Labeling Social Welfare "Socialism" Means You've Got Nothing Better To Do

Are the commies back? Do we have to fight the commie subversives in the US all over again? Say it isn't so. I don't want a Cold War directed straight at the American people.

A little over one week ago, on an overly-heated September morning, I once again heard a crass slur that should be familiar to many who actually pay attention to the consistently worsening madness that passes for political rhetoric on the American rightist fringes: social welfare is socialistic.

This time around on perpetually spin-dizzy merry-go-round of what is supposedly "conservatism", I learned that the smallish House GOP Freedom Caucus, the clown car with the Orwellian label, vociferously limned its latest demand: cut social welfare expenditures out of the federal budget because, well, you guessed it: socialism. This would mean, should such an idiotic proposal get through the sieve-thin defense of common sense in the US, that 80 percent of school meals for children living in poverty would be cut, and that 30 percent of all federal Section 8 housing grants would get the ax. As for those who receive this aid, kids would be the ones actually getting the ax, as might their parents receive the hatchet job.

Wait. This is all about principle, right? The principle of "fighting socialism in America". After all, if the ideology says so, representatives of the ideology have got to do the little robot-zombie dance to please the abstraction that has blinded them so thoroughly they are afraid to even look up socialism in the dictionary. In a country where an ideology does many things including allowing those who embrace one to shift responsibility away from their choices and toward the dictates of the ideology, and allowing such denizens of short-cut rationalizations to live without thinking, apparently the mindset is this:

What you consume is what you are. If you consume the ideology, you cannot in any form or fashion claim you are free. Freedom allows you to act on your choices, and if your choices are narrowed to only one choice, you cannot exercise any freedom. Hence, the Freedom Caucus is a perfect example of right-wing false advertising. But how does mis-branding an item like a caucus work on people who happen to be politically or ideologically naive? Just drop the word, freedom, into the grift, and suddenly those driven purely by sentiment and the saccharine are on board with whatever it is you want to do to them.

Not actually thinking. How does this phenomenon play out in the many thoughtless demands from those stricken by the fact we, as the American people, owners of the government, have chosen to assist those who have not been financially fortunate, shuck social welfare and get with the program of all capitalism all the time? To be honest, I don't know if I can find an honorable answer to this question. For one, social welfare, by and large, is a transitional aid that helps people gain a financial foothold so they may be able to get out of a period of desperation that is preventing them from, um, being free. After all, if one is willing to take any solace at all from the famous Hierarchy Of Needs as developed by psychologist Abraham Maslow, one cannot truly aspire towards actualization and wholeness if one's physical necessities--food, water, shelter, to name three--cannot be met. If you're living hand-to-mouth, your situation is going to be coerced into an almost obsessive-compulsive focus on short-term goals in favor of long-term goals--like political agency or spiritual development.

I name those two long-term goals because they pertain to what really could be called "capitalist family values" as "membership of the Holy Church of Capitalism" advocate. Why regulate businesses if the operators of the businesses go to church and are hence absolutely moral? And why be poor if one prays to a God who, throughout all human history, has showered believers with material riches--gold, jewels, mansions, even yachts with cool inboard motors--if only they choose blind faith over reason? Choose blindness! Don't think! Restrict thine-self to the short term.

See? Conservative outlook courtesy of the Libertarian Easy Bake Oven Contraption! It's really difficult to think through a confusing political phenomenon like The Freedom Caucus if you're so tired after working two part-time jobs that watching the news puts you right to sleep. It's hard to demonstrate an actual high culture mentality if you're consumed with "getting" in order to survive. Is "getting" synonymous with "living"? Beyond that, if one is prevented by one's financial circumstances from finding the time and energy to exercise one's political agency in an active way, who or what is going to benefit from your passivity? And since passivity is a singular quality inherent in reactionaryism, perhaps if one reacts so easily to stimuli that push, aggravate, inflame and create ambiguity in the mind, one is practically ready-made for what passes for "conservatism" in the United States, 2023. Again: is "getting" the same thing as "living"?

Maybe it is among the lowbrow denizens of the House Freedom Caucus. But if "getting" is "living", who is doing the "giving" as an aspect of getting-as-living? If one listens to these ever bloviating madmen in the US House, it is capitalism that is doing all the "giving". How many times are we treated to the trope "capitalism is the tide that lifts all boats" in one week's time these days? And, if one isn't "lazy" or "stupid" or "incompetent", one needs to accept "personal responsibility" and get with the program of becoming a working stiff for Jesus.

See all the poorly-imagined value judgments in such thinking? After all, the boss doesn't "give". The boss makes an exchange: your labor for a set wage. This amounts to an employee selling his or her labor to someone who hopes to make profits above and beyond the actual value of the employee's labor or or wages as defined as a "capital expense". There's nothing wrong with that. At least on its face. Yet it's also clear capitalism isn't lifting all boats. This is implicit in the design of competition's contest, one that creates "winners" and "losers". One competitive group "beats" the competition. And if this happens every single day, every single day there are going to be competitive groups and individuals who lose in the contests.

