Posted by aogTuesday, 24 November 2009 at 19:12 TrackBack Ping URL

Here is a funny post about ex-Governor Sarah Palin from across the pond. The title says it all —

Tracing Sarah Palin’s socialist roots

Yes, because Palin, while governor, administered the dividend distribution from the rents charged by Alaska to various natural resource extracting companies. While the author demonstrates a severe lack of understanding of commerce (such as the difference between expenses and profits), the really amusing thing is that the Alaskan redistribution is far more libertarian than socialist. After all, a key point of socialism is to accumulate control of economic activity in government hands. The distribution instead empties the government buckets of any accumulation from land rents and distributes it to citizens to use as the citizens, not their government minders, wish. A real socialist would put all that money in a fund to increase the power and control of the state, possibly to use to purchase the companies paying the rents and work up the commercial food chain. And of course, a government not dependent on taxes can experiment on its citizens far more aggressively. Isn’t that what socialism is about?