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Posted Monday, February 16, 2009 9:00 AM

Daniel Stone

We here at Newsweek love when we get people into vigorous and thoughtful debates. Particularly when they're inspired to do so by something we've published. So you can imagine how we felt to see this week's cover story about America's increasingly socialist approach to broad problems (under the headline asserting We Are All Socialists Now) get a cameo in the seat of power. It happened on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, during an exchange between Rep. Todd Akin (R-Missouri) and Rep. John Carter (R-Texas), who used our publication as a prop to oppose the president's stimulus bill.

But it quickly became clear that both lawmakers had somehow missed the point of the article (which was to say America's fierce borrow-and-spend capitalist policies over the past decade have left us looking more, not less, like France). In fact, it soon seemed that neither had actually read it.

Akin disagreed with our cover headline (a riff, it should be noted, on Richard Nixon's 1971 assertion 'We're all Keynesians now'), but the shots Akin took at what he assumed was our foundation were something we just couldn't let squeak by. So we collected some points we wanted to correct -- for the record:

"Now what we're talking about here [referring to the stimulus bill] is socialism. We're going to take, after the economy takes a hit, we're going to spend money like mad. We're not going to create jobs. We're just going to slop it around and hope somehow it is going to make the economy better. And the facts of history are that it doesn't work… There was an interesting cover on Newsweek. It says, we are all socialists. I think there's an awful lot of people in…my district that are thankful for [Carter's] common sense and willingness to just basically state it the way it is." - Rep. Akin

Well, to start our story didn't address any single piece of legislation, certainly not the stimulus bill debated over the past few weeks. In fact, that was the point. Editor Jon Meacham and Editor-at-Large Evan Thomas argue that we find ourselves all to be socialists because of loose regulatory policies that led to massive borrowing and spending, leaving us in our current precarious spot where more borrowing and spending seem to be the only solution.

"Sometimes when you hear the term "socialism,"'...young people really don't know what you're saying. But they do know people interfering with their lives. Because quite frankly, whether they were going to college and paying exorbitant fees to go to school, or whatever it is, as they have moved into the workforce, they see that the government is available to interfere with their lives. And the real issue here is we're growing government and we're giving government the ability to interfere more and more in the lives of people." -Rep. Carter

"So when the economy gets better, we have more money to spend. And that is what has always made America great. It's because there are certain basic true principles that are not smoke and mirrors. It's not a whole lot of government redistribution of wealth, and not everybody is a socialist, in spite of what the cover of Newsweek wants to tell us." -Rep. Akin

Our story (the deep content inside the cover the congressmen seem so fixated by) offers no such individual prescription. There aren't masked socialists hiding among us eager to take over the government. No, we're all closer to being socialists because of the manner in which our government has decided to respond to unstable markets and industries over the past year. The solution, we can all agree, is a stimulated economy. But, as our story states, "since neither consumers not business is likely to do it, government will have to stimulate the economy."

"It's not the job of the government to take everybody's property away from them and to slop it around and redistribute it. That is socialism. This idea was tried by the Soviet Union. The government is going to provide you with a job and with health care and with food, and the government is going to give you your education. That idea died in the dustbin of history when the Soviet Union collapsed." -Rep. Akin

That is indeed what socialism is, at its most extreme. And yes, history has proven it doesn't work so well in practice as in theory. But as Michael Freedman notes in his piece accompanying the cover story, the emerging trend is rather toward "what could be called a European model of governance, regulation and paternalism." Or perhaps what really spooks Rep. Akin is the picture Freedman lays out later: "Think about it, and it's very easy to imagine a chorus of former American individualists demanding cushy French-style pensions and free British-style health care if their private stock funds fail to recover and unemployment inches upward toward 10 percent and remains there." If, that is, Rep. Akin actually read the story and was thinking of the future.

Jon and Evan figured that some members in congress would disagree and even dismiss our assertions. And that's okay. But the meat of the argument spoke directly to men like Akin and Carter -- those in government who continue to see the challenge of the future in the context of the past. They write: "If we fail to acknowledge the reality of the growing role of government in the economy, insisting instead on fighting 21st-century wars with 20th-century terms and tactics, then we are doomed to a fractious and unedifying debate. The sooner we understand where we truly stand, the sooner we can think more clearly about how to use government in today's world."

We just wanted to clear that up.

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Member Comments

Posted By: cougar_gal06 (February 16, 2009 at 1:48 PM)

I think that on top of fixing our economy we need to help countries struggling with bad economies and poverty. The Borgen Project (www.borgenproject.org) has a section on poverty and the economy that explains why it is so important to help these countries. It is something that Congress has been saying would be beneficial for years, so why is it so hard to attain this goal? There are 800 million people that go to sleep hungry every day, 300 million are children.

$30 billion: The annual shortfall to eliminate global hunger

$540 billion: The U.S. defense budget

$170 billion: The U.S. war budget

The entire world needs to be pulled out of recession. It seems that every few weeks there is another country that is getting ready to go into recession. It is time for action.

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