Yeah, let that house in Obion Tennessee burn to the ground! We don’t need the fire department! No more socialism, no more socialism, NO MORE SOCIALISM!

I’m joking of course. If you don’t know what I’m referring to, a private home in Obion Tennessee recently burned to the ground as the fire department watched because the homeowner, Gene Cranick, hadn’t paid his $75 fee for fire protection.

One of the trendy arguments presented by the Tea Party these days is that Obama and the Left are trying to transform America into a socialist nation. Socialism is a system advocating public or common ownership and cooperative management of the means of production. The Tea Party doesn’t acknowledge that socialism already exists in America in the form of public services like the fire and police departments, Medicare, and Social Security. These services exist for the greater good of the public, not to ruin America from the inside. I hate it when a cop pulls me over for a speeding ticket, but if that same cop prevented someone from stealing my car, I would kiss him on the mouth. We need police officers to keep the peace, and I’m willing to lock mustaches to show that.

If we do away with socialism entirely, then we are left with the situation in Obion Tennessee where a man’s house burned to the ground because he hadn’t paid for his fire protection. To be correct, the situation in Tennessee was a public fire department that was choosing to provide service to a remote area, and a man opted not to pay for that service. But it illustrates what would happen if all socialist institutions were abandoned in favor of private replacements. If fire protection was privatized and each citizen had to pay for their own private fire protection, then your house could burn to the ground because a clerical error at the fire office said you hadn’t paid, because you were on vacation and your protection expired, because your trained carrier pigeon that was flying your bill to the fire department flew too low and got hit by a bus and the check never arrived.

 In Obion, the fire department sprang into action when the fire touched a neighbor’s property, a neighbor who had paid for fire protection. But what if the fire happened in a city like San Francisco where homes literally share walls? Imagine your neighbor is a lazy pothead and hasn’t paid for fire protection. One day he decides to make pot brownies in the oven. He puts the brownies in, but he forgets about them and goes to the park to meditate and ‘find himself.’ While gone, the oven sparks and catches the house on fire. However, the private fire department refuses to respond because lazy pothead neighbor doesn’t remember things like paying for fire protection. So the private fire department waits until the fire spreads to your house because you are a responsible adult and you put “pay for fire protection” on the big calendar that hangs above your bed. Only thing is, once the fire spreads to your house, it has already burned down a whole shared wall and now it’s pretty big and strong, so it actually burns half of your house before the private fire department can put it out completely. I don’t know about you guys, but sign me up! Protected homes will burn because unprotected ones do too. That sounds like an amazingly efficient system. (And that sentence sounds like sarcasm).

I’m not saying I want America to switch entirely to socialism. America was founded on the sense of ingenuity and innovation that results from competition. But it is also foolish to try to privatize everything. For instance, our private health care system is not serving the needs of most Americans. In 2007, the US spent about $7, 290 per person on health care, by far the highest amount for any developed country. In contrast, the UK spent the average amount for developed countries, $2,986. We spent over twice as much on health care as the average developed nation, and yet we don’t even break the top 20 in overall health statistics. That sounds about as efficient as privatized fire protection.

The biggest current debate over privatization is whether to privatize Social Security. It’s clear that Social Security needs to be reformed because the current system is not sustainable in the long-term. The Social Security Administration projects that by 2016 the costs of benefits will exceed tax revenues. However, privatizing is not the answer. Social Security exists for the greater good, just like the fire department. If we privatize Social Security, that basically puts peoples’ retirement money at the whim of the stock market. People who retire in a bad year for the market will essentially have to watch their home burn to the ground while the fire department does nothing. Do you want to put your retirement in the hands of Wall Street? Let me remind you, this is the same Wall Street that caused the recent financial crises and still received record bonuses. They don’t care about the common man, they laugh at the common man while sitting in a bathtub made out of solid gold. They don’t have rubber duckies that float; they have gold bars that sink. If Social Security is privatized, it won’t serve the greater good, it will put millions of dollars in brokerage and management fees into the pockets of Wall Street. For instance, private retirement accounts in the UK that started in 1988 have had management fees and marketing costs eat up an average of 43% of the return on their investments. That sounds about as efficient as privatized health care, which sounds about as efficient as privatized fire protection, which sounds about as efficient as doing laundry by constantly buying new clothes and burning the dirty ones.

 So while some people yell, “No more socialism”, I’m going to continue yelling “A fair amount of socialism to protect the general good, please!”