OpinionJournal - Outside the Box

Socialism's Last Redoubt

Why do Dems oppose Social Security reform? Because they're committed to government control.

BY PETE DU PONT
Wednesday, February 16, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST

In 1945 Clement Attlee led the British Labour Party to victory over Winston Churchill's Conservative Party. He then proceeded to socialize much of the British economy, for he believed that 'the creation of a society based on social justice . . . could only be attained by bringing under public ownership and control the main factors in the economic system.' Labour's goal was to get rid of the waste and irrationality that, in the socialist view, doomed market economies to failure.

Fast forward six decades, and you hear an Attlee echo--Sen. Hillary Clinton telling a California audience last summer that taxes must rise because 'We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.'

American socialist Noam Chomsky made the same argument concerning Social Security: that allowing people to invest in markets is a bad thing, for 'putting people in charge of their own assets breaks down the solidarity that comes from doing something together, and diminishes the sense that people have responsibility for each other.'

So the 2005 Social Security argument is an old and familiar one: government decisions versus individual ones, government control of assets versus individual ownership. In short, socialism versus individualism."
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