The title of this article is the title that former Roanoke Times columnist Dan Casey used in 2020 to point out the presence of socialist programs in the United States. Following are excerpts from Casey’s article.
These days, you can hear some people spit out the term “socialism” like it burned their tongues. Meanwhile, they take for granted all the socialist aspects of daily life.
Once upon a time in American cities, a homeowner who wanted some kind of fire protection bought insurance. The insurance company would nail a small but distinctive metal symbol, known as a firemen’s mark, on the home’s exterior. You can buy those relics in antique stores today.
Insurers would pay private firefighting brigades to extinguish blazes at marked homes. If you didn’t have a mark, tough luck. The brigades might not fight your fire.
Then in the mid-19th century, some do-gooders in Cincinnati came up with a bright idea. They suggested firefighting should be a public service that covered all homes, rather than only marked ones. In populous areas all over, people fell for the argument, and government took over urban firefighting. One result today is the “socialist” Roanoke Fire-EMS Department. Its costs are spread among all city taxpayers. Although most of their homes never catch fire, they pay the firefighting costs of the ones that do.
The crafty socialists didn’t stop there, however. And as a result, all manner of other things became socialized, too. Both the Roanoke County Police and the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office are socialist enterprises. They’re funded almost entirely with tax dollars, and they render service regardless of anyone’s ability to pay.
In Roanoke, socialist garbage collectors prowl the streets each weekday. Yes, the city collects a fee for that – but it’s a flat charge per house. A retired couple in south Roanoke who puts out one bag of trash weekly pays the same as a family of eight in southeast who puts out 10. That’s socialism!
Over in Roanoke County’s tony Hunting Hills neighborhood, every toilet flush is a socialist deed, because those homes are hooked up to public sewers. Every book in the nearby South County Library is a paid-for-by-socialists volume. Interstate 81 is a socialist highway. And the bread of every doctor in Roanoke is buttered with socialism in the form of income they derive from Medicare.
The wily socialists chalked up their biggest victory ever in the realm of education. In 1870 they persuaded Virginia lawmakers and voters to enshrine no-charge public schooling in the commonwealth’s constitution. Many other states followed suit. Today, some of those – such as Idaho and Utah – are bastions of conservatism. Just goes to show how conniving those socialists can be.
And when the subject of tuition-free public college comes up, ask whether that’s anything new. Tuition was nearly free when I attended the University of Maryland in-state full-time. It was $399 per semester. Adjusted for inflation, that translates to under $1,000 today. If you’re older than 60 and attended Virginia Tech in-state, tuition was nearly free for you, too. That’s because public universities used to be far more heavily subsidized – thanks to socialism. At Virginia Western Community College, tuition is free or greatly reduced for students who qualify for its Community College Access Program.
So the next time you hear someone braying with outrage against socialism, ask him or her who douses their house fires, or teaches their children, or collects their garbage. Who took a report the last time they got in a car crash?
And ask how could it be that Norway, whose social welfare system is far more comprehensive than ours, also has a much higher per-capita gross domestic product.
