talking out the side of they neck

Ok just wanted to vent a little bit. I know, I know, I do such quite frequently. But I just had to drop my purview on a trend I have noticed since the democratic nomination of Barack Obama. Seems that over this period, there has been an increased usage over a word that likely hasn’t been mentioned as frequently since the times of Roosevelt and Senator McCarthy – Socialism and its derivative socialist.

No I don’t think America has gained any insight or increased intellectual acumen over the past 30 years, in fact I would argue that we have become dumber and less informed. Yet still folk throw around the terms socialist and socialism as if the actually knows what they mean. I did not learn of socialism via the traditional mode as most, via the writings of folk like Karl Marx, but from an epistemological perspective. The majority of these folks likely repeat these words because they hear them from opponents of the current Presidential administration and singularly focus on it as being a centrally planned economy in which the government controls everything – especially with respect to the economic bail out and the heated health reform debate.

The truth is that Marx wrote only a few pages about socialism, and that these same folk likely never read the philosophical tractates on who I first learned of the concept from, John Stuart Mills (in picture). True, there may be some support that Lenin focused a substantial amount of attention on devising an economic system devoid of the incentives of profit. But from the extent to which the world economies, especially America’s are linked, it is impossible for Obama to turn America into a socialist state and only an idiot would make such an assertion, especially if we take the history of our arch historical cold war enemy, Russia.

From the years after the 1917 revolution, to the fail of the iron curtain, it is more than obvious that the tenants of socialism are counter supportive of a functional and/or planned economy. So if Obama is a socialist, so is George W. Bush, the House and the Senate for all are instituting what Lange described as “a bureaucratization of economic life.” Now what do I mean you may query? Well in this country, it is virtually impossible to implement any form of socialism because it has no means of establishing a rational pricing system and as long as greed or avarice cannot be obviated from the American psyche – we won’t have it. Moreover, for those who say that folks are using socialists’ as a new code word for nigger, you are mistaken. If anything, it is a code word for ignorance for these people have no percipience of what the word means and are merely speaking out the side of their necks.