Americans Prefer to Hang SeparatelyBy Allan UthmanNow that fiscal “conservatives” have devastated this country in ways that only the most knuckleheaded can deny (or blame on Barney Frank), it seems that “liberal” just doesn’t pack the epithetic wallop it once did. Just a few years ago, it was enough to tar a Democrat as a liberal to hurt him in the polls, but Barack Obama hasn’t even done much to evade the charge. People may just be thinking that the liberals might not be so bad, considering that they have turned out to be right about seemingly every policy argument of the past decade or so.So what does a floundering Republican candidate say to damage his opponent’s image? Well he has to kick the red-scare machine up a notch. The next level up from “liberal” is “socialist.”To a lot of Americans, who are more likely to remember the entire cast of Celebrity Apprentice than to have ever read a book about economics or political science, “socialism” evokes images of totalitarian dictators—Castro, Kim Jong Il, and the like. But like capitalism, socialism is not a political system; it is an economic one. In a nation where every facet of public policy is crammed into a one-dimensional ideological spectrum, with only two directions, left and right, it is basically impossible to express this in the approved nomenclature. The fact is, a democracy, or a dictatorship, can be either socialist or capitalist. But the best countries to live in in this world, relying on objective data, are Democracies in which capitalism and socialism are blended—like America. It is true that capitalist principles of competitive markets, of better reward for better service, are undeniably good ones. But it is just as true that a society that doesn’t do anything to alleviate the grave economic injustices that inevitably arise from unregulated capitalism isn’t worth a damn. Democracies that address the economic needs of their people are just better places to live, period.
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