Posted by Tina
I highly recommend an article posted at the American Thinker, Why Obama’s socialism matters, by Bookworm.
The following is an excerpt but do read the entire piece. It will clarify the terms we toss around with such abandon and it will provide a clearer basis for conversation regarding the candidates in this election.
* If it were up to me to attach labels to modern political ideologies, I would choose the terms “Individualism” and “Statism.” “Individualism” would reflect the Founder’s ideology, which sought to repose as much power as possible in individual citizens, with as little power as possible in the State, especially the federal state. The Founder’s had emerged from a long traditional of monarchal and parliamentary statism, and they concluded that, whenever power is concentrated in the government, the individual suffers. *** And what of Statism? Well, there’s already a name for that ideology, and it’s a name that should now be firmly attached to Sen. Obama: Socialism. *** Although one can trace socialist ideas back to the French Revolution (and even before), socialism’s true naissance is the 19th Century, when various utopian dreamers envisioned a class-free society in which everyone shared equally in what the socialist utopians firmly believed was a finite economic pie. That is, they did not conceive of the possibility of economic growth. Instead, they believed that, forever and ever, there would only be so many riches and resources to go around. *** The original utopians did not yet look to the state for help establishing a world of perfect equality. Instead, they relied on each enlightened individual’s moral sense, and they set up myriad high-minded communes to achieve this end. All of them failed. (For many of us, the most famous would be the Transcendentalist experiment in Concord, Massachusetts, which almost saw poor Louisa May Alcott starve to death as a child. *
Visit Bookworm on his blog, Bookworm Room