March 26, 2023

Someone has made the claim that socialism is being taught in our junior college in our town.  Some official discounted that possibility and challenged him to “prove it.”

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Now, that would be difficult to do.  Socialism is defined in various ways, such as the ownership of the means of production or the control of industry.  But one thing they all seem to have in common is that under socialism, the government does many things that individuals would usually do for themselves, or that would be done by private industry.

Over the past several decades, we have gotten so used to government in our lives that we do not even consider that there might be other ways to deal with issues.  In our town, our public hospital is the largest industry in the county.  Little by little, our hospital has taken over local clinics and some medical offices, such that almost all medical care has some relationship to the hospital, and thus hospital policies.  Whatever the hospital requires of its staff and patients, it also requires of the regional clinics.  Now this same hospital is going to become a 501(c)(3) organization so that the citizens of our county will have nothing to say about what the hospital does.

It does not seem to appear to anyone that in the past, most hospitals were private, or owned and directed by religious and charitable organizations.

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The more centralized the hospital becomes, the more control it has over the lives of the patients who use the hospital.  And if the hospital receives some government directive to do certain things, that directive is soon felt by nearly every medical facility in our area.

Socialism, then, means big government, and as time has gone on, the governments, both local and national, have become larger.  Thus, more taxes mean more government.

So what is happening in the classroom that has anything to do with socialism?

No teacher is going to stand up in class and say, “Children, today we are going to learn about the benefits of socialism.”  They know that a few people who have studied the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution might find serious objections.

But there is nothing stopping the teacher from extolling one government program or another.

Welfare is just one government program that involves more and more government at all levels.  We are used to that, and in fact expect the government to do more.  Never mind that in the past, individuals, churches, and charitable organizations took care of the needy; now it is just assumed that the government has to do it.  So if a teacher happens to suggest that welfare is good, that teacher is teaching socialism.