By Josh Pasek
Many of us like to think that we have moved on since the 1950s when political moderates and progressives were indiscriminately “outed” as Communists and Communist Sympathizers. While it is no secret that many in the political world will use any attack that sticks, we did think that this half-century old boogie-man would haunt us no longer. Instead, however, the Republican Jewish Coalition decided to repost an article pronouncing Obama as socialism’s new Manchurian candidate [1]. What do they use as evidence? A speech to the NAACP when he used the term “economic justice.” They explain that the term is “a euphamism for socialism” [2].
The concept of Economic Justice however is no fringe idea. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains, “there is actually an important literature in economics that addresses normative issues in social and economic justice” and suggests that it is “virtually impossible to avoid mingling [economic theory] with value judgments” [3]. If this is socialism, we worry for all the economics departments out there.
