Archives » Monday, February 16, 2009
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Daniel Stone
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Feb 16, 2009 09:00 AM
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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