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We Need a Socialist Correction, Not Socialism
There’s a reason I’m not afraid of Bernie Sanders’ socialism, and it’s quite simple.
We are due for a correction.
Not a remake. Not a restart. Not a do-over.
Just a correction.
But here’s the thing: I believe (I’m not an expert on this) we already know that pure socialism does not work.
It’s not just rhetoric that true equalization and elimination of climbing opportunities is harmful to the human spirit. It’s also not rhetoric that even in those societies you tend to sill have the oligarchs. China is a communist country with more billionaires than the United States. And that’s an expected outcome.
So, no. Socialism is not the answer.
And that’s what this post is about. We don’t need socialism. We need a socialist (populist) shift as a correction to our current path, which is every bit as dangerous as pure socialism.
The outcome of pursuing our current path is a super-rich oligarchy where the people have very little. The outcome of pursuing pure socialism is a super-rich oligarchy where the people have very little.
The difference is that in this true one-percenters world, the people will be told they have nothing because they’re not good enough to self-start as billionaires. In socialism, the people will be told that they have nothing because they’re morally pure, and that it’s the right thing to do, while being ruled by those with all the money.
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Both sides take us to an oligarchy where the people are screwed.
Right now we’re getting perilously close to the capitalist version, so we need a corrective swing in the opposite direction.
We do. We need that. And Bernie could bring it to us. And I’d vote for him so he could try.
But the move towards socialism should stop after education is free, after we have true universal healthcare, and after we’ve done some corrective work on money in politics.
Those things are needed, and they’ll make more people in our country able to harvest their creativity and participate in capitalism. And that’s a good thing.
But that’s where it should stop.
We should not continue the march to the other side, where we basically see capitalism as evil, or ambition as something to be squelched or destroyed.
That’s going too far, and it will harm rather than hurt us.
Summary
Both extremes of the spectrum (worshipping either capitalism or socialism) lead to a small number of oligarchs running a country full of poor people
We do not want a pure socialist country (it’ll lead to oligarchy)
We do not want a pure capitalist country (it’ll lead to oligarchy)
We need a socialist correction in this country that stops after certain infrastructure components are repaired (education, healthcare, etc.)
We would need to stop the socialist movement before it went too far to its extreme, just as we need to stop the capitalist version now
The goal is a medium that has the best of both
Notes
I have a conservative friend who thinks that it’s healthy for the masses to worry about their survival because that’s what made America great, and that’s the true fuel of creativity. I think it’s inhumane to apply this concept to hundreds of millions, or billions of people because their opportunities to better themselves are not the same as when the U.S. was empty and there were only a few hundred thousand here in total.