So You Think America Isn’t Socialist?

Cool. Let me walk you through your morning.

Your alarm goes off. You check the weather, produced for free by a federal agency using satellites you paid for. You flip on the light, where the rate is set by a government commission. You flush the toilet into a public sewer. You brush your teeth with water that was tested, treated, and pumped to your house by a public utility.

You drive to work on a road you didn’t pay for, past a fire station you didn’t pay for, while your phone navigates using GPS satellites operated by the United States Space Force, free of charge, anywhere on Earth. You drop your kid at a school you didn’t pay tuition for. Some asshole runs a red light and you call 911, where a public dispatcher sends a public cop in a public car. The ambulance, if you need one, arrives the same way.

It’s 9 AM and you’ve already used more socialism than most Europeans use by lunch.

But please. Tell me again how America isn’t socialist.

The Stuff Outside Your Front Door

Roads. Highways. Bridges. Streetlights. Traffic signals. Sidewalks. Sewers. Storm drains. The water in your tap. Garbage pickup. None of it billed à la carte. All of it paid for by taxes on every working person whether they use it that day or not.

That, my friend, is the textbook definition of socialism. They literally teach it that way.

The People Who Show Up When Things Go Wrong

Cops. Firefighters. Ambulances. 911. The Coast Guard pulling your dumb ass out of the Gulf when your boat dies. The National Guard showing up after a hurricane with chainsaws and bottled water. FEMA writing checks to people who built a house on a sandbar.

No itemized bill. No thank-you card. It’s just there. Because we all pay for it. Together. Like a commune. With guns.

The Big Checks

Let’s start with the most on-the-nose one. Social Security. The word “Social” is right there in the name. They put it first. They could not have been more obvious about it if they’d named it Comrade Insurance. And it’s the most popular government program in American history. Touch it and you lose your job.

Then there’s Medicare. Medicaid. VA hospitals, which are literally British-style government-run hospitals operating inside the United States, treating 9 million veterans, and somehow Fox News has never noticed. Unemployment. Disability. Food stamps. Section 8. Pell Grants. Free school lunches.

If you’ve ever cashed a Social Security check and then complained about socialism, congratulations. You’re the meme.

The Stuff You’re Forced To Buy Whether You Like It Or Not

Workers’ comp. Car insurance. Social Security taxes out of every paycheck. Medicare taxes out of every paycheck. Property taxes funding the schools whether you have kids or not. Your kid in school until at least 16. Jury duty. Selective Service registration if you’ve got a Y chromosome.

No opt-out. No “I disagree with this so I’m not paying.” Try it. Let me know how the federal prison food is.

The Military, Which Is The Most Socialist Thing On Earth And Nobody Complains

Army. Navy. Air Force. Marines. Space Force. Coast Guard. Eleven aircraft carriers. Roughly 800 bases worldwide. Almost a trillion dollars a year. Owned collectively. Used collectively. Funded collectively.

If a Soviet planner had pitched this in 1955 we’d have called it the most ambitious public-works project in human history. We call it Tuesday.

The Schools And Libraries

Public K-12. Public universities subsidized by your state taxes. Community colleges. Public libraries where you can walk in off the street and read every book ever written, for free, including the ones about how socialism is bad.

The Bailouts (This Is The Fun Part)

This is where the tough-talking free-market guys line up at the trough and the crowd doesn’t even boo.

2008: $700 billion to the banks. The same banks that got rich blowing up the economy. Socialized losses, privatized profits.

GM and Chrysler: bailed out so we wouldn’t lose the auto industry. Then we lost it anyway. Have you seen what China is putting on the road? Electric supercars that literally jump. A $10,000 EV that runs circles around anything Detroit makes. We’re toast, and the bailout didn’t even buy us a decade.

Airlines after 9/11: $15 billion. Airlines during COVID: another $54 billion. The same airlines that charge you $35 for a carry-on, packed the seats so tight your knees press into the seatback, and put you next to a guy whose love handles have annexed your armrest, half your thigh, and the airspace above your tray table.

PPP loans during COVID: roughly $800 billion handed out and mostly forgiven. Some of those “small businesses” turned out to be congressmen, megachurches, and the Los Angeles Lakers.

Farm subsidies: every year, rain or shine, war or peace, somebody’s getting paid not to grow corn.

If your buddy Cletus tells you America isn’t socialist, ask him how Iowa’s economy works.

The Stuff You Use Every Day And Don’t Even Think About

The post office, which is in the Constitution and is required by law to deliver mail to every address in America at the same price, including the cabin in Alaska you can only reach by floatplane.

The weather forecast. Federal. Free. Every hurricane warning that ever saved a life.

The FDA, making sure your hot dog isn’t actually 30% rat. The meat inspector at the slaughterhouse. The CDC when there’s an outbreak. Air traffic control keeping 5,000 planes from running into each other in the sky over your house, every single day.

National parks. Federal courts. The patent office. The trademark office. None of it billed by the user.

The Insurance You Didn’t Know Was Insurance

Your bank account is insured by the FDIC up to $250,000. You didn’t buy that insurance. The government just handed it to you, because they figured out the hard way in 1933 that an unregulated banking system is what we in the technical fields call “a real bad time.”

Flood insurance? Federal program, because no private insurer will touch it. They tried once. They lost their shirts.

Crop insurance? Federally subsidized, about 60% of the premium. Because Cletus, see above.

The Kicker

A political scientist named Suzanne Mettler ran a survey asking Americans if they’d ever used a federal social program. Ninety-six percent of them had. A whole lot of them swore they hadn’t.

People are taking the bus to the rally where they shout that nobody should ride the bus.

So

The question isn’t whether America is socialist. We already are. We have been since at least 1933, and arguably since George Washington personally led federal troops to crush the Whiskey Rebellion using an army funded by everybody’s taxes.

The real question is which parts of the socialism you’ve decided to like, and which parts you’ve decided to call “freedom” because somebody on TV told you to.

Pick a lane. Either you’re against the roads, the cops, the firefighters, the military, Social Security, Medicare, the FDIC, FEMA, the GPS in your phone, the weather on your TV, and the public school where you learned to read the word “socialism,” or you’re not.

If you’re not, welcome to the team, comrade. The dues are already coming out of your paycheck.