The Gadfly just loves it when some ambitious writer/blogger sits down to analyze and thoughtfully think through an issue with the end result being a puncturing of the simplistic, black & white world view bubble that modern conservatives and Libertardians cohabit inside of.
Jesse Myerson wrote a piece about economic reform at The Rolling Stone, which really set conservatives off. In particular, they were real keen on calling his proposed reforms communism.
Hoping to bring some sense to the discussion, I explained on Saturday that four of the five reforms Myerson advocated ...
1. Guaranteed Work for Everybody
2. Social Security for All
3. Take Back The Land
4. Make Everything Owned by Everybody
5. A Public Bank in Every State
...already exist in America right now in one form or another. Here I want to build on that with a special focus on Republican-controlled Alaska. Why Alaska? Because it already has two (and arguably three) of Myerson's proposals in place right now. It is, I guess, America's great communist province.
In 1976, Republican Governor Jay Hammond started Alaska's sovereign wealth fund (SWF), which has come to be called the Alaska Permanent Fund. The way it works is Alaska has a big pile of money that it uses to buy up the means of production (sometimes called stocks and bonds). Those investments yield returns and revenue for the state. Right now, Alaska plows that revenue into its universal basic income (UBI) program, which is called the Permanent Fund Dividend. The way it works is the state sends a check to every single Alaskan each year. Last year, it was $900, but in better years, it has been as high as $2000. For a family of four, that's a $3,600 and $8,000 income boost respectively.
The Alaska communist story gets more interesting than that though. The way Alaska builds the principal of the fund is in line with another of Myerson's proposals: take back the land. You see, the oil wealth in Alaska happened to reside underneath public land. Instead of doing the red-blooded American thing and just giving all of that natural wealth that nobody creates away to oil companies, Alaska held on to its ownership and collects royalties from the oil. Those royalties are plowed into its SWF. So what you have in Alaska is a state that is leveraging publicly-owned natural resources to build a SWF that pays out a UBI. Or as conservatives on twitter call it: a communist hellscape.
How has communist Alaska fared you may be asking? Well, they have a 10 percent poverty rate, which is 33 percent lower than the nation as a whole. It has the second lowest level of income inequality in the country. It must be pretty cool to live there because half of the shows on TV are about it. It does not appear to be on the verge of collapse any time soon. And there are no, as far as we know, gulags or forced labor camps yet. So all in all, I'd say its adventures in communism have been pretty successful.
http://www.demos.org/blog/1/5/14/spectre-haunting-alaska%E2%80%94-spectre-communism
KA-CHING!!
Alaska, that great bastion of rugged individualism and real American conservative values, has found a (not so) unique way to better the lives of it's citizens, and lo and behold, it involves the scary concept of denying corporate monopolization of it's natural resources and instead imposing royalty taxes on those corporations for the privilege of mining on those public lands. Those royalties are then put in to a communal wealth pool that is equitably distributed to every man, woman and child in the state.
If that ain't the classic fucking definition of socialism, The Gadfly is a suck-egg mule.
It is a constant source of amusement to The Gadfly that the histrionic assholes who constantly are publicly screaming about the evils of liberal "socialism" are the people who in actuality possess the least amount of knowledge on the subject.
But then again that really does provide a concise summary of the modern day, conservaTea movement -- a pathetic mixture of willful ignorance, misguided hubris and a level of selfish greed and callousness that even Gordon Gekko would recoil at.
They are what they are, no matter how much they would deny it.
----TFG
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