Donald
Trump’s economic advisers released a bizarre report attacking
socialism yesterday. Socialists can only take one lesson from it:
we’re winning.
by
Miles Kampf-Lassin
Part
5 - A Flawed Critique
Accidental
arguments for single-payer aside, the entire premise of the CEA
critique of socialism misses the mark. After pointing to the failures
of farming and food production under Stalin and Mao — models which,
as far as I’m aware, no socialist politicians or Democratic
Socialists of America organizers are advocating for — the authors
claim that “the lessons from socialized agriculture carry over
to government takeovers of oil, health insurance, and other modern
industries: They produce less rather than more.”
The
implication is that socialist policies would result in scarcity —
bread lines, famine, and rationed care. For socialists, however, the
goal is not to eliminate production, but to shift it from boosting
corporate profits to serving human needs. As Meagan Day explains,
“Our goal is not to rein in the excesses of capitalism for a few
decades at a time — we want to end our society’s subservience to
the market.”
Medicare
for All would replace the current system of private health insurance,
which would spell the end of the industry. But it would do so in
service of making health care a human right that all people have
access to regardless of their ability to pay, and base our care
provision on that proposition. Current plans for instituting Medicare
for All — including Sanders’s — also incorporate job training
for health insurance workers to gain employment in other fields that
would be more productive for society.
When it
comes to the oil industry, socialists are clear that avoiding the
worst effects of climate change — spelled out in detail in the
recent IPCC report — requires leaving current fossil fuel reserves
in the ground and immediately transitioning to renewable energy. That
would mean stunting the oil industry’s growth, but it would be in
service of the continued existence of our civilization. And energy
production would massively increase in solar, wind, and other
renewable sources instead of fossil fuels.
Another
bizarre claim made in the report is that “Nordic taxation
overall is surprisingly less progressive than US taxes.” That
statement may come as a surprise to Amazon CEO and US resident Jeff
Bezos, the richest man on Earth whose company paid zero in federal
income taxes last year and has avoided $20.4 billion in state taxes
since its founding in 1994. Also, because he lives in Washington
State which has a notoriously regressive tax system, Bezos personally
pays no state income taxes.
This
type of tax avoidance is commonplace among US-based corporate
behemoths and the super rich — including President Trump himself
who has boasted about it. If such a system is considered
“progressive” by CEA standards, the bar has been set to a new
low.
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