Hat tip to Kane Fernau for this great essay:
http://newsrealblog.com/2009/11/05/if-you-give-a-socialist-mo...
If You Give a Socialist Mouse a Cookie…
November 5
by Susannah Kopecky
“Democracy is the road to socialism.” – Karl Marx

The concept of socialism and its path to communism reminds me of the story If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. In that delightful children’s story, the moral is that even if you give an inch, expect to give a mile. If you start accepting socialism, communism is just one cookie away.

For such a totalitarian system, socialism has been gaining quite a bit of street cred lately, thanks in no small part to emotional appeals toward a “moralistic” system of government-mandated “fairness”: limiting executive pay, demonizing the business class and rationing health care for the greater good.

Of course in all these instances the dreaded S word is never used. And those who advocate these policies will staunchly ridicule opponents who bring it up.

I can’t help but be amused when people define socialism as something that has to affect EVERYONE at once. In this estimation, somehow a socialist health care program isn’t really socialist until it’s renamed StalinCare.

Socialism can be defined as the precursor to communism, and a system which uses democracy and capitalism to eventually destroy the free thought-based systems themselves.

According to Princeton’s WordNet, socialism can also be defined as “a political theory advocating state ownership of industry” and “an economic system based on state ownership of capital.”

On Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report” on Tuesday, alleged “conservative” English commentator and Atlantic writer Andrew Sullivan spoke to host Stephen Colbert on the issue of health care reform.

Sullivan pointed to the push for health care reform as a way to get working health insurance for “poor people” who currently do not enjoy it. “For some reason… he’s [President Obama] actually on the verge of [succeeding in] health reform,” Sullivan said. Interestingly, Sullivan pointed to the figure of five percent, which he estimates to be the actual number of Americans who would be shuffled into a public option system. To him, five percent of Americans being forced into a government-run health care system is not enough to constitute socialism, since it’s for (you guessed it) that “greater good.”

Accepting any degree of socialism means validating an inherently flawed idea. Socialism has no defined threshold value and is the means to an end, no matter how few individuals are immediately affected. Socialism simply needs an authoritarian center of control to oversee production (bureaucrats peering over the shoulders of doctors) and a way to allocate resources to citizens.

It’s time to stop accepting the argument that just a little socialism is alright, that a little bit of evil is alright. It’s time to stop giving the Maoist mice their cookies.