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Letter: Collective action is not the same thing as socialism

Editor:

“Climate change agenda amounts to socialism” (Reading Eagle, Sept. 22) says that people concerned with global warming are Chicken Littles rushing toward “socialism” to save the planet.

Control carbon emissions? Not if it means that my country, state, county or neighborhood will suffer economic loss — never mind the economic promise that comes from addressing carbon emissions, and never mind that failure to address them easily entails the collapse of our entire planet.

Chicken Little here: We are doomed because so many want to put personal or local choice above collective action in response to threats that are evidently collective.

Similarly, we learn in the Sept. 21 Eagle that Republicans in the state House say that decisions about masking and vaccines should be local, not statewide (“GOP: Let locals make decisions on health”). I guess we should never mind that a virus has no clue about where one local entity stops and another begins, and never mind that as a result controlling the pandemic becomes near impossible. The whole nation wants the same localized response, and the result is spike after spike of the pandemic.

Unfortunately in current political discourse, talk of collective action becomes evidence for a socialist conspiracy to infringe on our liberties. The result is that our responses to both crises become fragmented into independent local actions with absolutely no coordination or thought for the well-being of the whole.

Collective action is not socialism. It’s common sense.

Alberto Cacicedo
Reading


Source: Berkshire mont

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