July 19, 2022

Conservatives attack socialism as the equivalent of Communism and Marxism with no explanations. There is a pigeonhole in the minds of conservatives for everything negative they want to dump onto opponents independent of the meaning of what they say.

Marxism itself is so devoid of meaning that it has never had the slightest relationship to anything that exists. It has never served any other purpose than attaching it to the enemies conservatives want to attack.

Trump campaigned on preventing Democrats from creating socialism. Why didn't the Democrats create socialism long ago, if that is what they were going to do? Trump doesn't produce the logic of a bird brain.

There has never been socialism in the U.S., because it isn't possible by the criterion that is argued, which is whether the government pays for free services.

The impossibility is demonstrated by the central point of the socialism promoted by Senator Bernie Sanders, which is free health care paid for by the government. It's called "single payer," which means the government is the single payer. Nothing resembling such "single payer" is remotely possible.

Social Security is not socialism, because it is only available to persons who have paid a large amount into it; and it has no other source of revenue. Therefore it is similar to insurance and is often called insurance, which is not socialism by the criterion of government paying for something that is free.

The closest thing to welfare that ever existed in the U.S. was "Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC)." Persons in poverty could get free government money. Why should that not be called socialism? Because it was abandoned by Clinton saying Reagan was right, such processes don't work. If it were sustained, it might have been a low level of socialism.

Why isn't basic education called socialism? It's free and paid for by tax payers. In fact conservatives are trying to eliminate public education—not by getting government out of the process but by getting government to pay for privately administered education. If it were called socialism, it would mean conservatives promote socialism.

So why isn't government-financed education called socialism? Primarily because the word socialism is so meaningless that it only is applied to political purposes without a consistent definition, while the most vulnerable persons, children, must be required to get the service of education whether they can afford it or not.

Why then wasn't (AFDC) a necessity in making life possible for impoverished children? Only because conservatives are fighting a war against the lower classes. When the AFDC program was discontinued, single mothers were told to get a job with no assistance, while $80 billion were removed from the low class economy and not replaced. That would be like taking out about $200 billion dollars now days. Draining that much money from the impoverished economy was a major cause of social problems.

Often Europe and Canada are used as examples of free health care indicating that socialism is possible. The difference is that the U.S. spends huge amounts of money on basics that other countries can avoid. The basics include research and development and of course, the military.

That fact alone prevents the U.S. government from spending significantly on free services and totally eliminates the possibility of it producing free health care. Military spending by the U.S. is used to maintain a global force for Western interests alleviating Europe and Canada from the need to spend significantly on their military. Trump tried to reverse that situation by forcing Europe to spend more on its military without any decrease in U.S. spending on its military.

One argument for single payer health care is that the U.S. can simply shift the flow of dollars from insurance to government. To do that would require a total redesign of tax methods. A so-called income tax will not do that, because it is too illusive and easy to manipulate.

What would have been needed to shift revenue is an expense tax rather than an income tax. An expense tax would be the equivalent of a sales tax but applied at all levels rather than just retailing. The simplicity and invariability with no cheating possible would have created a stable tax base for creative purposes.

Europe approximately created an expense tax, but they called it a "value added tax." Since it is approximately an expense tax, it allows Europe to provide some free services from the government without the tax base disappearing in shenanigans.

Should not Medicare be referred to as socialism? Conservatives are not calling it socialism in their condemnation of the whole concept of socialism. In part, the necessity would be the reason. A lot of conservatives depend upon Medicare; and another reason is that some of the funding comes from a wide variety of sources in addition to the government.