Why I regard my socialist heart as a moral imperative

The world is a complex place, and I always feel easily belittled when talking about its matters. The world is complex, and what follows is a very simplistic approach to things, but it can be surely excused, because the view of this matter as it lives in my head is, after all, very simple.

This is not really about politics, but about the welfare state and some of the comments I occasionally hear or read regarding social expenditure and incremental taxes. Comments in the line of not wanting to pay for others’ benefits, since one’s surely worked their ass out to earn everything they have now, much more than all the lazy people that exist in the world.

I always feel tempted to take out the machine gun and shoot some questions around: think about all the efforts you’ve made to arrive to where you are now, and answer: was being born in a developed country earned by you in any way? Or being born in a family that could provide food and shelter and hopefully love every day of your life? Your family not needing that you would start working at the age of 14? The intelligence that allowed you to make it through college? The money in your family or from other citizens’ pockets that allowed you to do so? The lack of serious health problems that came to disrupt your life, or the magical medicine that saved you from them?

I always feel tempted to take out such machine gun, but I never do: if last night, while making this reasoning to a like-minded friend, my voice almost broke, I can see how things could go very wrong when talking to somebody who doesn’t realize that, for every big effort and hell-like situation they went through in their life, the world had a bigger gift in place for them.

In a couple months I’ll be starting a new job that’s going to pay me well, part of which will be taxated at the highest rate. A small chunk of me wants not to like that, but a bigger part prefers to learn to regard it as a honor and a privilege. A privilege because arriving to such position means that I’ve been immensely lucky and covered with gifts in my life. A honor because it means I could be contributing to a system where people without private medical insurance get the most expensive of treatments without a blink, or get put through college without strangling their following years. It’s only too bad I don’t find it in me (yet) to get rid of half my earnings right away.

Doubt is a constant in my life, in the sense that I constantly challenge the way I act in my daily doings and strive to do better. It is a pure joy, then, and a big gift, that at least some beliefs are in place and set in stone, to act as foundations and not subject to challenge.