Socialist who? Big government not such a bad idea

"Socialist," "pinko commie," even "Adolf Hitler" are all terms being used to describe Barack Obama by thousands of protesters in Washington this week. These protesters come from all over the country to express their discontent with the idea of "big government." The only problem is that these people assembled probably don't know what big government actually entails. This confusion arises from the fact that as American children, we were taught that big government is equal to socialist nations like the U.S.S.R. or far-right authoritarian regimes like Hitler's Third Reich in Germany, both of which probably top the list of the most hated governments in history. But many of us are ignorant as to how big government has helped our country in the past and of how too little government has almost ensured the fragmentation, even downfall, of the United States.

People raised in America during the 20th century carry certain prejudices that were created during the Cold War era. These prejudices taught that Marxism and anyone associated with it - socialists, communists or anyone that seemed to be on the political left - were the arch-enemies of America and the greatest threat to American ideals. Included in this generalization was the concept of big government, which became synonymous with socialism.

But Americans lose their memories very quickly, forgetting that just 20 years before Joseph McCarthy's communist witch hunts in the '50s, the U.S. government carried more power than ever before - and that power was still being employed throughout the '50s. The '30s saw one of the most well-known rises of big government in American history as Franklin Delano Roosevelt became president and instituted the reforms of the New Deal.

These programs and the enormous amount of power that the president wielded over the country during World War II allowed the United States to come out of the '40s fully recovered from the Great Depression, with a booming economy to match. Eventually ,government power began to scale back little by little, but some institutions like Medicare, Medicaid, social security and government-subsidized welfare continue to this day.

Eventually the one government cutback that resulted in the recent financial crisis happened during the presidency of Bill Clinton. In the 1990s, chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan began to allow holding banks, which were only allowed to loan out money and hold money accounts for clients, to own investment bank affiliates. These affiliates are banks that are allowed to invest their clients' money in the stock market. He also raised the amount of assets that could be underwritten in securities to 25 percent instead of the previous 10 percent.

The Clinton administration also saw the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which was implemented in 1933. The act put huge restrictions on banks stating that commercial banks could not underwrite stocks or bonds and established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. In 1956 the Bank Holding Company Act, a corollary to the Glass-Steagall Act, was passed that put further restrictions on holding banks stating that they could not engage in any non-banking activity and were not allowed to own banks in other states. Both of these acts were deemed obsolete and repealed in the '90s by the Clinton administration and a Democratic Congress. The repeal of these acts effectively ended regulation of banks and allowed them to do whatever they pleased with investors' money - something that would not have happened if the Glass-Steagall and Bank Holding Company acts were not repealed by a Democratic government that favored the concept of small government over big government.

So now when we begin to say that Obama is the next Stalin or Hitler and when we shout in the streets that the United States is going to turn into a socialist nation like the U.S.S.R., remember that big government saved the United States as recently as the mid-20th century and that the repeal of regulatory policies by previous administrations in the '90s caused the current crisis.