Socialism Still a Threat?

While reading through the New York Times a few days ago, I noticed an article about the current bailout plan with an interesting title, “Intervention is Bold, But Has a Basis in History”. Throughout the article, it talked about the difficulty the government is having trying to decipher the extent of their intervention in financial affairs. They understand that the U.S. has “a culture that celebrates laissez faire capitalism as the economic ideal,” however they feel that the current crisis requires a more interventionist stance. Their plan would be to intervene by taking stakes in the U.S. banks now and restore confidence in the financial markets. Once confidence is restored, they will pull out and let the economy run on its own again.

The constant concern with giving the government more ownership of certain corporations, however, is that the U.S. is coming too close to the ideals of socialism. It is interesting how cautious we become when the term or anything associated with it is even mentioned. In most of Europe, “the concept of the social contract is much more social - that is socialist - than we’ve been comfortable with in America”. Why is it that Europe is so comfortable and we are not? In trying to answer this question, we must remember that this is not a recently discovered concern. It has been a concern of ours for centuries; the rise of McCarthyism in 1950 serves as a perfect example.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/14/business/economy/14nationalize.html?_r=1&scp=6&sq=steve%20lohr&st=cse&oref=slogin