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How Socialists Built America

Socialism and pensions

Otto Von Bismarck’s “Old Age and Disability Insurance Bill, 1889” was the first worldwide national pension system, though Prussia and Saxony had these systems in the early 1840s. In deed, he is regarded as the “founder” of the modern “welfare state”. This plan was supported by German industrialists because they were losing workers to the United States because of higher wages, but the US offered no pension plans. Since he was also trying to suppress the German Social Democratic party, I would not call him a socialist. It gives the neoliberals in Europe fits, and they are passing his “welfare” program off as a Ponzi scheme.

Certainly, the US has touched by many political systems, including socialism. I don’t have a problem with Social Democratic Parties. One of my brother-in-laws in Germany is a lifelong member of the SPD and a member of the City Council in Waldorf.

However, along with Civil Rights, there has been an ongoing debate between advocates for a strong central government and those for state rights. The initial debate had Alexander Hamilton pushing for a strong industrial central state, and Thomas Jefferson’s bucolic dream of a farm-based economy.

With the demise of the Federalist Party, Jefferson’s Democratic Republican won for a time, but the experience of the Embargo Act, disputes with France and the war of 1812 with Great Britain made men like Henry Clay turn toward national unity. Like Hamilton, he would favor tariffs for industrial development and internal improvements, which at this time meant roads and waterways. This “plan” was called the “American System, Economic.” Clay and his supporters, would split from The Democratic Party to form the “Whig” Party. The Missouri Compromise and the Compromise of 1857 represented attempts to keep the “union together. Slavery, as an issue, would eventually split the “Whigs”, and the anti-slavery North would become the “Republican” Party which supported tariffs, industrialization, internal improvements and union. All of the Republican presidents from Lincoln through McKinley had their roots in the Whig Party. During the Civil War, Lincoln imposed the first income tax, a 44 percent tariff, and the transcontinental railroad (internal improvement!). Obama is no Lincoln, and Republicans were not always brainless!