One of the most common ways to demonise even
moderately progressive reforms in the USA is to call them ‘socialist’ – but why
should such reforms be seen as socialist, and why would that make them bad? Two
main reasons stand out: first, they often involve spending ‘tax dollars’, in
other words taking money from one group of people and giving it to another;
secondly, they involve government regulation and intervention, which is
believed to infringe personal freedom. Yet redistribution and regulation can be
found in many aspects of life in the USA, including three examples that are
never labelled ‘socialist’, namely sports, company towns, and the military.
To start with sport, American football is more
heavily regulated than European soccer through rules that help to create the
proverbial ‘level playing field’ such as a limit on the total salaries paid to
all players in a team and a draft system whereby the worst teams get the first
pick of players emerging from college. And it works: the last ten Superbowls
have been won by seven different teams, making American football far more
competitive on the field than the major European soccer leagues by limiting
financial competition off it.
The company town was a distinctive feature of
America’s economic development in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. While such towns also existed in Europe, they were much more common
in the USA because America industrialised faster and in a much less populated
continent; according to Hardy Green in The Company Town, there were more than
2,500 such places at their peak, housing 3% of the country’s population. In
these towns, strict regulation and infringement of personal freedom were
enforced by employers, not by government. While some of these towns had decent
working and living conditions, the opposite was more common, especially when
towns were hundreds of miles from alternative employment.
There was plenty of redistribution of income too,
this time from a company’s workers to its owners: wages were largely spent on
rent for company housing and on buying food in company shops. The Commission on
Industrial Relations (1913-15) remarked that company towns showed ‘every aspect
of feudalism except the recognition of special duties on the part of the employer.’
Like the socialist states of Cold War Eastern Europe, employers used spies and
physical force to control their populations.
Many of the largest company towns in the USA
today are military ones (Fort Benning in Georgia is home to about 120,000
soldiers, family members, civilian employees and retirees), and the US armed
forces can be seen as a third example of American socialism. While European
welfare states are condemned for their supposedly debilitating ‘cradle-to-grave’
care, the military has created a closed society that is replicated bases around
the world.
In American
Dreams, Studs Terkel quoted a woman who had grown up on these bases: ‘When
you’re an army brat, it means your entire environment is conditioned by much
more than what your father does for a living. You grow up in a total
institution. I always thought of it as being like a circus child, there are
many second- and third-generation military families. Every need is taken care
of and you’re not expected to ever leave.’
The military is of course funded by tax dollars,
and plenty of them. The Department of Defense budget for 2012 is estimated at
$666 billion, or 4.4% of gross domestic product, while the total defence budget
for 2012 exceeds $950 billion when adding expenditure such as veterans’
affairs, homeland security, nuclear defence and foreign military aid. This
represents a huge redistribution of wealth from taxpayers to members of the
armed forces and to military suppliers.
Evidently America’s football clubs, company towns
and armed forces are not socialist. The point is that redistribution and
regulation exist in many forms of American life; they can be highly successful
or they can be abused; they can serve the country as a whole or they can serve
the interests of a few. For the 1% can be ‘socialist’ too, when it suits them.
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