Obama has also been slandered with the “socialist” moniker for wanting to reform national health care, fund education and reinvest in our nation’s infrastructure––all very socialist ideas according to McPalin.  I can personally attest and advise Mr. Obama that it is of little use to explain economics to rightwing dunderheads, as I have been trying for many years to explain things as simple as who owns the sidewalk in front of their business on Main Street but to little avail.  For the rest of you who have to put up with the incessant ranting of our rightwing brethren, I’ll give you a few simple arguments. 

Whether in small town Iowa or at the Port of Los Angeles, Main Street economies are only successful because government builds and maintains the streets that bring potential customers to small businesses. If the street did not exist with the requisite sidewalk our businesses would not exist. There would be no way, except by helicopter perhaps, for customers to access and pay us for goods and services.  The fact that the government owns and operates the streets and pays for them via taxes paid by the many means that we all have a stake in their being open and accessible. This is, at its core, social ownership and it has been viable, popular, and necessary since the very inception of this country—not to mention Britain and Rome before us.

You can see social ownership everywhere that you look in our country except until recently on Wall Street. Public education, the Post Office, our ports, freeways and even the public commons that includes our air and water are necessary for the, so-called “free market” to exist. The social spending economy is said to make up about one third of all spending in this country, and since the era of Reaganomics, the burden for paying for it has increasingly fallen on the backs of the middle class and small business.

The myth of a totally free market can be explained with either Alan Greenspan’s mea culpa about the current Wall Street collapse or with this simple question––what would America look like without publicly funded schools?  The answer is that both Wall Street and public schools need to be regulated and that we should have a greater concern for our investments in schools than we do for Bear-Stearns or AIG’s profits.  The problem is that when it comes to the health care industry it is treated more like a Wall Street insurance corporation rather than as a school district.

Not so long ago, before the rise of privately owned mega hospital corporations, it wasn’t unusual for communities like ours to have local hospital districts funded in much the same way that community colleges are funded today. Locally controlled and locally funded, they served as a bulwark for the county health care departments, which were created to protect against epidemics and to provide preventive health care. But we have been sold on the idea of privatized health care in much the same way we have been sold on the idea of deregulating banks, insurance corporations, and Wall Street in general. As Alan Greenspan, the guru of free market capitalism, admitted last week, deregulation failed in a way that was unforeseen.

That the McPalin campaign now lobs the “socialist” mud at Obama and the Democrats for calling for a readjustment of our tax system to pay for such things as a national health care system or to refund our public infrastructures is nothing more than the tired old “red baiting” tactics used by the likes of Joe McCarthy, Dick Nixon or at times Ronald “the great communicator” Reagan. This time, though, the blind belief in free market capitalism, unregulated, has been exposed for what it is ––gambling. This is not what we should be doing with our health care system, our schools or other essential infrastructure necessary for the well being of our nation.

If Obama is a socialist because of this, then so is everyone else in this country that pays taxes to support public education, which by the way one would assume includes John McCain and Sarah Palin.