During my daily journey to Digg to see what’s cool and new I usually fail the temptation test of reading the comments on some of the political articles.
For example:
http://m.digg.com/political_opinion/George_Will_Progressives_and_the_growing_dependency_agenda
The most dugg comment (indicating that the Digg community found this comment to be insightful):
Thanks for that myopic right wing rant-o-rama, George. Just because you have the money to afford private schools for your kids, doesn't mean you don't have to help support public schools. Yes, I read the article, he's misrepresenting the nature of the DC program. The same with health care. Nobody is stopping you from paying for a private room and your own personal doctor if you have the money, but you still have to help provide care to everyone else. Just because we have social services doesn't make us socialist. Most of you don't run your own electric company, water or sewer company, but most of you don't have a choice where you get those services, either. You take what the electric company offers at the price they set. Sometimes as a society we find it's easier to band together for collective services. Water, electric, education, health care, police protection, courts, fire services. And, yes, the list keeps growing because our society keeps changing. Most of you depend on collective water and electric but you have the option of turning it off and going solar if you find it impinges that much on your freedom. After 9/11 we decided to make airport security a collective service, maybe that wasn't such a winner but we know the alternative doesn't work. If you have the money to fly private, you can avoid all that inconvenience. All this teabagger blather is just nonsense.
The world Socialist or Socialism isn’t an insult. It is a specific concept with a specific meaning: The believe that society’s resources should be distributed by the government.
Let’s take a look at this genius’s comment in detail now:
“Just because you have the money to afford private schools for your kids, doesn't mean you don't have to help support public schools”
Don’t have to? In a completely free society, you would not be forced to pay for services that you do not use. Now, I don’t happen to support a completely free society. I support a certain level of socialism because I do believe that individuals do owe an inherent debt to society. But I’m not going to say that something has to be a certain way. There’s no particular reason why the government must pay for schools – particularly the federal government.
“The same with health care. Nobody is stopping you from paying for a private room and your own personal doctor if you have the money, but you still have to help provide care to everyone else. Just because we have social services doesn't make us socialist”
Um, yea it does actually. By definition. If you are forcing other people to “help provide care to everyone else” you are executing a socialist policy.
That is the core part of socialism – forcing people to pay for other people.
He doesn’t even recognize the distinction himself when he writes:
“Most of you depend on collective water and electric but you have the option of turning it off and going solar if you find it impinges that much on your freedom”
Yes, and we don’t “still have to help provide” electricity and water to other people. They pay for what they use. If a citizen goes solar then they don’t have to pay for electricity.
By contrast, as the guy originally grasps but then forgets later in his own comment, if you send your child to private school or buy private health care you still are stuck having to pay for other people’s healthcare. That’s socialism.
When tax time hits, I’m always pained to know that guys like this will be mindlessly voting for policies they clearly don’t understand.