Our Founding Fathers were Socialists, So Why Aren't We?

The men who founded the United States of America were socialists.

The United States was born out of socialism. We may have been the second socialist country in modern history after Switzerland. Unlike nations ruled by monarchies, our constitution declares that "we the people" own everything our government owns: roads, buildings, arms and munitions, ships, etc. We're socialists through and through and yet the modern debate over socialism pretends we are something else.

Socialism didn't destroy Venezuela's economy. Bad management destroyed Venezuela's economy. I know the Republicans will never admit to the truth of this matter but I must stand up for it. When an autocratic President like Hugo Chavez or Nicolas Maduro decides who will benefit from government largesse, with no accountability to the elected legislature of the nation, there is no socialism.

Latin American nations have struggled with socialism and capitalism for generations. Most of them are not very good at either type of economic system. They don't experience economic booms the way the United States does. I'm sure there are many reasons why the American experiment fails in other nations. It could be as simple as we have a large nation blessed with many natural resources that most other nations lack. Large Latin American countries like Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina do well enough when they have good times but none of them match the USA for productivity and wealth. Their socialist policies aren't holding them back because we have invested more money in our own socialism than they did.

Everywhere you look you find signs of socialism in the United States: our public highways, our public schools and parks, our national parks and the strategic petroleum reserve, our federal law enforcement agencies, highway commerce regulation, federal energy programs and regulations, and more.

Conservative Americans pretend that socialism is about a government controlling every aspect of an economy but that's not true. Socialism is just the government leveraging its wealth and power for the benefit of everyone. Rich and poor alike are free to drive on any major highway, fly from one airport to another, ride boats along the rivers and coastal waterways, and even check books out of libraries thanks to our socialism.

If you spend any time reading the Constitution of the United States you can't miss the long Section 8 of Article I that gives Congress the power to spend money on just about anything it deems necessary, including creating a postal service and "post roads", a navy and army, and to regulate commerce. How do you regulate commerce between the states without hiring people and building infrastructure? The constitution charges Congress to "provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States". You can't get more socialist than that.

Legal experts have been reminding us for many years that our founding fathers, flawed slave-owning men that they were, were also socialists. In 2009 Jeremiah Lee made this case for the Jurist Website. That is 10 years ago, long before Donald Trump was an embarrassment in the White House. The framers of the constitution created a government that would care and provide for us all regardless of status or means to pay for it. The care and welfare would be paid for by such taxes as the Congress deemed necessary to raise.

In 2013 PBS ran this article which argued that our founding fathers stood against inequality. People may be quick to demand why they didn't eliminate slavery but I think the answer is obvious: they couldn't. All the framers of the constitution could do was lay the groundwork for future generations to solve society's ills. Not everyone among the founding fathers owned slaves. But they couldn't resolve that problem in their term. It took a long, horrible war to end slavery in our nation. And even today some people are held against their wills by criminals. Slavery is not as easy to abolish as some would have us think. The fight is not yet over, and we must carry on.

Socialism is not a cure for slavery or a problem for people who want to be free. Socialism is just people working together to help each other. Your local Boy Scout troop is a socialist organization because they work together to complete projects to benefit their communities. When you volunteer at an animal shelter or a hospital, you're a practicing socialist. You cannot help other people and not be a socialist. The founding fathers may have left a flawed, inhumane system of slavery to their descendants but they also bestowed upon us a government that was charged with caring for and protecting all of us from threats both foreign and domestic.

Just because a country like Venezuela mismanages its economy under the wrong leadership does not mean we must hide our heads in the sand and pretend we are not socialists. If you're proud to be an American then you're proud to be a socialist because that is what keeps the USA together. This nation was founded in socialism and it practices socialism at all levels of government.