Here's a Facebook post written by David Gerrold, a brilliant writer (and also a liberal Democrat). I asked him if I could have permission to re-post this and he said yes. We’re Facebook friends. I’ve never met him in person, but we’ve known each other for 20+ years, going back to when we were both members of the Compuserve Writers’ Forum in the 1990s, more about which later.
The text in the blockquote box below the fleur-de-Kos is copyright 2012 (c) David Gerrold, all rights reserved. Reprinted and posted here with his permission. I sent him an email asking and getting his permission to post it here.
BTW, David Gerrold is the guy who wrote the (original) Star Trek episode called “The Trouble with Tribbles” and he wrote the series of Science Fiction (SF) books about The War Against the Chtorr, in which aliens from another planet don’t just invade Earth, they change the whole fucking ecosystem. Highly recommended if you like SF.
Here is David Gerrold’s recent (several weeks ago) Facebook post on the topic of socialism:
Recently, an acquaintance -- there must be another word for a person who you listen to politely, even though he's really a jerk -- told me that he could never vote for President Obama because Obama will impose socialism on America.
Um, no.
First, let's understand what socialism is. It's not what you think it is. It's not communism. It was convenient in the 30's to confabulate socialism and communism as equal political ideologies. They're not.
Communism is about the state owning and controlling the production and distribution of goods and wages. Communism doesn't work except perhaps in very small communities and only where it's 100% voluntary. Otherwise it requires a tyranny. We have the evidence of the Soviet Union to demonstrate that. We have the evidence of the People's Republic of China (which once having discovered the fun of capitalism began a massive restructuring of its economy). We have the evidence of North Korea, a pathetic dictatorship. Communism doesn't work.
Socialism is a whole other animal. It's about your membership in a group -- you benefit from your membership, you have an obligation to pay for those benefits. On a national scale, you benefit from the services the government provides -- roads, dams, bridges, libraries, schools, street lighting, police protection, fire protection, national defense, food and drug safety, a comprehensive legal system, safety regulations for various industries, unemployment insurance, affordable health care coverage, environmental protection, and so on. Because you benefit from those services, you have a corresponding obligation to pay your fair share. Few people object to paying their fair share, although in recent years some people have fixated on the idea that taxation is theft and that we would be better off with no government at all. Oh, really? (If you really really believe that, move to Somalia where they have no real government. Let us know how that works out for you.)
Do you have car insurance? Most drivers do. That's socialism for profit. The insurance company is betting that you won't have an accident, you're betting that you will. Most of the time they win the bet and keep your money. Once in a while, they lose that bet and give you money. The money they pay you for the accident is usually a lot more than you paid in insurance coverage. That money comes out of the general fund that all the insured pay into. When you don't have an accident, your premiums go into the company's general fund to cover the accidents that other people are having. That's socialism. Everybody pays a little so that benefits are available to everybody whether you use them or not. It's a cost-effective way to protect everyone's ability to keep functioning in society.
The same is true for health care insurance or even government-run unemployment insurance. Everybody pays a little so that those in need can benefit. And if you've ever been in need...you're grateful for having that insurance.
The difference between socialism and insurance is that insurance is socialism-for-profit. Socialism-for-profit adds as much a forty percent to the overhead of running the company, because the shareholders want a return on their investment. This is one reason why health care costs have ballooned in America. Meanwhile, the overhead for Medicare is only four percent -- because it doesn't have to show a profit, it only has to provide a service.
I'm not against profits. Believe me, I am NOT against making a profit. I enjoy making a profit. Most people do. But a blind, knee-jerk opposition to some misunderstood conception of socialism is politically illiterate. Would you rather pay $500 a month for health care insurance to a for-profit company? Or would you rather pay $50 a month to a national fund that guarantees the same or better services?
A for-profit health insurer has real death panels. No kidding. They don't call them that, but if the accountants decide that your coverage isn't cost-effective to their bottom line, you're out of luck. A national service will not have someone judging whether or not your treatment is in the best interests of the stockholders.
