Since you say the ACA is socialism but tax cuts are not then your views of economics are sadly uneducated.Free money and spending without tax increases is (bad) socialism and it defines what every republican believes. Good socialism is paid for with higher taxes. Bad socialism assumes everything is free. Bad socialism is conservatism. OK. Let me unpack this. I never said tax cuts are not Socialism. Tax cuts can be socialism, if they create a mechanism for redistribution of wealth. I've seen some tax scenarios that make you gag, because they represent a redistribution from the 99% to the 1%. Fiscal and monetary policies can be and quite often are both used to further socialist aims. I have quite an extensive education in both economics and in my lifetime of reading on economic history. So uneducated I am not. But being well read and having worked my entire life as an international businessman in the private sector, I have well formed opinions, acid tested in the real world.
I don't believe in free money nor in profligate spending. I also don't believe in tax increases, because our government is ALWAYS always wasteful. I just read the Pentagon lost $3.1B in Afghanistan due to corruption and lack of appropriate oversight and controls. I am no longer outraged at stories like that, because any thinking person who is grounded in economic history understands that this is normal for governments. The larger they are, the worse they get at managing money properly.
As to "bad socialism", I disagree with your premise. There is no such thing as "good socialism". That is merely a fantasy constructed in the halls of liberal academia. In the real world, socialism has killed tens of millions of people, driven tens of millions more into breath taking poverty, is currently starving the Venezuelan people, and will continue to destroy lives as long as there are undereducated liberals with big hearts who never learned or absorbed the laws of mathematics as applied to economies.
Lastly, blaming socialism on conservatives is a rich one. Most, if not all, the conservatives I know are Capitalists. I don't know any conservatives who are Socialist. Liberals think Socialism is cool and they think it can be "good", if we just ignore history for long enough. But I do believe there are conservatives who believe in Capitalism but for all intents and purposes act like Socialists. For example, Socialists love to enrich their cronies. That is a pretty common staple among many Socialist governments. Corruption is endemic. Just look at Latin America, where they continually lurch back and forth between Socialism until it collapses and then back to Capitalism, then back again to Socialism to redistribute the wealth from Capitalism, and on and on the merrygoround goes. In our country, we have plenty of conservatives who redistribute the wealth of American citizens to their favorite lobbying corporation, most notably, Wall Street, which cost this country trillions in the financial melt down of 2009, and then got bailed out with tax payer money and continues to siphon off billions from our economy through their financial shenanigans that created the mess in the first place. The Fed is the prime mover in punishing savers (capital creators in Capitalism) and enriching debtors through their artificially low interest rates and QE schemes, which are nothing more than Communist Central Economic Planning by a politburo of unelected apparatchiks. I'd call that Socialism or Communism, since it is a redistribution from the 99% to the 1%. So in that sense, yes, conservatives can act in Socialist ways. |
