Sarah Palin has taken to calling Barack Obama "Barack the Wealth Spreader" to highlight his connection to what she calls socialism. Like everyone else who uses this argument, she's just displaying her ignorance of what socialism is.
And, as with so many things the McCain/Palin ticket is saying, she's also being utterly hypocritical. Let's flash back to an interview she gave before she was the vice presidential nominee. In commenting on the fact that Alaska not only has no income tax but actually sends each resident a check every year, she told Philip Gourevitch of the New Yorker:
"Alaska—we’re set up, unlike other states in the union, where it’s collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs."
Collective ownership of resources! Share in the wealth! Now that's more like socialism.
1 comment:
INVALID COMPARISON!
It is not a valid position to accuse Governor Palin of being hypocritical when she points out that Senator Obama is waging class warfare or being Marxist for telling Joe the Plumber that he intends to "spread the wealth".
The Senator wants to take by force of taxation the accumulated earnings from one group and give them to another.
The Governor gives the receipts from the sale of Alaska's resources to the citizens of Alaska.
It is entirely different to simply distribute collectively owned public wealth to the owners than to redistribute privately owned wealth to non-owners.
Equating the wealth that Alaska receives from the sale of its natural resources to the accumulated savings of individuals is the application of the logical fallacy of equivocation. The two are not related.
Further, socialism is most generally state ownership of the means of production and distribution of goods. The sale of state-held resources alone is not socialism.
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