The Socialist movement in America gave us public schools, an end to child labor, a forty -hour work week, weekends(!), and other ideas that ultimately benefited the working class and made it easier for people below the poverty line to pull themselves up. Socialism is not some near-communist boogeyman. It's a political mechanism for providing services to the nation's working class. It stems from the idea that the government is a tool for providing services to the people.
Socialism is not and should not be a dirty word. Neither is liberal a dirty word. Liberals gave us Social Security, NASA, the internet, and ... if you check back far enough, the Constitution of the United States. Go back to 1776 and you'll find that the founding fathers were liberals. The conservatives of that era were Tories -- they wanted to stay subservient to Mad King George III. There's a lesson there....
Note: Copyright 2012 (c) David Gerrold, all rights reserved. Reprinted and posted here with permission.
Here’s some background about him and me:
The CompuServe Writers’ Forum
Before the internet took off (we're talking 1980s or 1990s here), you could connect with a telephone modem over land lines to CompuServe at 300 baud, 1200 baud, and eventually up to 56K baud. The cost was something like $12 per hour. At the time I was an editor at COMPUTE! Publications where I was the assistant editor for about five years of the Commodore (VIC-20, Commodore 64, C-128) magazine called COMPUTE!’s Gazette. I also participated in local message boards. Later I was a technical writer at Microsoft.
I wrote about 100 or 200 articles for COMPUTE! and edited several thousand articles. My greatest accomplishment, however, (in my own opinion) was writing a program called “Campaign Manager,” an election simulation, written in 6502 assembly language for the Commodore 64. When I programmed that game, the Apple Macintosh was brand new, so the user interface for the game I wrote was all point-and-click (using a joystick). I tried to make the Commodore 64 act like a Macintosh. It was a pretty good game. We got letters from schoolteachers all over saying they were using it in their classrooms. If anyone's interested, I'll tell you about how to write an election simulation game.
I was an enthusiastic and prolific poster/member of the CompuServe Writer’s Forum. which was (theoretically) limited to professional writers. But, in general, if you claimed to be a writer, you could get in. You just had to ask. And when I was there, I met David Gerrold (famous science fiction writer) and J. Michael Straczinski (who created the TV show “Babylon 5”) and Diana Gabaldon (author of the wildly popular “Outlander” books (my name was listed in the "thanks" page of the second book)). I knew her before she was famous. Plus, a very smart Associated Press writer from New Orleans, plus several poets (including Judson Jerome, who edited the book “Poet’s Market” for many years and often warned would-be poets against contests where you had to pay money to get in and if you paid, you'd get published, in mouse type on toilet-paper-thin paper).
The Writers’ Forum was a very friendly place to meet other writers. At $12/hour. And do you know the secret to becoming a writer? "Writers write." That's the whole secret. They don't take classes (about how to write) or read books (about how to write). Writers write.
So that’s the story about meeting David Gerrold (virtually) on CompuServe. I did meet Diana Gabaldon in person in Las Vegas once (after her first book, "Outlander" was published), but that’s another story. And when Jud Jerome, the poet, died, a group of us CompuServe people went to Yellow Springs, Ohio, for the funeral (Jerome was a professor at Antioch College in YS). We Compuserve buddies met each other in person, which was wonderful and weird.
Another Famous SF Writer
...who worked at COMPUTE! Publications... who I saw every day for several years: Orson Scott Card. He was a book editor. I was a magazine editor. So we didn't interact a lot. He's famous for two things: 1) Card won both the Nebula and the Hugo awards for best SF novel two years in a row. I don't think anyone else has won both awards two years in a row. 2) He's also a major Mormon voice against same-sex marriage. Very right wing and hateful. He and I talked once about writing a computer program for SF writers to model a planet with two suns or tidal influences or tectonic influences or whatever. But now I have nothing but contempt for him. You make your bed, you sleep in it.