Is socialism a dirty word?

In his editorial column this month, National Underwriter Editor-in-Chief Bill Coffin writes:

I take offense at people using “socialist” and “Marxist” like a dirty word, and towards people who are proposing certain kinds of policy in the American political sphere. There is nothing remotely socialist or Marxist about healthcare reform, financial services reform, tax policy, or anything else we’ve seen while the Democrats and Obama have been in power. Their policies are no more socialist or Marxist than Bush’s policies were fascist or Nazi, although during his administration, Bush got plenty of that kind of commentary, too, and it was just as ignorant and as unfair then as it is now.

Coffin is writing to defend a similar editorial viewpoint written by one of his senior editors, Trevor Thomas, entitled “Taxes are Not the Problem.” Coffin also writes:

There is something called Godwin’s Law, which states that on an infinite timeline, any heated discussion on the Internet will inevitably result in one side likening the other side or the other side’s point, to Hitler . . . All one has to do is actually read the Communist Manifesto or Main Kampf to get the difference. But for a depressingly large number of people, that’s too much work.

 
Like Bill Coffin, Rose Wilder Lane also visited the Soviet Union. But she was older than Bill, who was a teenager at the time of his visit, and Lane was, evidently, better educated. When Lane returned from the Soviet Union, she wrote Discovery of Freedom.


In this book Rose Wilder Lane makes the case that that human beings, or human energy, works best under its natural, individual control. She wrote that "in demanding that men in Government be responsible for his welfare, a citizen is demanding control of his affairs by men whose only power is the use of force."

Lane said that "The use of force must progressively destroy all the protections of an American citizen's natural human rights, and eventually - if at last he protests - his life. The men in public office can no more prevent this result of their assuming, or accepting, responsibility for the citizen's welfare, than they can prevent water from seeking its own level."

Bill Coffin and Trevor Thomas don't have a grasp of the relationship between government and the use of force. They don't understand what Marxism or Socialism really are. Do you? Read Thomas Sowell's Marxism to gain a basic knowledge. [ Get it on Amazon.com  Marxism: Philosophy and Economics ] I heartily recommend all of Thomas Sowell's books.

You might also enjoy Alexis de Tocquville's Democracy in America. Read the section “On the use that the Americans make of Associations in Civil Life.”

In contrasting America with Europe, de Tocqueville wrote: “Everywhere at the head of a new undertaking you see government in France and a great lord in England . . .”

He is not talking about voluntary undertakings. He is talking about the fact that behind every undertaking of government, behind every undertaking of a great lord or king, is the ability and the will to use force to compel citizens to comply.

de Tocqueville explains that this is how the Egyptians built the pyramids and how the Romans build the aqueducts. All of the resources of society - human and material - were marshaled by force into a great undertaking.

This is how the Lenin and Stalin built the Soviet Union.

At the end of the day, the reality is that behind the great undertaking of Healthcare Reform is the ability and the will of the Federal Government of the United States of America to use force to compel citizens to obey its decrees.