Sloppy thinking, resulting in sloppy speech and muddled ideas, pervades the right’s attempts to communicate clearly.  The sloppiness of our conservative commentariat has resulted in severe damage to our side in the battle of ideas being fought in the ongoing war for our culture.

An example: for years, even legendary communicator Rush Limbaugh and others allowed the left to get by with conflating terms like “immigration” and “illegal immigration”, and I would find myself shouting at the radio as we on the Right were smeared as haters, bigots, and anti-immigrant hypernationalists.  Only in very recent times has our side finally clarified the difference and refuted the labels, but the damage is done.

The same sort of thing has happened with the use of the term “socialism.”  That word is bandied about with little regard for its true meaning.  Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are socialists, it is said, as they push the Green New Deal.  The entire Left is sidling up to socialism and turning away from capitalism, appealing to a base of youth victimized by the failure to educate and by the success of leftist indoctrination.  The word is intentionally left fuzzy and ill-defined in order to cause confusion.

“This will never be a Socialist nation”, thunders President Trump, to great applause and cheers, including my own.  However, I can’t help but wonder if we know the enemy, what they represent, and what the actual issues are.  Is “socialism” truly the most imminent threat to our great American culture? 

As an employer struggling to keep a healthy business running in the People’s Republik of Kalifornia, we are forced to deal with this question every day and on multiple fronts.  Is it “socialism” that is strangling us?  Or something else?

What is socialism? Merriam Webster defines it as a “political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.”  That sort of fits what happens to us in this Advanced State of Destruction called Kalifornia, but not perfectly.  There has been a gradual movement away from free market capitalism, to cook us slowly, like the frog in the pot of hot water, but what is replacing it?

How about Fascism: “a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control.”  Absolutely true of this state, and more than you’d care to admit even in Trump-supporting flyover states.

Authoritarianism? “Favoring a concentration of power in a leader or an elite not constitutionally responsible to the people.”  Bingo!  Whether in Sacramento or in Washington D.C., Bureaucratic Dictatorship spews forth regulations that not even President Trump or our strongest conservative advocates can keep up with.  “Authoritarian” describes it best, and maybe we are blessed with all three in combination.

When we started our independent supermarket in 1975, our worst issues were with county regulations and Caltrans highway requirements.  We thought they were barely tolerable then, but if we had 20-20 foresight 40 years into the future, we wouldn’t have believed what was coming.

Relationships with our employees are micromanaged to the max so that we are barely able to hire them and develop their productive capabilities without violating some proscription of labor law.  All the levers of aggrieved recourse are handed to them, and employers are guilty until or unless we can afford lawyers to prove ourselves innocent.  We are victims of EEOC, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), the state Fair Employment and Housing agency, and many other agencies manned (oops, is that word allowed?) by well-dressed, arrogant “youngsters” barely out of college (Indoctrination Central) who have never had to run a business but have the power and weight of the government behind them.  And these people pretend to tell us how to run our business!

The Women’s, Infants, and Children (WIC) police and the food stamp (EBT) police tell us what we can sell, and for how much.  We and our staffers aren’t allowed to react at the fundamental wrong of people spending benefits they receive for doing nothing, at risk of a complaint of discrimination filed against us.  Soon we will be told that those with gender dysphoria will be a protected class and we will be forced by law to hire them or else.

Even the last, and potentially warmest interaction with our customers has been disrupted by laws requiring reusable bags for which you must charge a fee.  Many customers hate that and refuse any bags, walking out the door with a cart of groceries, leaving the less-than-honest to mingle with them and walk out with carts of “freebies”.  As a result, security costs have risen as we must be more vigilant.

Our resources are confiscated in taxes, fees, and minimum wages along with associated employment taxes, liabilities, and costly exposures to enforcement actions.  Even more are taken through the hidden costs of goods.  The mega-monster state and local governments just take and take and take from us, returning very little, but telling us how to live and work.  Worse, we are virtually powerless to fight back at the ballot box as our rulers have created a huge dependent class beholden to them, guaranteeing their hold on power.

Is this socialism?  Fascism?  Authoritarianism?  Whatever it is, it isn’t good, and while you can write it off as wacko Kalifornia, which it is, just remember that we are a bellwether of what inevitably spreads across the country, sooner or later. And if you look closely at your own state, even if it’s Texas or Oklahoma or Nebraska, you will find much evidence of this march to free-market oblivion in your own backyard.

At the very least, we must define the issues clearly and deal with the realities we face.  And if not too late already, we must not allow the leftist agenda to succeed under clouds of obfuscation and deceit.