To the editor:

My biggest pet peeve in the world of politics is that a lot of political “conservatives” constantly refer to Democrats, liberals and progressives as being “socialists” when they actually know that they are not. They are all actually “social democrats” who do not want to replace our market-based capitalist economic system with a genuinely socialist one, which, by the way, has never successfully worked in any large-scale society.

I am sure that it would bother conservatives if Democrats, liberals and progressives constantly referred to them as being “survival-of-the-fittest” social Darwinists who try to keep it a secret from the public. While some conservatives do want to abolish every single federal government social program that helps the lower and middle classes, it would be incorrect, unjust, unfair and stealthy to claim that all of them do.

To find out what a “socialist” actually does and does not believe in, please read the article titled “Bernie Sanders Isn’t A Socialist” which appeared in The New York Times. It can be found online.

The author is Paul Krugman, who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2008.

Sincerely.

Stewart B. Epstein

Rochester