I think I’ve missed voting in one local election since I became voting age. We went on holiday and I neglected to vote early. Other than that one mistake, I’ve always seen it as my civic duty to vote. I’m in favour of giving every voting age citizen a tax break if they vote, promoting full civic participation.
Here in Canada we are a socialist democracy, especially compared to the US. I watched a news clip yesterday and a rather conservative US reporter was equating social democracy to stealing tax money from the middle class to support the poor. Then I saw a Tiktok that quoted the article ‘Three Cheers for Socialism‘, and I thought this quote was very interesting:
“Americans are, of course, the most thoroughly and passively indoctrinated people on earth. They know next to nothing as a rule about their own history, or the histories of other nations, or the histories of the various social movements that have risen and fallen in the past, and they certainly know little or nothing of the complexities and contradictions comprised within words like “socialism” and “capitalism.” Chiefly, what they have been trained not to know or even suspect is that, in many ways, they enjoy far fewer freedoms, and suffer under a more intrusive centralized state, than do the citizens of countries with more vigorous social-democratic institutions. This is at once the most comic and most tragic aspect of the excitable alarm that talk of social democracy or democratic socialism can elicit on these shores. An enormous number of Americans have been persuaded to believe that they are freer in the abstract than, say, Germans or Danes precisely because they possess far fewer freedoms in the concrete. They are far more vulnerable to medical and financial crisis, far more likely to receive inadequate health coverage, far more prone to irreparable insolvency, far more unprotected against predatory creditors, far more subject to income inequality, and so forth, while effectively paying more in tax (when one figures in federal, state, local, and sales taxes, and then compounds those by all the expenditures that in this country, as almost nowhere else, their taxes do not cover). One might think that a people who once rebelled against the mightiest empire on earth on the principle of no taxation without representation would not meekly accept taxation without adequate government services. But we accept what we have become used to, I suppose. Even so, one has to ask, what state apparatus in the “free” world could be more powerful and tyrannical than the one that taxes its citizens while providing no substantial civic benefits in return, solely in order to enrich a piratically overinflated military-industrial complex and to ease the tax burdens of the immensely wealthy?”
Wow.
I don’t think Canada has the correct mix of social democratic policies, but I think that we better understand how a wide social net protects those that need protection, and lifts our entire society as a whole… as compared to the US, but not compared to some European countries. Lessons can be learned from other countries, but I fear that US political and news influences are misleading about terms like socialist democracy, and it’s easy to get lost in what is essentially propaganda.
I’m back to thinking about the blind man analogy, and wondering how we can create a vision for democracy in the future that is more all encompassing, that is less capitalist and more socialist? The true lessons of capitalism as I see them aren’t to maximize growth of wealth, but to create competitive cost efficiencies that reduce costs for public good. Bloated social programs that cost too much hurt us all. This is where the lessons in the business world can help with the public good.
But to many the perception of a socialist democracy is a step towards communism. It’s a step towards giving up freedom to a more controlling state. It’s the start of the collapse of a capitalism… It’s actually more like the collapse of exploitation of the vast majority of the working class, but that’s not the narrative. I fear that the narratives we are exposed to are convincing more and more people that capitalism and democracy share the same principles, they don’t. A true democracy is a government chosen by the people for the people… not corporations.
