The official name of the former East Germany was the German Democratic Republic, but we’re not running in horror from democracy. We know that wasn’t what a democracy is really about. There’s another label that’s being misused these days, that is, socialism. It’s a scare word because those nasty old commies called their "evil empire" the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and blathered constantly about how well "socialism" was working there. Well, it wasn’t really socialism – it was feudalism, pure and simple, managed by a totalitarian government, and it didn’t work well at all.
There can be reasonable differences of opinion as to what government should and should not do for us. If a democracy – the real thing – operates properly, we govern ourselves through our elected representatives. We pay taxes, and those taxes are used to provide for the general well-being of our people. We decide what that includes, sometimes after loud and rancorous debate.
Sometimes the issue of the proper role of government gets lost. We build walls, not bridges.
Truth is, some decisions made by government bureaucrats are disastrous, and so are some decisions made by major corporations. Fed-Ex and UPS are fine services, but sometimes they make major blunders, and neither one of them can deliver a letter across the country in a couple of days for forty four cents.
The point is, we shouldn’t avoid serious decision making by using scare labels. The "socialist" label could easily be applied to the United States Postal Service, to public education, to public highways and public transportation, to Medicare and Social Security, public parks, and to dozens of other operations of the federal as well as state and local governments.
An individual, a society, or a nation must continually learn, mature, and adapt. In our days, changes are going to take place, in our healthcare, our financial systems, our manufacturing sector, our law enforcement and corrections, our public transportation, our energy policies, i.e., throughout our society. Please, let’s not be panicked by the idea that some change we contemplate can be labeled socialist by someone who doesn’t happen to like it. It wouldn’t be the American way to react with ANTI-social hostility to anything new.