Democrats are not socialists

I believe that it is now a good time for the national Democrats to expose that which 2008 Nobel Prize-winner in economics, Paul Krugman, refers to as the "Dishonest Political Strategy," used by conservative-Republicans of calling some and most, if not all, Congressional Democrats names like socialists, Marxists, communists, far-leftists and radical-leftists.

In actuality, I do not believe that any of them are true socialists at all. They are social Democrats, just as most of our allies are in Canada, Australia, western Europe and Scandanavia. What Democrats really want is simply to make our country more like our allies in that their federal governments do more and spend more than ours does (in proportion to population size) on social programs in order to help their lower and middle classes to be able to pay their bills and receive good-quality health care and a decent overall quality of life.

I know that some Americans actually believe that the Democrats want to abolish our market-based capitalist economic system. I want to assure them that none of them want to do this. Democrats know that a truly socialist economy has never worked or been successful in any large-scale society. We would all have to change a great deal for socialism to work, and my guess is that it would probably take another 2,000 years from now for it to work in a country with 330 million people.

Don't fall for this right-wing propaganda. Wanting to abolish capitalism and to replace it with a genuine socialist economic system is what makes someone a socialist. If the truth were to be told and revealed, I believe that about 95% of conservative-Republicans know that the Democrats are not really socialists.

They just want to scare the American people, and that is why they keep telling this lie.

Stew Epstein, Rochester, New York

This article originally appeared on Pocono Record: Democrats are not socialists