<img height="1" width="1" style="display:none" src="https://www.facebook.com/tr?id=192888919167017&amp;ev=PageView&amp;noscript=1">
Thursday, March 28, 2024
March 28, 2024

Linkedin Pinterest

Letter: Socialism has many successes

The Columbian
Published: January 28, 2014, 4:00pm

Many of us suffer misconceptions about socialism, having been conditioned to the knee-jerk linking of it with communism. We know that Communist tyrants perverted socialism to control their citizen-victims. But socialism is primarily an economic, not a political system.

In American history, socialist influences go back to the 1790s when the great patriot Thomas Paine described a social security system, a system of pensions and social welfare supports for the elderly, the infirm, children and others who might otherwise suffer in extreme poverty. Thanks to labor unions, our democracy, during the 20th Century, put this economic system to good use, often in the face of brutal resistance by the forces of capitalism. Read your labor history.

Thanks to visionary socialist thinkers and decades of union pressure, our workplace is more humane than ever. Today we have sick leave, Social Security, minimum wage, child labor laws, 40-hour work week, 8-hour work day, overtime pay, sexual harassment laws, unemployment insurance, etc.

How we treat our children, our poor, our unemployed, our veterans, and our mentally fragile tells who we are and what we value as a people.

Democratic socialism has helped us become more like the people we want to be.

Chris Langlois

VANCOUVER

We encourage readers to express their views about public issues. Letters to the editor are subject to editing for brevity and clarity. Limit letters to 200 words (100 words if endorsing or opposing a political candidate or ballot measure) and allow 30 days between submissions. Send Us a Letter
Loading...