“No, I still believe they are socialist. Their policies prove that almost daily. Look, when all the answers emanate from Washington D.C., one size fits all, whether it’s education policy or whether it’s healthcare policy, that is, on its face, socialism.”
There reaches a point in a word’s history at which it has been misused so many times that it ceases to have any meaning. For proof of that, just look at what happened to the word irony. Is it not ironic that irony, while meaning the opposite of the literal meaning, has no literal meaning anymore: not really. The word literally has followed suit more recently. That word should literally be set aflame by dragons and trampled by unicorns. Anyway, it seems that the fringe right, as well as many members of the GOP, cannot get enough of bastardizing the word socialism. Socialism has grown so much in its old age. It used to mean the government ownership and control of the means of production. Now, socialism means taxes, healthcare, welfare, unemployment, and even good old-fashioned government. If government is socialism, and the antithesis of government is anarchy, does that make capitalism equivalent to anarchy? Is Rick Perry an anarchist? I literally do not think so.
When Rick Perry says that the supposed liberal socialist agenda is proven “almost daily”, I imagine that he must be talking about all the factories that are being raided and refitted by the Obama administration. The fact is that the United States does not produce enough to become socialist even if we wanted it to: and I think that some of us do. In this sense, it is important to keep healthcare in mind. A single payer system is not on its face socialist. When the government uses tax dollars to pay private hospitals and providers for universal medical coverage it is called collective bargaining. When Obama and his minions take control of these hospitals and force the providers to give all of the citizens health care; that would be socialism. Keeping that in mind, universal health care is far more capitalist than it is socialist. Universal health care is just the type of capitalism that the far right does not agree with: helping individuals rather than corporations.
Perry did not drop the “socialist bomb” on Obama; he dropped it on himself. He proves here that he fails to grasp economic principles that many Americans his age were required to learn in middle school. It seems that the only thing that he has learned is that, given the general misuse of the word, you can now claim that someone is a socialist. And while you are literally lying, you are not actually lying.
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