Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

homestead - [Homestead] Socialism? It's Already Here, column

homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Homestead mailing list

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: bob ford <bobford79 AT yahoo.com>
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Homestead] Socialism? It's Already Here, column
  • Date: Sat, 15 Nov 2008 06:19:15 -0800 (PST)

This is George Will, from Tommorrow's Washington Post. The subject has been
discussed at length on this list

---------------------------------------------------------------------


Socialism? It's Already Here

By George F. Will

Sunday, November 16, 2008;

Conservatism's current intellectual chaos reverberated in the Republican
ticket's end-of-campaign crescendo of surreal warnings that big government --
verily, "socialism" -- would impend were Democrats elected. John McCain and
Sarah Palin experienced this epiphany when Barack Obama told a Toledo plumber
that he would "spread the wealth around."


America can't have that, exclaimed the Republican ticket while Republicans --
whose prescription drug entitlement is the largest expansion of the welfare
state since President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society gave birth to Medicare
in 1965; and a majority of whom in Congress supported a lavish farm bill at a
time of record profits for the less than 2 percent of the American
people-cum-corporations who farm -- and their administration were partially
nationalizing the banking system, putting Detroit on the dole and looking
around to see if some bit of what is smilingly called "the private sector"
has been inadvertently left off the ever-expanding list of entities eligible
for a bailout from the $1 trillion or so that is to be "spread around."

The seepage of government into everywhere is, we are assured, to be temporary
and nonpolitical. Well.


Probably as temporary as New York City's rent controls, which were born as
emergency responses to the Second World War and are still distorting the
city's housing market. The Depression, which FDR failed to end but which
Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor did end, was the excuse for agriculture
subsidies that have lived past three score years and 10.

The distribution of a trillion dollars by a political institution -- the
federal government -- will be nonpolitical? How could it be? Either markets
allocate resources, or government -- meaning politics -- allocates them.

Now that distrust of markets is high, Americans are supposed to believe that
the institution they trust least -- Congress -- will pony up $1 trillion and
then passively recede, never putting its 10 thumbs, like a manic Jack Horner,
into the pie? Surely Congress will direct the executive branch to show
compassion for this, that and the other industry. And it will mandate
"socially responsible" spending -- an infinitely elastic term -- by the
favored companies.

Detroit has not yet started spending the $25 billion that Congress has
approved but already is, like Oliver Twist, holding out its porridge bowl and
saying, "Please, sir, I want some more."

McCain and Palin, plucky foes of spreading the wealth, must have known that
such spreading is most of what Washington does. Here, the Constitution is an
afterthought; the supreme law of the land is the principle of concentrated
benefits and dispersed costs.

Sugar import quotas cost the American people approximately $2 billion a year,
but that sum is siphoned from 300 million consumers in small, hidden
increments that are not noticed. The few thousand sugar producers on whom
billions are thereby conferred do notice and are grateful to the government
that bilks the many for the enrichment of the few.

Conservatives rightly think, or once did, that much, indeed most, government
spreading of wealth is economically destructive and morally dubious --
destructive because, by directing capital to suboptimum uses, it slows wealth
creation; morally dubious because the wealth being spread belongs to those
who created it, not government.

But if conservatives call all such spreading by government "socialism," that
becomes a classification that no longer classifies: It includes almost
everything, including the refundable tax credit on which McCain's health-care
plan depended.

Hyperbole is not harmless; careless language bewitches the speaker's
intelligence. And falsely shouting "socialism!" in a crowded theater such as
Washington causes an epidemic of yawning. This is the only major industrial
society that has never had a large socialist party ideologically, meaning
candidly, committed to redistribution of wealth.

This is partly because Americans are an aspirational, not an envious, people.
It is also because the socialism we do have is the surreptitious socialism of
the strong, e.g., sugar producers represented by their Washington hirelings.

In America, socialism is un-American. Instead, Americans merely do
rent-seeking -- bending government for the benefit of private factions. The
difference is in degree, including the degree of candor. The rehabilitation
of conservatism cannot begin until conservatives are candid about their
complicity in what government has become.

As for the president-elect, he promises to change Washington. He will, by
making matters worse. He will intensify rent-seeking by finding new ways --
this will not be easy -- to expand, even more than the current administration
has, government's influence on spreading the wealth around.



http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/14/AR2008111403045.html?hpid=opinionsbox1






  • [Homestead] Socialism? It's Already Here, column, bob ford, 11/15/2008

Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page