Rhode Island: The Petri Dish of Socialism

“The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.” – Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013)

A petri dish is a pristine, transparent carrier in which scientists develop a culture, a bacterium, or a cancerous sample within a controlled environment. By allowing a monitored proliferation of growth within an antiseptic environment, scientists can discern causes and cures for potent and lethal maladies, like cancer. Socialism is a cancer, one which is eating Rhode Island from the inside out. Unlike the limited growth within a petri dish, the Democratic hypermajority's aggressive cancer has metastasized beyond the statehouse and invaded every house in the state.

The centralized control of the Democratic hypermajority, coupled with the moneyed hegemony of the public sector unions and the selective cowardice of city leaders who want to cut spending -- but not while the voters are watching -- has promoted a selective disease into an aggressive opprobrium which is turning the Ocean State into a society stricken with socialism.

Rhode Island GOP Chairman Mark Smiley acknowledges that their curative message needs improvement. By comparing property taxes in Rhode Island to the lower rates in other states, he explained the need for healing. However, the GA keeps the needy needy while enhancing their greedy grab for power at voters’ expense. Democrats and unions are turning into their own worst enemies with their pernicious avarice. What’s the point of higher taxes when no one is hiring, who can then pay those hire taxes? Assemblymember Doreen Costa lamented, and rightly so, that the Rhode Island GA would rather discuss calamari than take down the spending, the taxes, and grant people the opportunity to get good paying jobs and got of the state’s handouts.

How many Rhode Island residents suffer lack and deprivation because of a state which taxes everything that moves? Like a cancer-stricken patient languishing in hospice, small businesses are getting smaller, or leaving the state entirely. MetLife insurance has met its match with high taxes, higher spending, and the height of regulations squeezing the life out of their bottom line. General Treasurer Gina Raimondo made a deal with the diseas, and while Wall Street may rally, Forbes Magazine was riled up, with nothing but lavish denunciation for state pension "reform" which will ravaging everyone.

What have the US Senators done for their state? Jack Reed flies to Afghanistan, and Sheldon Whitehouse laments “climate change”. If any aggrieved veterans need support and care, they live in Rhode Island. If any climate needs to change, it is the tax-and-spend, regulate-frustrate atmosphere which has advanced the socialist agenda of the Democratic Party while diminishing every man, woman, and child in the Ocean State.

Socialism breeds state-sponsored dependence, a corrosive leprosy which inflicts the host with a sense of shame. Within every human being, regardless of what he says or thinks, is a healthy desire to thrive in the world without having to survive on someone else. Yet every time that a young person wants to get a better education, or an unemployed citizen seeks a job, the state inflicts him with more handouts. Unlike neighboring Connecticut and Massachusetts, Rhode Island state law has authorized recipients to receive five years’ worth of assistance, with a one-month period before the same residents can get back on the dole. No man can be free as long as he believes that he cannot do for himself. So far, the Democratic hypermajority has been content to enable dependence, like a deranged caretaker with Munchausen syndrome by proxy, who has no purpose without an ill patient to "care".

The contagion of socialism has been in remission before. Recently deceased British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was a virulent opponent of socialism. Determined to live out what she believed, the free market principles of Friedrich Hayek, she rebuked her predecessors’ acquiescence, accommodation, and cowardice. She stepped up to her Conservative party’s leadership in 1974, after their caucus endured their third loss in parliamentary elections.

For decades, the Labour Party was not working for the British people, but for the special interests: the unions. The growing majority of services in Great Britain were state-owned enterprises, which empowered public sector associations to bully Parliament, or force the nation to suffer the consequences. Inflation was rising at a record annual rate of 17%. Strikes from postal workers to grave diggers, and even trash collectors were bringing the nation to its knees. In 1979, her party ran a simple platform : “Labour isn’t working”.

Labour wasn’t working, and Thatcher won. She implemented drastic austerity policies. Unemployment rose sharply, then diminished considerably. She stood up to the unions, and won. She privatized numerous industries, then expansive job creation and homeownership quickly followed. The massive repudiation of the British People, coupled with Thatcher's resolve to protect the Falklands and the domestic economy, engaged discouraged Conservatives to voice the values of disparaged and disappointed Britons into victory.

The Rhode Island GOP, the Moderates, the Libertarians all can follow Thatcher’s example. With resolve comes engagement; with engagement victory, and the Conservatives can "clean out the petri dish" and excise the cancer of socialism from Rhode Island.