If You Are on TV Still Griping About Socialism, It's Because You Have No Idea What Socialism Actually Is.

Ever noticed how certain words just enter the vernacular but if you really break it down it turns out that most people don't even use it the right way?

Here's an example- TENDER MERCIES. You'll have to be LDS to get this one, but ever since Elder Bednar's talk on the topic, we Mormons have found reason to apply this phrase whenever possible. "I had just passed gas in the kitchen when my mother-in-law opened a bag of sauerkraut. What a tender mercy." (Based on true events.) Now, I do believe in a loving God who bestows large and small blessings upon us, but I think much of the time what we are calling "tender mercies" might actually be more accurately referred to as "happy accidents."

The one that has been getting my goat lately has been SOCIALISM. Let me help sort this out for us. First: Socialism is an economic system, not a political system. Therefore, our country would not be transitioning from a democracy to socialism. If such a transition to socialism was occurring, we would be transitioning from capitalism to socialism. Second, Marxist theory classifies socialism as characterized by unequal distribution of goods and compensation according to work done. Let's take health care reform, then, as an example. A chief complaint about this reform is that people who do nothing get something, but socialist theory clearly states that people who do stuff get stuff, and people who do nothing get nothing. So while health care reform might be a big steaming pile of you-know-what, it just isn't socialist.

Count Henri de Saint-Simon is regarded as the first individual to coin the term socialism. He advocated the creation of a society in which each person was ranked according to his or her capacities and rewarded according to his or her work. Economically, socialism denotes an economic system of state ownership and/or worker ownership of the means of production and distribution. There are elements of both of these principles in our society now, and they were in place long before our current president. Think about Medicare, Medicaid, our PUBLIC lands system, and our system of PUBLIC education, just to name a few. I don't necessarily think that all of these programs are run well, but they have been around for decades, yet it is only recently that talking heads have started screaming "SOCIALISM!"

My final note comes from Che Guevara, and I'll quote:

"Socialism cannot exist without a change in consciousness resulting in a new fraternal attitude toward humanity, both at an individual level, within the societies where socialism is being built or has been built, and on a world scale, with regard to all peoples suffering..."

See? We Americans could never be socialist because we don't give a **** about anybody else.

The moral of the story: Go ahead, call the state of affairs in this nation a joke, call our President delusional, say that Congress has their heads in dark places, and say that the proposed health care plan will never work. Just don't call it Socialism. It isn't.