On Being a Democratic Socialist

I align with the concept of democratic socialism because I have been blessed with its benefits and am old enough to have known people who have suffered in its absence. I grew up in a mining town, but the coal it produced was no longer valued. My father died when I was eight, and my mother had to support herself, her three sons, and her mother. She did factory worked, was the church custodian, and gave haircuts. In spite of the hardship, she always seemed to be both joyful and thankful. She was the epitome of the hard working, independent, Christian woman. It was not until later that I realized the scope with which the safety net of democratic socialism assisted her and impacted my early life. For, in addition to her work, my mother received monthly Social Security checks until I graduated from college, a school in the Pennsylvania Public System supported by state funding. I have also known men who worked in the mines; men who told me that the company valued the mules more than the men because it had to pay to replace a mule but another man would show up to replace the one that had been injured. They worked unprotected by regulatory statute, paid in company scrip, lived in company housing, and suffered from Black Lung without any assistance until a social support was mandated.

People love to cite the Founding Fathers ideas on a free society that is governed on democratic principles. They also love to envision themselves rugged individuals, living free and independently, libertarian, citing Ayn Rand as their heroine (often without any more than a shallow understanding of its implications). It seems that they also hate to pay taxes, not wanting to share their prosperity with any other. Ben Franklin seemed to have a different opinion.

“The remissness of our people in paying taxes is highly blamable, the unwillingness to pay them is still more so. Money, justly due from the people, is their creditors’ money, and no longer the money of the people, who, if they withhold it, should be compelled to pay. All property, indeed, except the savage’s temporary cabin, his bow, his match-coat, and other little acquisitions absolutely necessary for his subsistence, seems to me to be the creature of public convention. Laws and customs made accumulation of property possible, the public therefore has the right to regulate the quantity and use of property. “All the property that is necessary to man for the conservation of the individual and the propagation of the species is his natural right, which none can justly deprive him of; but all property superfluous to such purposes is the property of the public, who by their laws have created it, and who may therefore by other laws dispose of it whenever the welfare of the public shall demand such disposition. He that does not like civil society on these terms, let him retire and live among savages.”

On this Franklin and I are of like mind, ” He that does not like civil society on these terms, let him retire and live among savages. “