On S*ci#l!sm
Sarah Palin won’t stop ranting about how Obama is going to turn the country into a communist state:
“See, under a big government, more tax agenda, what you thought was yours would really start belonging to somebody else, to everybody else.”
In classic Palin style, she singlehandedly accuses liberals of advocating abolition of private property, while at the same time blurting out a completely unintegrated noun phrase “more tax agenda” that sounds like some kind of Buzzword-Tourette’s tic.
This single sentence is a scintillating example of the Republican strategy: make people fear your opponent with utterly inarticulate, nonsensical, baseless accusations, delivered with a contrived appeal to down-home sensibility. And tragically, this seems to be working.
To me, the discourse plays out as follows:
Liberals: “The rich are getting richer at expense of the poor.”
Republicans: “You are a redistributionist.”
Liberals: “No, it’s just alarming that in 1980, the top 7% owned 20% of the wealth, and today the top 1% owns the same amount. We need to rebuild the middle class.”
Republicans: “You are a socialist.”
Republicans are just calling names, they aren’t offering any real solutions to the problem that our country is becoming a plutocracy.
Well let me make a radical claim: redistribution is exactly what we need right now. At times, that word has been (rightly) treated as a profanity, but today it shouldn’t be. The pendulum has swung too far in the direction of plutocracy, and it’s time that it swing back towards fairness. You may call that change in direction “socialism”, but we have to pull to get back to center.
Tags: Capitalism, Redistribution, Republicans, Sarah Palin, Socialism, Wealth
October 27th, 2008 at 12:43 pm
I think your numbers may be a little off. There’s no clear consensus on the distribution of wealth in the U.S. but most sources I checked cited something along the lines of: “The wealthiest 1 percent of families owns roughly 34.3% of the nation’s net worth, the top 10% of families owns over 71%, and the bottom 40% of the population owns way less than 1%.”
Whatever the true figures are, it’s clear that in the last 20 years, the U.S. has witnessed a new age of robber barons, mostly concentrated in the financial services and tech industries. That era may be coming to an end, and none too soon for the health of the country. The French Revolution (gotta love those French) is just one example of what can happen to a society without a thriving middle class. Too many people with no hope watching a small minority of their countrymen living like kings can be a volitile mix.