Unless you’ve been under a rock lately you may have heard Palin calling Obama a socialist. Well now let’s take a look at socialism defined before starting the slam-o-gram.
(From Wikipedia)Socialism refers to a broad set of economic theories of social organization advocating state or collective ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods, and the creation of an egalitarian society.
Ok, let that settle in for a few moments…
Got it? Ok, great. Hendrick Hertzberg wrote a piece in New Yorker about the Republican attempt to paint Obama as a socialist.
(clip from BoingBoing.net)
The state that she governs has no income or sales tax. Instead, it imposes huge levies on the oil companies that lease its oil fields. The proceeds finance the government’s activities and enable it to issue a four-figure annual check to every man, woman, and child in the state. One of the reasons Palin has been a popular governor is that she added an extra twelve hundred dollars to this year’s check, bringing the per-person total to $3,269. A few weeks before she was nominated for Vice-President, she told a visiting journalist—Philip Gourevitch, of this magazine—that “we’re set up, unlike other states in the union, where it’s collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs.” Perhaps there is some meaningful distinction between spreading the wealth and sharing it (“collectively,” no less), but finding it would require the analytic skills of Karl the Marxist.
Word.
