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I opened my copy of The Mining Journal for Tuesday, Aug. 11 and found not one, but two full length opinion columns and an editorial cartoon on top of them, condemning aspects of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.
I am not a Democrat, much less aligned with the DSA, but I do feel very strongly that major newspaper op-eds have a responsibility to present truthful and factual information. Neither of these op-eds meets that criteria.
All of the posturing seems to rely on first isolating the word “socialist” and then providing a definition for that term which has no relationship whatsoever to the candidates they are condemning. Not one of the Democratic candidates has proposed turning the USA into another Soviet Union or China. The exemplars for their objectives are countries like Germany, France, Denmark, Sweden, South Korea and Japan among other industrial, developed, democratic countries, with a small “d.”
Despite the claim of Calvin Thomas, even now the U.S. is not a “free market” economy unless you think you can purchase our national defense from Elon Musk’s Space/X rather than the U.S. military. We have public schools, public libraries, public roads, community police and fire services. Social Security and Medicare are socialistic, not “free market.”
All these are examples of socializing services for the public good. The U.S. is what responsible economists call a “mixed economy.” That means we have some parts of our economy based on the free market, and others based on socialism. Often, these are intertwined, for example, when our socialized military allows corporations to compete for the right to manufacture our military appliances.
By all means, let's hear from politicians on all sides of any issue. But can we insist that everyone, left, right and center be truthful and refrain from attacks based on prejudice?