The national, state, and
local sharing of resources and responsibilities is neither socialism nor
communism.
The practice of shared
resources and responsibilities is embedded in our national conscience.
The Mayflower Compact of
November 11, 1620, speaks of “the general good of the Colony”. Nowhere does
this Compact speak of willy-nilly anarchical liberty, or even free market capitalism.
From the conclusion of
the Declaration of Independence, we read: “we mutually pledge to each other our
Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.” I believe those words applied, not
only to the fifty-six signers, but also to their families and everyone they represented
as members of the Second Continental Congress. But, the Declaration, like the
Compact before it, does not enshrine free market capitalism.
And from the Preamble to the Constitution: “to promote the general Welfare”. Again, no mention of free market capitalism.
This is not to bad-mouth capitalism. But it is to assert that self-serving capitalism is not all that that our nation is about.
In all of these founding
documents we gather a sense of a national conscience that reaches beyond
personal or individual interests only.
Examples of these shared
resources and responsibilities:
Police and Fire protection, even for
churches which pay no income, sales, or property taxes, thereby shifting that
tax burden to homeowners, and consumers.
Roads, highways, interstates, and bridges;
along with the National Transportation Safety Board.
Weights and measures departments that
protect the credibility of amounts of consumer goods purchased.
Social security and Medicare
because we know that, left to our own immediate gratification tendency, most of
us would not save sufficiently for retirement or health provision. Many of us never have reasonable opportunity to earn enough to save sufficiently.
Medicaid and Snap
because often our entrepreneurial business projects fail and resort to
bankruptcy leaving our creditors to lose financially and moving us to need public
assistance.
And many other services
that benefit the general population.
To label services of our National
Conscience as socialist or communist is egregiously un-American.
