George Rebane

[This little note was written on 1 February 2009 in Woodinville, Washington where we were visiting our ‘Northern Tribe’ to attend our grandkids’ sporting events before taking part in that great American tradition, the SuperBowl party repeated in millions of homes across the country.]

The socialist season is now officially in full swing.  Despite our left-wing rejecting the ‘socialist’ label as perhaps too revealing of the grand plan now in progress, a spade is nevertheless starting to be called a spade by world leaders.  Australia’s prime minister Kevin Rudd is about to publish an article calling for the end of the “bankrupt” experiment with market capitalism and the start of a world wide “social democracy”.  Rudd, a social democrat, takes great joy in this prospect as he acknowledges that the United States has now finally elected a fellow social democrat as its President.

As the nationalization of our nanny state picks up speed, Obama and the Congress are ramming through the next $800B (or is it now up to $900B) economic stimulus.  This piece of social legislation is made up of at least 40% of direct transfer payments to traditionally Democrat voters, an all-time record of pork barrel projects stimulating only the chances of their sponsors’ re-elections, and less than 20% of monies that have any chance of getting their shovels ready before the 2010 elections.  You can bet the ranch that two years from now the economy will still be struggling to get out from under so much government help.  And it will all be laid on the doorstep of failed Bush policies and the final indictment of market capitalism.

To make sure that I and other local bloggers (e.g. Russ Steele at NC Media Watch, Martin Light at CABPRO Report) are not the only ones taking note of what is happening in our state, please read WSJ’s ‘California’s Green Jobs Experiment isn’t Going Well’ by Stephen Moore.  Just because we are local should not prejudice our analyses of what is happening that affects our state and county.  We stand on our public record and invite the comparison of these analyses and predictions with any other competing source.

And meanwhile Nevada County’s reflection of all this is that Thomson will soon divest itself of the former Grass Valley Group and Nevada City’s premier tax revenue source.  RR’s predictions and assessments of local economics was available here, here, and here.

So there you have it on Super Sunday as we turn our short attention span from bread to circuses.  The tremors that you feel come from the crumbling of the American Dream under the tread of the advancing new world order.

[3feb09 update.  A lot of the RR feedback comes in emails from sharp-minded readers which are an abundant blessing to this blog.  The following excerpts from several emails expand and contribute to the posted piece, so I am including them here along with my response

“Please provide the novice but interested reader with a precise definition of “socialist” that doesn’t include 90% of the industrialized world (otherwise its not a very differentiating definition), …”

“Little wonder the ‘s’ word got no traction whatsoever during the election despite the increasing frequency, hysteria, and inappropriateness of it’s use. A little bit more of this and the term “socialized medicine” will have lost it’s power…”

Well, I wouldn’t say the ‘s’ word got “no traction whatsoever” because by the most conservative counts somewhere in the 47-48% people voted against Obama (other counts exceed 50%, but we’ll leave that lay).  The operative word here is ‘against’ since McCain was not much of a ‘for’ candidate for the Republicans.  But your implication is indeed correct, the tipping point has been passed and now the Peters exceed the Pauls and it’s hard to see why they would ever vote themselves a lesser deal than the socialists promise.

“Put me down as one of the “lefties” rejecting the socialism label.  You’ve heard me on this before but what’s happening doesn’t come close to being socialism and I worry that mislabeling public policy and political issues badly hampers efforts to deal with them.  It’s the old question of not being able to solve a problem when it’s misdiagnosed.  Of course, definition of terms is a crucial element in any intellectual discussion.

For instance, for all the red-faced heavy breathing of the right, a single-payer health care system like Medicare is not “socialized” medicine.  (My wife) and I get all our care under Medicare and we have had no trouble seeing any doctors we wish–primary physician, eye, and allergy care for me, various ones for her. …”

Oh yes, the definition – socialist is a supporter, adherent, and/or practitioner of socialism.  I’ll go with Wikipedia’s long form here, and with dictionary.com’s short form here for socialism.  And it may be correct that ‘socialist’ paints about 90% of the industrialized world today, and the *total* world tomorrow for all the reasons that I have already given elsewhere.  Putting nuances on it now is an empty exercise, since no matter the starting point in socialism, as wealth generation capacity gets destroyed, the system quickly progresses toward its more comprehensive forms as the Peters demand more and more from the diminishing number of Pauls.  Keep an eye on the EU’s ‘progress’.  It’s tragi-comical that many of the EU countries have been desperately trying to reduce taxes even more to hold off complete economic collapse.  It wasn’t supposed to work that way – protectionism, redistributionist high taxes, and outcome egalitarianism was the advertized path to workers’ paradise.  The advertizing campaign is again in full swing.

Finally, labels like ‘socialist’ are useful for efficiently summarizing a bag full of attributes.  And the people who use that term to describe another (target) group of people find that it accurately communicates the attributes and their assessment of the target group.  To the extent that it serves that purpose, it continues to be used.  The rejection of the label by the target group is of secondary concern, and if it is perceived to be rejected for purely political vs semantic reasons, then the label’s use becomes even more firmly entrenched – ‘methinks she doth protest too much, and all that’.

A further example is the label ‘denier’ that the true believers in anthropogenic global warming append to anyone who is skeptical of their arguments.  The skeptics can and have spent gallons of ink in refuting the science of the AGW adherents to no advantage.  Their arguments receive no response, and they are simply lumped together as deniers, with all the implications of maintaining an unreasonable and unassailable position.  (However, we are beginning to see a wee crack in the AGW fortress.) 

Another label is ‘intelligent design’ that the secular humanist connects at the hip with ‘creationism’, thereby cutting off a rich field of debate and enquiry as to the origins of the cosmos.  The fact that those defending intelligent design are not creationists does not impact the political reason for putting the two groups together for the purpose of forging public policy in education.  It simply serves their purpose.

So given the history and the current acceleration of government interventions in what used to be the private sector, rejecting the socialism appellation seems cynical to almost half of us in the country.  And that is a legitimate position for the minority to take.  I suppose we use the ‘s’ words in our public arguments in order to drive the point home as to the direction we believe we are heading, no matter how each of us assesses the extent of the road already travelled.  That should also be information to the majority.]