What is Democratic Socialism?

Socialism is an arrangement where a resource that serves a society, such as roads, sidewalks, parks, police, libraries, air traffic control, or the armed forces, belongs to that entire society.  

Some countries, like North Korea, carry socialism to a totalitarian extreme and completely ban all private property altogether.  The name for that is communism. It failed in the U.S.S.R. and it wouldn’t work here in the U.S.A. because we value individual initiative and we believe that everyone deserves to enjoy the rewards of hard work.

Democratic socialism is different from communism. Democracies like Canada, England, France, Denmark, Israel,  still allow capitalism and private industry to flourish, while supporting a few more socialist programs than the U.S.  Instead of providing health insurance only for people over 65, they provide it for everyone in the country, from cradle to grave, as a right, along with prenatal care before babies are even born. Instead of providing free public education for children from kindergarten through high school, they provide if from preschool through college, and they pay parents to stay home with their babies who are too young for preschool.

We already have a few socialist sectors in our economy, and we always have. The city of Milwaukee, where I live, thrived for decades under socialist mayors. Every modern country has some degree of socialism, or we would have total anarchy, and life would be impossible. We can’t all own private water mains and hook and ladder trucks, so if you smell smoke, you call the municipal fire department, which is financed by local property taxes. If you have a job of your own, you can’t stay home with all your children and teach them all the academic subjects they need, so you send them to schools financed by local property taxes where specialists can teach them. If your ship sinks off the shore, you call the U.S. Coast Guard, which is financed by federal income taxes.  Every major country in the world has a mix of socialism and capitalism. Even China and other communist countries now allow some  capitalist enterprise. 

Democratic socialists don’t want to eliminate capitalism in the United States or take over anyone’s business. They simply want to reduce the obscene income inequality that has grown over the past 36 years by giving middle class and working class families a better chance in life and making the millionaires and billionaires pay their fair share of taxes.