What happens to "the losers" in the competition? What if "the marketplace in jobs" is so limited that only minimum wage positions are available? What if only one part-time job at minimum wage is literally an absurdity if one is striving to meet the demand for rent? What if the rent is so high that it eats entire paychecks, thus leaving no options for food, electricity, transportation, school supplies, etc?

These are questions "the market" seems afraid to address. Capitalism isn't engineered to be charitable to those who by chance or by design cannot compete for scarce employment opportunities. In fact, in order to keep "the job market" an "owner's market", employment is never complete. There are always going to be more seeking work than there are available jobs. This gives ownership more options and more leverage to keep wages and thus capital expenses low.

Great. Competing with potential employees. Can it get any better than that? Look. We've designed this thing to give ourselves the advantage, and if you don't meet our requirements or agree to what we offer in wages, you're not being personally responsible! Maybe that's too facetious a remark. But when it comes down to agitprop by libertarian trick-or-cheaters, the propaganda always holds that the unemployed (or the disabled or retired) are losers who are not personally responsible, and thus are "government dependent".

Remember? The government is us, taking care of us. Will the wonders of anti-government propaganda never cease to amuse? Capitalism, not only in competition with prospective employees, but in competition with the entirety of the American people. Why else would commercial interests buy into the nonsense that people are "government dependent" because they can't afford to meet the demand on the supply called "a paycheck"? Who'd bet those interests wouldn't begin a whine and gibber festival if prospective employees demanded that rent demands and other demands on the skimpy paychecks be reduced or else?

Wait. That kind of demand has been rendered illegal in many states in the US, 2023. "Ask not what your company can do for you, ask what you can do for the company".

In the 1930s, during the Great Depression, for the first time in over 40 years, the actual socialists and socialist labor unions were beginning to make headway. Even a state like Oklahoma was electing socialist candidates to its state legislature. Socialist agitators were taking to country roads to convince people who were hit head-on by the Depression that it was the fault of capitalism. And people were buying into that line of advocacy. Hence, FDR and the New Dealers decided to use a tactic that had proved successful in Europe's social democratic orders: social welfare. Giving people a foothold, a safety net, not only kept the wolf from the door, it also helped restore worker faith in a government that had promised to protect them from often-predatory capitalist excesses. Over the years, social welfare and unionization (another factor in combating the Great Depression via the Wagner Act) actually helped increase consumer trust in commercial operations, and also instilled greater labor trust in ownership, both factors which led to a great productive leap in the late 1930s.

And socialism? Chased out of town on a rail. The tactic worked. Liberalism took the Marxist critique of unrestrained capitalism seriously--and reasonably addressed it with increased labor protections, consumer protections, regulations on competition and commercial behaviors and activities--as well as the safety net.

So. How is social welfare "socialistic"? The infamously famous sham economic ideologue F. A. Hayek suggested that social welfare represented "a different strain of socialism", as did Nazism. This is what happens when someone with no political experience plays fast and loose with facts in order to make his monkey business seem like it makes sense. Just because the government does a thing that has social ramifications doesn't mean it's socialism. The government does have a role to play in both the domestic tranquility and the general welfare. . . of society. Hayek insisted government involvement in economic activities such as giving workers a safety net or regulating commercial activities amounted to "government control of the economy". That's familiar cant along the rightist fringes today.

How is government control of the economy the same thing as government ownership of all the means of production? And if the government passes laws, principles, guidelines and rules of thumb to smooth commercial operations and moderate competition, is this actually 'control of the economy'?

Nope. Not at all. With between 15 and 30 million market capitalist enterprises in the US today, all existing within a market economy, it looks to me like the government isn't controlling the economy at all. It can't. "The market" is often totally out-of-control. The libertarians like using a big word for an irrationally out-of-control market that eats everything insight: stochastic order. This means there is a "natural order" to "the market", a thing that happens to be a social construct that was invented by human beings, and something, moreover, that does not exist in nature.

Does that stop the libertarian pinheadedness from proceeding with creepy mythologies like "stochastic order"? Nope. It does not. They'll tell you that "government interference" with "stochastic order" fouls it all up. If the signals of supply and demand are disturbed or manipulated by third-party force or coercion, the all-important pricing system is sent spinning, haywire. Never mind that financial speculators manipulate the signals of supply and demand every single day, something that profits no one but themselves.

But but but. . . ! The market is rational!

Seriously? They're kidding, right?

