The Spectre of Socialism

In the waning days of the 2008 Presidential Campaign, the McCain message is focusing on wealth redistribution as the threat of a two branch Democratic government. Seeming to stem from the exhausted "Joe the Plumber" device, both McCain and Palin have appealed to working class voters, who might aspire to high tax brackets, to resist an Obama administration that would "spread the wealth around." To this extent, I must agree with McCain/Palin: Barak Obama has embraced an economic program of wealth redistribution, however feeble and limited.

Their argument oversteps approximately here: Obama is a socialist. The evidence is built on the "spread the wealth around" comment made to Joe Wurzelbacher and a boring 2001 interview in which Obama describes the US Constitution's relationship to redistribution. So let's consider three goals of a socialist agenda: 1) redistribution of wealth to workers, 2) state regulation of prices and wages, 3) state ownership of all or most of the means of production.

Certainly, redistribution of wealth is an intended outcome of socialism...as well as liberalism...or free market capitalism. In fact, all popular economic theories claim to create and distribute wealth to most participants. The shock many Republicans are gripped by this week is around a century too late. It was President Lincoln that proposed and signed the Internal Revenue Act of 1862 (creating the IRS and income tax) and 1864 (raising income taxes). This tax, of course, was used to pay for the US Civil War. But the modern form of our graduated income tax was championed by another great Republican, Theodore Roosevelt, in a 1906 speech:

It is important to this people to grapple with the problems connected with the amassing of enormous fortunes, and the use of those fortunes, both corporate and individual, in business. We should discriminate in the sharpest way between fortunes well-won and fortunes ill-won...I feel that we shall ultimately have to consider the adoption of some such scheme as that of a progressive tax on all fortunes, beyond a certain amount either given in life or devised or bequeathed upon death...of course, to be imposed by the National and not the State Government.

But it's a slippery slope when you're playing with socialism. If Obama was allowed to return income and corporate tax rates to Clinton-era levels, what would stop him from regulating wages and prices, like a true socialist!?!.....or President Richard Nixon in his 1971 New Economic Policy.

From this Marxist precipice, it would only take a nudge to go over the edge: nationalizing the means of production, which include heavy industry, transportation, energy, and well, banks. Luckily, Secretary Paulsen and President Bush have blazed this trail in using the "stock infusion" power of the "Economic Rescue Package" to buy shares of banks under conditions of limited CEO compensation.

What do these legs of the "socialist" scourge have in common? All were supported by Republicans (some ideologically opposed to intervention) in times of economic crisis. The point is, of course, these men were not socialists, nor is Senator Obama. This is a particularly important fact to me, because I identify as a socialist, and despite his record of supporting the pseudo socialism of Lincoln, T. Roosevelt, Nixon, and Bush, I voted for him anyway. What a sell out!

But don't fret! If you wish to vote your own socialist principles there are at least two candidates that will satisfy. The Socialist Party USA has nominated Brian Moore, and the Social Workers Party (formerly Communist Party USA) offers Roger Calero!