I am sick of these stupid memes that show trucks plowing snow with some text about socialist snowplows. This plays into the far right agenda to remove all government programs designed to help society as a whole. There is nothing socialist about the snowplows. The drivers don’t own them. In most cases they aren’t even unionized. They are keeping roads open so all of the workers can still get to work to make money for their corporate overlords.
Yesterday, I was attacked on Facebook, on a post about my 46th TIA (mini-stroke) by my cousin Sally’s husband, a self-identified “capitalist pig”. He asked if I was concerned about who was paying for my ER visit, since I have Medicare. He sells insurance. He told me that he was challenging my “ridiculous socialism”. At first I responded with, “I paid plenty, with Medicare payroll taxes my entire working life and with a monthly premium out of my disability now, plus the deductibles and copays, prick!” I mean, I just came home from the ER recovering from my 46th TIA, my third in the last three weeks, and he decides to “friend” me to take stupid potshots?! I then blocked him and deleted his comments. I don’t need the stupidity, the judgment or the drama right now. He called his wife, his children and his grandchildren “capitalist pigs”, as well. I don’t think it was very kind of him to call my cousin Sally a pig.
Medicare is not socialism. Some Republicans tried to brand it as such when it was being proposed, just as they did Social Security before that. Neither program involves workers seizing the means of production, so, by definition, they are not socialism. This is just old-fashioned, McCarthyist red-baiting. The GOP also lies about the insolvency of the misnamed Social Security Trust Fund. If GOP presidents had not stolen trillions of dollars from it for useless wars over oil, it would be solvent for decades to come. If the Social Security tax were not regressive and Social Security itself acted like a true insurance, as in, it was means tested, it would be solvent indefinitely. Both programs were created by capitalists.
How does this benefit capitalism? Teddy Roosevelt was the first president to advocate for universal health coverage from a position that no country can have a strong economy with a sick workforce. Eisenhower, another GOP president, certainly not a socialist, advocated for universal, free healthcare for children. He was hoping that the universal free distribution of the polio vaccine would serve as a pilot for such an initiative. His reasoning was manifold. Children cannot choose whether they are born into a family that can afford healthcare or one that can’t. He felt that it is undemocratic and a denial of the American credo of “all men being created equal” to not at least provide healthcare to all children, if not all people, who need it. Also, providing healthcare to all people helps save money and reduce pain and sickness for all by limiting contagion and preventing diseases and injuries from creating worse problems long term. It also saves a ton of money by eliminating the billing and collections process and all those bonuses to insurance executives for denying care, not to mention all those wasted advertising dollars. This has been the experience of all of the civilized countries, which have universal healthcare. (Most of these are social democracies, as opposed to the US which is an anti-social oligarchy, listing toward fascism.) These conditions produce a more productive workforce. This is a capitalist value.
Social Security was introduced in the midst of two world wars. Traditionally, children take care of their parents as they age and can no longer care for themselves. Wars are a capitalist venture. Weaponry and war is the US #1 export and budget expense. The world wars, followed quickly by the Korean War and the Vietnam War, etc., left a lot of parents without children to support them. So Social Security is a program to share that burden somewhat among the whole nation. The truth of the matter is that money does not keep. Money is just a means of exchanging labor. Another GOP president, Abraham Lincoln, said it, “Labor creates all wealth.” It is said that money is denatured manhood and denatured womanhood. Social Security creates the illusion that one lives on one’s own resources in retirement. No one does. Everyone who no longer works lives off of the labor of others. Social Security and Medicare and various private insurances are social contracts that try to preserve the illusion of self-sufficiency which is an essential myth necessary to prop up capitalism.
Next time someone tries to tell you the fire company or highways are socialist, remember Ben Franklin established the first free public library and organized the first fire companies, and helped lay out the grid pattern of roads for the westward expansion of the US. He also was a strong believer in capital exploiting labor to generate wealth, as in The Franklin Fund, etc. Also, when Brian Brady tries to sell you insurance, don’t buy it. He will try to make you feel guilty if you ever dare to use it.