redistributing wealth

That old saw about the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer is not just a cliche -- it's mathematically true. Every society in history has needed some form of redistribution to maintain its stability -- starting with potlatches and kings tossing out their weight in gold on their birthdays and proceeding to more sophisticated methods, like taxation.

The economy is not an inexhaustible well where you can just pump wealth out of the working class forever. It's a closed, circulating system -- and that means wealth has to be directed from the top back down to the bottom. The idea that the rich can just keep getting richer and richer forever without ever having to pay back in is what's killing us now.

If this particular law of nature is not observed, relative economic equality has ways of reasserting itself, ranging from bloody revolution to widespread societal collapse.