How did we go from there to here?

"From each according to ability, to each according to need."

Although this passage is commonly attributed to Karl Marx, the phrase was actually (per most histories) coined by Louis Blanc, about a decade before Marx really climbed to the pinnacle of his soap-box. Blanc himself offered the phrase as a revision of a comment from a French utopian socialist (Henri de Saint Simon) who had the audacity to suggest that workers should be paid according to how much he works.

But although the line doesn't actually appear in the Communist Manifesto (1848), it is a principal underlying point of nearly every mainstream communist/socialist movement, philosophy, or ideal. Which I mean to include any time a tax dollar gets paid for the benefit or advantage of someone who doesn't pay taxes, or who otherwise fails to support themselves. Use of warm fuzzy "moral" arguments to argue that it is the responsibility of the capable to provide for the comfort and benefit of the incapable. Which is not something that I'm overwhelmingly adverse to. There are people who legitimately need charity, and there are a great many who can afford to give to charity. My objection comes when the idea becomes institutionalized to the point that the capable are REQUIRED to provide for the comfort and benefit of the incapable, whether they like it or not, and where there's only questionable differentiation between "incapable" and "disinterested."

But returning to the communist ideal expressed above, this was an idea that Americans railed against 50 years ago, universally and violently. You couldn't get a job in this country if you were associated with any sort of communist/socialist party. Wars were waged with little more justification than being part of the "war against communism." Aversion to this idea, and belief that a person was entitled to the benefit of their labor, was fierce, to the point that the United States went to the brink of nuclear war, and contemplated ending the existence of meaningful human civilization on this planet, rather than accept the concept.

So I think it's hilarious that "from each according to ability, to each according to need" has become a central tenant of American political thought and governmental efforts. We don't use those words, of course. Even if it were politically correct to call a duck a duck, we're much more sophisticated than to use the same failed slogans while we attempt to re-enact the same failed policies.

Because that is what we're doing. Lets make the successful pay higher taxes, BECAUSE THEY CAN. It should be their obligation to support the health and welfare of the HALF OF THE POPULATION that doesn't pay taxes at all. Fuck this whole privatized industry thing: lets get the automotive industry under Federal Control. Throw some more regulation on the banking industry. Oh, and about that whole health-care thing; successful people should be barred from paying their own money for procedures. Lets make the taxpayers buy coverage for everyone. Play some games with the billing structure so we can fit 30 million additional people into the healthcare system, regardless of whether they can pay. Never mind that the former Soviet Union - where living conditions are currently nearer to downtown Mogadishu than they are to downtown Chicago - should be lesson enough for any rationally thinking political scholar to write off Marxism/Leninism as a catastrophically bad idea. Never mind that there are five entire European countries on the verge of bankruptcy (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, Spain) from following these exact policies, Barack knows better. And, after all, he is NOT a communist. Just ask him. And of course, he'd never endorse the Marxist language, which remains anathema, even as he trumpets the Marxist ideal.

Fifty years ago, the administration was willing to destroy the world to protect us from this idea. Now, the administration is enacting this ideal, pretty much regardless of whether people want it or not.

*Sigh.* We have met the enemy. And he is us.