Socialism is legalized plunder

Nate Spain in his rebuttal to a letter of mine states, “ ... he (Lonigro) makes the following curious assertion, the term progressive is newspeak for communist.’ ”

Nothing curious at all about it. The term newspeak was once a colloquial term taken from George Orwell’s “1984.” If you get “1984,” you’ll get my use of the term.

To put that argument to rest, one need only listen to radio station WCPT AM-820. It is full of socialists from top to bottom. CPT stands for Chicago Progressive Talk. Lest you accuse me of interpolating communism and socialism, Marx’s original title for “The Communist Manifesto” was “The Socialist Manifesto.”

Even back in 1848 socialism had a stench associated with it. Still does.

The main point of my original letter was that the Occupy Wall Street movement was planned from the top and not a spontaneous uprising of the downtrodden masses ... another colloquial term with which Mr. Spain may be unfamiliar. Surely you’ve read the “Communist Manifesto;” after all, you espouse its teaching as I’ll show.

Spain then gets to the thesis of his letter, “It could be that Mr. Lonigro genuinely believes that Teddy Roosevelt was a communist. I never once mentioned Teddy Roosevelt in my letter.

Spain’s socialism really shines later in his letter. He calls Medicare “the great socialist health care program.” He then calls Social Security “the great socialist safety net.”

I assume you know our country is in serious debt. Social Security receipts were put into the general fund, which is now broke, nay, in debt for $14 trillion.

We are paying current Social Security recipients with debt that will be paid by our children and grandchildren. That’s unconscionable.

Socialism has always been about legalized plunder and has nothing to do with the “downtrodden masses.”

Jeff Lonigro

St. Charles