Today, I’d like to talk about socialism.

I’m almost afraid that Sen. Ted Cruz, the Canadian-born rookie senator from Texas and professional red-baiter, is soon going to accuse me of having ties to communist North Korea, as he did Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel during his senate confirmation hearings. All Hagel did to incur the wrath of Cruz was imply that the Pentagon’s budget could be trimmed a bit. (Socialist!) This is something that has been obvious to anyone with any common sense since Reagan decided to build a giant laser missile defense system in space and call it Star Wars. (Chuck Hagel, by the way, is a Republican.)

One would think that our conservative political elites — the GOP congressmen, Limbaugh-esque talk show hosts and Fox News commentators who keep the right-wing noise machine running — would have, at the very least, a rudimentary understanding of the distinctions between the multitude of American political ideologies.

Then they make the unfortunate mistake of opening up their mouths, and you realize that they wouldn’t know a socialist from Adam.

In 2009, then-House Minority Leader John Boehner deemed the president’s stimulus package to be “one big down payment on a new American socialist experiment.”

At the Conservative Political Action Conference that same year, former South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint warned that conservatives would soon need to “take to the streets to stop America’s slide into socialism.”

These gentlemen are continuing that great American tradition of displaying a remarkable level of ignorance about socialism. I’d like to take this opportunity to correct them.

First of all, forget whatever’s been coming out of the mouth of Rush Limbaugh or Michelle Malkin for the past five years. President Obama is most certainly not a socialist. He’s repeatedly cut taxes, kept our absurd amount of corporate welfare in place and taken campaign donations from nearly every big player on Wall Street. As the HBO host and comedian Bill Maher put it, “If he’s a socialist, he’s a lousy one.”

Despite the repeated assertions of House class clown Rep. Louie Gohmert and his GOP colleagues, Obamacare — which is essentially a handout to the insurance companies — is not socialism. “How much more socialist can you get than a government telling everybody what they can do, what they can’t do, how they can live?” asked Gohmert, who has distinguished himself as a congressman by accusing nearly everyone in the Obama administration and their mothers of being members of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The stimulus package and the bailouts of GM and Chrysler were not unsuccessful socialist experiments in centralized economic planning, though Boehner, DeMint and others continue to think otherwise.

Here, instead, is what socialism is.

Socialists want a government-provided, single-payer health care system — or at least a public option to compete with private insurance and further bring down costs — because they note (correctly, I might add) that Big Business doesn’t so much have the American people’s best interests in mind as they do profits. They see health care as a right, not a privilege reserved for those able to afford it, and they feel that government is compelled to provide it to its citizens.

Socialists view overly low or flat taxes as being detrimental to the economy and to society. As multiple studies have shown, the across-the-board tax cuts first implemented during the Reagan years squeezed the middle class while overwhelmingly benefitting the wealthy: at the same time, social services and transfer payments were slashed significantly. (Screw you, our tired and our poor!) I often hear the president being characterized as an ardent redistributionist. In actuality, though, it’s been the GOP who have been taking from the poor and the middle class and giving back to the rich — all while demonizing taxes and government spending as immoral and unnecessary.

And socialists are troubled by the status quo. They see government action, not inaction, as the proper response to a situation in which one in two Americans are low-income or live below the poverty line, more than 48 million are without health insurance, and nearly 20 percent of our nation’s children don’t know where their next meal is coming from.

Their proposals to remedy these problems aren’t as ridiculous or impractical as the right makes them out to be. They’re simply common sense: Assist the unemployed and allow the government to create jobs, extend and guarantee health care to every citizen and spend more on infrastructure and education to preserve our future economic viability.

This isn’t communism. It’s simply a desire to invest, not to slash — to extend a helping hand, not to pull it away.

So, if it means easing the lives of so many, I really don’t think that a little socialism is too much to ask.

Adam is a freshman in LAS. He can be reached at [email protected].