From: Tom Lane
Columbus
It always amazes me when I read a letter to the editor and someone makes a superficial comment that paints a broad brush over any group of people. As if some name accurately defines anyone or, especially, a whole group of people. The latest was in claiming that all “Democrats” are socialists.
We have come to a point in our world of extreme complexity that few seem to try to understand how things work anymore. When you combine an economic system (socialism) within a governance system (representative democracy) you get a very complex arrangement. To over simplify with name calling is not helpful.
We have no pure capitalistic or communistic system in our world. (Socialism is seen as somewhere in between the two). In our human history, a capitalist system based on pure supply/demand economics in a world of pure individualism has been a catastrophe. You have to go back to the late 1800s to see that. Wealth in the hands of a very few, child labor, no worker protections, massive pollution, horrible heath conditions, extreme poverty and no old age protection, to name a few.
If you want to see how bad communism was, just look at the USSR in the ’70s and ’80s. Government controlled companies making things no one wanted, no productivity, no creativity and similar social conditions, except few starved to death. Maybe it wasn’t worth living though.
We have evolved to somewhere in the middle of all that. We humans need to find out what works by looking at what we do, improving what we do and standardizing that. We are already quite a “socialistic” nation with Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid farmer subsidies, public education, public highways, etc. All these could have been done privately in a pure capitalistic system. Do you think that would have worked?
The major communistic societies (mainly China) have already opened doors for private industry. There are many rapidly expanding industries like Alibaba in China — a major competitor to Amazon. They realized that over domination by the state is not good for the society.
Isn’t the purpose of any government to provide for the well being of its population? The ones that do not do this are typically dictators of one sort or another. If you believe that the purpose of any governing body is to look after its people, then you must understand the complexity of living in our modern world. To say “this is the right answer” without explaining how it will work, in detail, is adding to the demise of human society.
We humans need to work together to find the best way to make society/economics work for all of us. To help that happen, we all must understand the complexity we live in. Simple answers to complex questions only adds fuel to fire of mutual destruction. We are better than that.
