Category: politics

Like most Democ­rats in the Unit­ed States, I am actu­al­ly a social­ist. I vote for Demo­c­ra­t­ic can­di­dates in the hope that, after sweet-talk­ing their ways around the real issues, they'll get down to the real work of redis­trib­ut­ing wealth and nation­al­iz­ing busi­ness­es. So when John McCain announced that Barack Oba­ma is a social­ist, it came as no sur­prise to those of us who already know the secret handshake.The prob­lem is, an essen­tial plank in the secret social­ist plat­form is the promise that those who have nev­er worked a day in their lives will receive an equal share of society's spoils. Repub­li­cans quib­ble over seman­tics, say­ing that wage-earn­ers "work hard­er," or "have more skills." Fine. These peo­ple can suc­ceed any­where. But what about the peo­ple who would rather not work? How are they going to pay for dig­i­tal cable? They have a lot of time on their hands, and they need to be able to enter­tain them­selves and be com­fort­able. This is one prob­lem that I have with Sen­a­tor Obama's plan; he seems to think that those in need of the boost are in the mid­dle class, i.e. skill­ful peo­ple who are like­ly already work­ing hard. I am left to won­der how, in Obama's plan, those who have nev­er worked a day will be able to watch Bridezil­las and Rock of Love.Anoth­er prob­lem that I have with the so-called social­ism of Sen­a­tor Obama's agen­da is that his health-care plan falls well short of being a mono­lith­ic, gov­ern­ment-run, uni­ver­sal-care plan. The only thing any Demo­c­rat cares about, when it comes to health care: We want to be assured that every­one will wait in the same line for treat­ment. In fact, John McCain's approach actu­al­ly feels almost more social­ist; he plans to redis­trib­ute $5000 per per­son in the US, and then to tax this amount. Redis­trib­ute AND tax; that's dou­ble-hap­pi­ness for us Democrats.But the prob­lem with McCain is that he sim­ply will not guar­an­tee that he'll teach sex ed to kinder­gart­ners. If there's one issue that unites social­ists-in-Demo­c­rat-cloth­ing, it's the belief that, when chil­dren turn five, they need to be forced to lis­ten to near-strangers (i.e., their teach­ers) talk about sex. This seems so obvi­ous. I don't know why McCain doesn't sup­port it. In any case, it looks like all of us Democ­rats have a tough deci­sion in front of us. One tick­et fea­tures actu­al wealth redis­tri­b­u­tion in the form of a health-care stipend, and the chief exec­u­tive of a state that actu­al­ly redis­trib­utes wealth to its cit­i­zens every year. And the oth­er tick­et fea­tures the kind of peo­ple who usu­al­ly pro­pose this kind of stuff. I'm not sur­prised that so many peo­ple are still unde­cid­ed.