Capitalism cannot or will not address those who fall through the cracks of their well-turned earnings. People don't fit into the scheme? "Let the guy fix it". But if there is no guy, what then? Maybe a resurrection of the socialism of the 1930s will come along and begin pushing people's thinking into ways not amenable to capitalism's political-economic "preferences". Most of us would have that reactionary turn. After all, in its own way, socialism is reactionary. But if it's been shown that capitalism can be reformed in such a way as to make the socialist reaction inappropriate to a changed paradigm, then what?

Don't worry. These libertarian goofs already know that most Americans are unknowledgeable in regard to what socialism actually is. And if TV news announcers continue to carp about it, the vaunted "authority of print" will give the announcers a credibility in the minds of viewers, credibility they may not deserve.

I've remarked on my suspicions that, while actual state socialism in the US is literally nonexistent, and while it's amusing to read and see suspiciously paranoid commentators insist that poor, misunderstood capitalism is under siege from the commies, it may be a possibility that the socialists have chosen "to hibernate" until conditions change into favorability should regulations, the administrative and welfare states be eradicated. It is an interesting picture to entertain. One Theodor Adorno, a famed "cultural Marxist" in the 1950s and 1960s, actually suggested "hibernation" in a coming "night" or "Ice Age" as the wholesale capitalist reaction to being pushed by socialists led by the USSR and Red China gained steam. Then the idea that those disenchanted by capitalism could "pretend" and work hard to push capitalism and the US into a reactionary position that would lead to what Lenin suggested was a pre-revolutionary state of affairs called fascism--that's also a possibility.

Could be, the US is reacting in a way that looks swimmingly optimistic to actual socialists the world over. If the state has been "downsized", and thus no longer possesses the power to defend the political agency of the American people against the negative neighborhood effects of unrestrained capitalism, and if the concept of modern Liberalism per FDR and the New Deal is defamed into ignominy--what happens then?

We're right back to a point in time where unrestrained capitalism was a serious and undermining threat to the American people, a point in time that served as an opening to the very socialist subversion all the current paranoids and libertarians are telling us is happening right now--when it isn't.

OK. I can laugh at the slur that Liberals are socialists in disguise. While it's for real that libertarians are deeply involved in a Great Big Masquerade Party as they trick-or-treat on "conservatism", it's also saddening to me that most Americans have no idea that actual conservatism advocates hierarchical structures based on hereditary rulership--not political governance. In the US, the only way conservatism remotely would make half-assed sense would be that "the big shots" of capitalism will stand in for hereditary elites made by nature to rule over "the mob". Selective readings of Edmund Burke don't really help their cause much at all.

Laugh I will. Sure. The government has not gained the approval of the faction of capitalism deeply involved in reactionary politics. But in a political sense, those reactionary capitalists have already decided that the rules, and the entirety of the liberal democratic tradition, don't apply to them. They're going to do it all their way, and the rest of us, by their lights, can lump it. This, oddly, is the very definition of "rabble". A rabble isn't rag-poor and desperately hungry. The rabble of America 90210 is wearing Brooks Brothers and is out to instrumentalize everything that moves into an 'economization' of the political. There. There's your subversion. When you see figures that suggest that something like 40 percent of all the children in the US this year are going to bed hungry, or that something like 80 percent of all Americans are so financially unstable as to not be capable of even saving $400 in case of a sudden or catastrophic financial emergency, or that almost 50 percent of all American adults do not qualify to pay federal income taxes due to the fact they are not being paid enough, you really have to wonder what those reactionary capitalists are thinking when they seek to so disparage social welfare to the point they can vote it out of existence.

Ah yes! We're back to "capitalism in competition with the government for the loyalty of the American people". None dare call that fascism. If the government is charged with aiding poor people, how come capitalism hasn't come up with a better solution? Even if the vaunted idea of neoliberalism, i.e. the privatization of government services, tells us this is possible, I certainly don't see commercial interests stepping up to the plate in any measurable way.

One of my biggest criticisms of mass media in the US has to do with its overly casual and quite generalized habit of giving viewers and readers inaccurate definitions for socialism, liberalism, conservatism, libertarianism, communism, fascism, Nazism, and neoliberalism. People do have not only the right to accurate definitions of often confusing terminology, people have a need for journalists to at least try to get it right. But this is in a situation where the wealthy reactionary capitalists are buying up mass media like mass media was nothing but a big bag of chocolate Ding Dongs. Maybe it is. If not now, maybe it will be one Big Ding-Dong in the future. Not a good look, America. No way to be free.

I get labeled a "leftist" all the time. That's laughable. If anything, if the twin termini, the extremes in economic and political understanding begin and end in either socialism or capitalism, modern Liberalism is smack in the middle. The moderator between extremes. Liberalism protects both capitalism and the public from the excesses and disorders of both capitalism and socialism.

And no, that's not a mouthful of malarkey. Even if it departs from the current propaganda of some Orwellian "Freedom Caucus".

It's really sad when those who represent the American people in the House of Representatives are more ignorant than dead squirrels.