I Really Hope My Mom Reads This

The McCain/Palin campaign has been pounding the "redistribution of wealth" message into every other sentence over the last week or so, a coded phrase indicating a communist threat. This secret message is aimed at people my mother's age, who grew from adolescence to adulthood in the age of McCarthyism, blacklists, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the domino theory.

It reminds them of the cereal-box decoder-ring theater of their childhood: Alert! The sinister communist plot for world domination did not end with the fall of the Berlin Wall; rather it moved underground, to the south side of Chicago, where community organizers and former hippie radicals now prepare to infiltrate America's highest office!

For those who fear communism as the chief foe in the global battle for the human soul, redistribution of wealth is like the seizure of grain from church-going farmers to feed party leaders and their whores. They ignore the fact that the United States' progressive income tax is, by definition, redistribution of wealth. And for some reason they fail to see Robin Hood as a collectivist traitor to the crown. To them, he's a populist hero.

Amid all this recent discussion of wealth redistribution in the presidential campaign, it is worthy to look back at the New Yorker magazine's profile of Sarah Palin from last September.

“We’re not just gonna concede to three big oil companies of this monopoly—Exxon, B.P., ConocoPhillips—and beg them to do this for Alaska,” Palin told me last month in Juneau. “We’re gonna say, ‘O.K., this is so economic that we don’t have to incentivize you to build this. In fact, this has got to be a mutually beneficial partnership here as we build it. We’re gonna lay out Alaska’s must-haves. Parameters are gonna be set, rules are gonna be laid out, a law will encompass what it is that Alaska needs to protect our sovereignty, to insure it’s jobs first for Alaskans, and in-state use of gas’ ”—her list went on. In the past, she said, “Alaska was conceding too much, and chipping away at our sovereignty. And Alaska—we’re set up, unlike other states in the union, where it’s collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs.” And she said, “Our state constitution—it lays it out for me, how I’m to conduct business with resource development here as the state C.E.O. It’s to maximize benefits for Alaskans, not an individual company, not some multinational somewhere, but for Alaskans.”

Alaska is sometimes described as America’s socialist state, because of its collective ownership of resources—an arrangement that allows permanent residents to collect a dividend on the state’s oil royalties. It has been Palin’s good fortune to govern the state at a time of record oil prices, which means record dividend checks: two thousand dollars for every Alaskan. And because high oil prices also mean staggering heating bills in such a cold place—and because it’s always good politics to give money to voters—Palin got the legislature this year to send an extra twelve hundred dollars to every Alaskan man, woman, and child.

I believe that most people would say that folks should pay their fair share, that the land, the earth, belongs to everyone, and that those who benefit most from our society's freedoms ought to bear the greater burden for society's upkeep. If that's socialism, then I guess I'm as socialist as Sarah Palin.