Politics & Other Mistakes: LePage’s *%+# up

6 mins read
Al Diamon

I thought I was reasonably familiar with most of the dirty words in the English language. Apparently not, because I never knew “socialization” and “socializing” were among them. Now, thanks to the Maine State Chamber of Commerce and Gov. Paul LePage, my trove of swear words has been expanded to include these swell new additions.

Some examples:

“We are opposed to the socialization of [unemployment insurance] costs across our system,” chamber lobbyist Peter Gore told a legislative committee back in March.

I assume those in attendance covered their ears.

More recently, LePage sent a letter to business leaders, plagiarizing a good deal of Gore’s testimony. “Employers who have the highest use of unemployment in their slow season are already socializing their costs across the system,” the governor wrote.

LePage can go socialize himself.

According to numerous dictionaries I consulted, socialization is a noun and socializing is a verb that mean either “the activity of mixing socially with others” or “the process of learning to behave in a way that is acceptable to society.”

That second definition has long eluded the governor.

It’s possible LePage and Gore are confusing these previously non-obscene terms with “socialism,” which is the political philosophy that Bernie Sanders espouses, whereby the government takes all your money and gives you free health care and food stamps.

Oddly enough, a careful examination of the issue that has so incensed the chamber and the governor reveals no trace of socialism. Or, for that matter, socialization. According to the Portland Press Herald, earlier this year, the Legislature passed a bill allowing some workers who are laid off on a seasonal basis to avoid the requirement they search for other jobs as a condition of receiving unemployment compensation. This provision covers them for just six weeks and only for workers whose employers have set a definite date for their return to their jobs within 12 weeks.

The reason for this measure, sponsored by Republican state Sen. Amy Volk of Scarborough, is that industries such as logging and construction, which routinely experience weather-related interruptions in their work schedules caused by stuff like mud season, are sometimes forced to institute temporary layoffs. Under the old law, employers were required to enter red-tape hell by applying to the state Department of Labor (motto: Just have a seat in that pit of boiling lava, and someone will be with you in an eternity) for a waiver of the work-search requirement. The new law will allow them to skip that painful process and makes it easier for them to retain employees during short-term layoffs. Given the state’s historically low unemployment rate and tight labor market, that’s a plus.

The legal change also frees workers from engaging in the elaborate charade of pretending to be looking for new jobs, when they have no intention of changing their employment. “It is just an exercise they had to go through,” Volk told the Press Herald. “They are not switching employers. These are truly temporary layoffs, and they are going back to the exact same employer you were working for the month before.”

One more thing: The law automatically expires in 2021 unless the Legislature renews it. So, if the economic situation is different then, or this measure doesn’t work as planned, the state won’t be stuck with it.

Naturally, this being a sensible bill, LePage vetoed it. Because: unchaperoned socializing.

The Legislature overrode the veto handily (only four senators and representatives out of 186 sided with the governor).

Also naturally, LePage did not accept this defeat gracefully. Instead, he sent letters to 45,000 businesses calling on the owners to confront their legislators for pushing a “socializing” agenda. It’s possible the governor, never one to let facts get in the way of a good tantrum, believes the law requires providing the unemployed with picnics, movie nights and dinner-dances.

“You and I know that unemployment is insurance, not an entitlement,” he wrote. “It is a safety net – not a means of subsidizing one industry’s or one employer’s payroll on the backs of all other employers.”

It’s worth pointing out that the law does that in much the same way it encourages socializing, which is to say not at all. But as with a sizable percentage of LePage’s rhetoric, his letter is most likely to be filed in your local library’s fiction section.

I swear that’s true (more or less). If you don’t believe it, you can socialize off.

Wash my mouth out with soap, metaphorically speaking, by emailing aldiamon@herniahill.net.

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4 Comments

  1. Just a linguistic note: Webster’s gives this as one meaning of “socialize”: “to constitute on a socialistic basis.” For instance, when Medicare was first proposed, some people criticized it as the first step toward “socialized medicine.” (It wasn’t; the government still doesn’t own the hospitals; but I also knew one actual socialist who advocated Medicare for exactly the same reason, using the same word.) I don’t think anyone complained that the word “socialized” was being misused.

  2. Well, the remarks on socialism could drive me to go on for a few thousand words at least. But I will spare the readers my many observations. Here are a few though. I had a dog who died four years ago. He had to be SOCIALISED for 13 months by a foster family in Missouri because she was feral and, likely, feral her whole life.
    The terms “social” and “socialized” are so utterly sloppy and used in so many many contexts it doesn’t mean much of anything now. Almost like the popular terms “racism” and “racist”
    Nobel Prize winning economist Friedrick Hayek said he’d spent his life trying to find out what “Social Justice” means. He confessed he’d not figured it out.
    A socialist state need not own the means of production, as one definition holds. It is sufficient to control the means of production for a socialist state. It is not necessary to own the hospitals to have a socialist medicine. Our public school system in the US might be said to be “socialist”
    “Socialism” is a genus term. There are many species of it like there are many flavors of ice cream.
    When a state is socialist enough, history shows they fail.
    The Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts was initially “socialist and it didn’t work well at all that the Governor, (was it Winthrop ?) changed it to private property to save the colony.

  3. Al most be experiencing a low energy day. We are way past the point where it makes sense to impose semantic precision on the use of social or any of its derivatives, compounds, cognates, and corruptions. I’ve read the same passage in Hayek’s Fatal Delusion as Bill—a whole page of puzzling and pointless compounds.

    I’m not implying hangover. I’m only suggesting low energy—that could be anything.

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