Who You Calling a Socialist?

Harold Meyerson is a Washington Post opinion editor.  In today's article (click on the title), he discusses all of this socialism talk.  He says the only "democratic socialists" he's encountered in DC are Bernie Sanders, the senator from Vermont and himself.  He says socialists don't want to nationalize industries anymore and Obama certainly isn't a socialist, but, like FDR, trying to save capitalism.  And that the capitalist system is failing on its own.

The new, uncrowned head of the opposition, Rush Limbaugh, likes to call everyone a socialist.  I wish Obama were a socialist, but it is clear to me he's not.  I have a socialist bookkeeper and and a socialist barber, but I'm not sure they're out of the closet on the issue.  So I think I can recognize a secret socialist and I just don't see it with Obama.  Rush is welcome to call and discuss this with me if he likes.

If I had to choose between Bernie Sanders to run things and Rush, I'd take Bernie.   But I don't want the government to take over the banks.  I'd like to go back to the days when branch banking was illegal and you knew your banker.  That way if he stole from you, he had to live next door or down the street and face you at the grocery store.  And if he was real bad, people could get together and tar and feather him.  But now banks are multi-headed hydra (with far more than the nine heads of the beast in Revelations) and much harder to kill.   Maybe it would be best if banks were turned into 24 hour libraries and coffee shops.  I don't want the government to take over the brokerage houses, but perhaps they could be converted into homeless shelters and public cafeterias.  I don't want the government to take over insurance companies.  I'm thinking ice cream parlors.  Anyway, you get the idea. 

 

I think if the government is to do anything, it should help poor people and not rich people, but I also think there are only rare periods in history when things work this way.  Maybe we are entering one now.  I hope so.  But in general, I think the rich will in the long run always corrupt government.

I have tried to read the doctrinal battles of various flavors of socialists and I find them as complex and impenetrable as the Sicilian defense.  

I like Big Bill Haywood, but I don't think he was really a socialist.  He was an anarchosyndicalist rather than a socialist.  He was in he Socialist Party of America for a while and campaigned for Eugene V. Debs, but Big Bill was too radical for the socialists and they tossed him out.

He was a bundle of other contradictions as well.  He was strongly anti-war, but when a Pinkerton man came to arrest Big Bill, Big Bill shot him.

I also like Big Bill's view of contracts, especially labor contracts.  He believed in industrial unions (that is, the whole industry rather than just trades, hence the Industrial Workers of the World) and not trade unions.  Trade unions tended to be racist and snotty about workers further down the pecking order from them.  Big Bill viewed most any contract for labor as a trap rather than a benefit for workers.  As soon as it becomes unfair, the workers should all be able to walk off the job.

I am not sure what Big Bill would make of today's world and Obama.  I am pretty sure he would not favor sending all of these soldiers to Afghanistan.  I doubt he would have bailed out IAG, more likely shut it down.  

Anyway, all you socialist-baiters, please be aware that socialists tend be calm, moderate people with whom you can negotiate and make contracts.  Before this particular collapse of capitalism is all over, and before the remains of the middle class is completely beat into submission, you may be wishing for more socialists.