BY SHARON MARTIN
Universal healthcare? Socialist.
Labor unions? Blood suckers that destroy the economy.
Raising the minimum wage? Kills jobs.
If you believe these things, you probably call yourself a conservative. You want fathers to earn a living while Mom stays home to raise and educate the children.
In the best socially liberal world, there is a parent at home with children, as well, but a liberal, the true social conservative, understands that a family must have access to affordable healthcare. Breadwinners must earn a living wage.
The current push to kill unions and maintain the status quo on healthcare and the minimum wage just doesn’t jive with rightwing wails about the decline of the American family. Why do the people who preach family values work so hard to destroy the economic base on which a family depends?
Unions, like this democratic republic, were built on blood and labor. Workers and policemen died at Haymarket Square. Women died at the Triangle Shirt Factory. Miners still die deep in the earth to feed their families and make mine owners rich. Unemployed manufacturing workers struggle for want of what a good union provides – decent working conditions, a living wage, 40-hour week with overtime pay when the job demands it.
When adults work minimum wage jobs just to float below the poverty level, there is no money for a family. Perversely, social conservatives want to ban cheap contraceptives and shut down Planned Parenthood. And if your multiple 20-hour-week jobs don’t feed you, go to the church for a handout; it’s not the government’s job to feed you.
Tax revenue is reserved for job creators.
Don’t expect to be covered when you get laid off your job or get sick. And none of that socialism that says everyone gets an education or has access to preventive healthcare!
Baffling, isn’t it, this lack of logic?
Social justice isn’t evil. It isn’t even socialism; it’s good sense. You can’t build an economy by starving workers, limiting access to quality healthcare, or rationing education. Workers can’t raise healthy families when parents work for slave wages just to keep a roof over their heads and industrial food in their children’s bellies.
It’s time for a revolution. The true social conservatives must rise up and demand decent wages and safe working conditions. They must picket for universal healthcare and universal education. Our country’s economy and conservative family values are on the line.
– Sharon Martin lives in Oilton, OK and is a regular contributor to The Oklahoma Observer
Conservative is a wide range; to use it to describe only Tea Party idiots is intellectually dishonest. I distinguish liberals, socialists and communists – among others – as very different groups. You are a sharp mind; please make the same distinctions.
Mr. Roberson, with all due respect sir, Sharon Martin speaks the gospel and represents the views of the millions of liberal’s who are weary of hearing from the right, as well as the far right, that all Democrats are socialist commie b**tards. Liberals live with the vitriol of the conservative right, on a daily basis, through the mouthpiece of Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum and Michele Bachmann. If you wish to find intellectual dishonesty, you need look no further than the wealthy loving, union bashing, misogynistic, science denying, intellectually dishonest, racist policies of the conservative right, Either way, Ms. Martin is correct.
I enjoyed reading Ms. Martin’s essay very much.
It should be noted perhaps, that we tried Free-Market Economic theory (Classical Economic theory) from the late 1700s to the 1860s. We can look at the empirical evidence — the results if you will — of the Free-Market approach and what we find is large masses of poor and a very small middle class and even smaller ruling class all across Western Europe and the United States.
Failing to learn the mistakes of our own past, if the political pressure results in policies that lead us further and further into the Free-Market economic approach then we should not be surprised to learn that doing the same thing over and over again leads only to repeated failure.