What follows here is my summary and interpretation of a NYT column by Nicholas Kristof.
In many ways, our armed forces live by an astonishingly liberal ethos -- and it works. Our military helped lead the way in racial desegregation, and even today does more to provide equal opportunity to working-class families -- especially to blacks -- than any social program. It has been an escalator of social mobility in American society because it invests in soldiers and gives them skills and opportunities.
In a way that America does not, the United States armed forces knits together whites, blacks, Asians and Hispanics from diverse backgrounds, invests in their education and training, provides them with excellent health care and child care. And it does all this with minimal income gaps: A senior general earns just 10 times what a private makes, while CEOs at major companies earn more than 300 times as much as those cleaning their offices. So let's not pretend otherwise: the military ethos leans way to the left.
"It's the purest application of socialism there is," Wesley Clark, the retired four-star general and former supreme allied commander of NATO forces in Europe, has stated.
"It's a really fair system, and a lot of thought has been put into it, and people respond to it really well," he added. The country can learn from that sense of mission, he said, from that emphasis on long-term strategic thinking.
The military nurtures camaraderie in part because the military looks after its employees. It features a rare enclave of single-payer universal health care, and it follows that up with a veterans' health care system that is socialist in every sense of the word -- a system that has much lower costs, per patient served, than the American system as a whole. And patient satisfaction with the service they get is much better than it is among health care recipients as a whole.
Perhaps the most impressive achievement of the American military is not its aircraft carriers, stunning as they are. Rather, it's the military day care system for working parents.
While one of America's greatest failings is underinvestment in early childhood education (which seems to be one of the best ways to break cycles of poverty and keep it from replicating one generation after the next), the military manages to provide superb child care. The cost depends on family income and starts at a very affordable $44 per week.
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