Anthony Teso says socialists do not propose to seize your home, your vehicle, your savings accounts, or your church

Editor’s note: Opinions expressed in this letter to the editor are those of the author alone and may not reflect the editorial position of ClarkCountyToday.com

Most residents of Clark County associate “socialism” with nationalized churches, secret police forces, and an authoritarian government regime with no accountability. That is not paranoia. That is reality, and no one should be expected to deny that factuality.

Anthony Teso

Democratic socialists acknowledge that concern much more seriously than do some of our adversaries. The problem with those systems was not that they lacked sufficient democracy. It was that none existed at all. A government apparatus that cannot be removed through elections, subject to lawsuits, publicly criticized through journalism, or denounced from the pulpits of churches is not a worker-owned government, whatever it claims to be.

Begin instead with what the term literally refers to. Democratic socialism asserts that citizens should have the opportunity to provide consent for governance beyond just voting for their local representatives. You elect a president, a governor, a county commissioner, and members of a school board. You have absolutely no ability to participate in choosing the organization that hires you most days per week. The organization sets your salary, your work schedule, and whether you have a job in twelve months. We believe it would be unusual if this were where American self-governance ended.

Clark Public Utilities is a public utility district. It has no stockholders. Clark Public Utilities’ customer/owners choose its commissioners. Rural electric cooperatives provided electricity to farm areas that investors refused to serve. Credit unions are owned by their member-depositors. Volunteer Fire Departments exemplify this idea perfectly. None of these entities are experimental models; they exist routinely in American society; they are yours; and they function.

There is more than simply policy disagreement involved for Christian readers. The Acts account depicts the community at Jerusalem as sharing resources collectively, providing support to each person according to their needs, and the New Testament does not describe this as an aberration. In Rerum Novarum Leo XIII condemned socialism by name, and honesty demands acknowledging this fact. But Rerum Novarum also states that when wages are insufficient for a working-class family to maintain themselves in modest living conditions, that constitutes injustice; that workers have a right to form organizations; and that a small number of extremely wealthy individuals have placed upon the shoulders of working-class individuals a burden that is essentially equivalent to enslavement. These are statements made by a pope in 1891 that many people in Clark County would clearly identify with.

We do not propose to seize your home, your vehicle, your savings accounts, or your church. Those are not the types of property at issue, nor have they ever been. What is at issue is much smaller and more difficult to define: who owns the factory? Who accumulates the value generated within it? Who receives representation?

An economy that places a working family just one medical diagnosis away from financial disaster while treating the institutions that they constructed and maintained as commodities over their heads does not reflect natural law principles. It is an arrangement created by humans and capable of being modified by humans.

Anthony P. Teso
Camas

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