I'm going to let you people in on a secret: The American military's support system is the very definition of socialism. Healthcare, shopping, housing, education all subsidized. You people literally use socialism to support your primary arm of anti-socialism.
this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2026
762 points (96.7% liked)
Today I Learned
28060 readers
124 users here now
What did you learn today? Share it with us!
We learn something new every day. This is a community dedicated to informing each other and helping to spread knowledge.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must begin with TIL. Linking to a source of info is optional, but highly recommended as it helps to spark discussion.
** Posts must be about an actual fact that you have learned, but it doesn't matter if you learned it today. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.**
Rule 2- Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding non-TIL posts.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-TIL posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.
If you vocally harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
For further explanation, clarification and feedback about this rule, you may follow this link.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Unless included in our Whitelist for Bots, your bot will not be allowed to participate in this community. To have your bot whitelisted, please contact the moderators for a short review.
Partnered Communities
You can view our partnered communities list by following this link. To partner with our community and be included, you are free to message the moderators or comment on a pinned post.
Community Moderation
For inquiry on becoming a moderator of this community, you may comment on the pinned post of the time, or simply shoot a message to the current moderators.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Do any of you guys know what communism or socialism really are?
This thread sounds like if they offer subsidies for goods, housing, school system and so on, then we can ignore you can only get in if they like you and they use the entire countries tax payer money to subsidize goods for themselves only. Must be socialism. We can ignore its about war.
If Socialism means collective ownership and social welfare, then where is the collective ownership in your examples? Many can't get in the US military, but pay for it.
It's like the VA of grocery stores, or like the Medicare of health insurance, or the public schools of education, or the taxpayer-funded firefighters or judiciary or police or highways or ports or bridges or hydropower dams or the forest service or national parks or public health and science and technology research or NASA
LOL at the idea that we don't do this sort of thing all over the place
MAGA will find a way fuck it all up.
During the first year of Obama's first term, with the push for the ACA, conservative pundit Bill Kristol got trapped by Jon Stewart into admitting the US government can run a first class health care program, but only for the soldiers because the rest of the public doesn't deserve it.
First class? HAH!
Granted, my anecdote is more than 20 years old, but a simple blood test almost put me out because the intern taking my blood had to try 5 times, in two veins, just to get the few ml she needed, after exploding the first vein
That can happen in privately run care, too. The point was more that a then-leading conservative admitted he doesn't actually believe that socialized health care can be of good quality, but the common people just don't deserve to have access to it.
load more comments
(4 replies)
If you want an opposite anecdote, the VA took pretty good care of my granddad, especially as he needed end of life care, so, I guess ymmv.
load more comments
(2 replies)
Honestly I haven't heard an American healthcare, active duty, va, or private that was good. Including my own experiences.
The insurance model, tons of regulatory capture, and low investment in quality or even availability makes it just kind of shit. Way too much time and money spent on avoiding helping people.
load more comments
(3 replies)
load more comments
(2 replies)
Its not just the commissary. The entire way the military works is functional communism. Housing is assigned by rank, is available to anyone currently in contract, as well as healthcare and obviously, work. Pay is rated by rank and not by position, a Physician assistant gets the same rank pay as a Lt working command staff in any other unit. There is no capitalism in the DoD at all not even under their procurement systems.
Base pay may be the same, but there are several incentive pays available for various duties. Flight pay, sea pay, jump pay, hazardous duty pay, etc.
I knew someone would point out “hazard pay”. It is not really common, but if youre gonna split hairs; what about BAQ/BAH? The pay differential isnt any more significant than shift differentials. There is a difference between flight crew and ground crew in aviation and they get different hours and pay, but the base rate is absolutely the same by rank.
load more comments
(3 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
The entire way the military works is functional communism. Housing is assigned by rank,
Uhh - that would be a 'bourgeois right', going Marx's 'Critique of the Gotha Programme'. Very much the opposite intended outcome.
load more comments
(3 replies)
Housing is assigned by rank, is available to anyone currently in contract
Not only that, but government owned housing is assigned not based on pay, rank, or whatever, but size of household. So an E-7 with no kids gets a 2 bedroom and an E-3 with three kids gets a four bedroom (depending on age/gender of the kids). So according to need.
The U.S. Military currently has a lot of problems with housing, feeding, and providing healthcare for service members. Check out USAG's hawaii barracks for example. There's a large number of lawsuits against the living conditions of family-housing. Dining Facilities that are intended and required to feed service members simply don't.
Until recently Service Members couldn't do anything if there was medical malpractice against them (and there was a LOT). And the act allowing medical malpractice suits was not retroactive, meaning everybody who served before 2020 was simply fucked.
Commissaries are (usually) genuinely good though. No complaints.
Understand that the government provided living conditions are not as good as you may be imagining.
Anyways here's my personal anecdotes to bitch about: Goodfellow AFB many years ago. Sewage was leaking into the barracks' (already shitty) Concho water pipes making it unsafe to drink and bathe. Lasted weeks. The water pipe above my room in particular was dripping onto our fridge and smelled like shit. I made a dumb fuckin gummy-bear funnel that diverted the leak into our sink because every single god damn person I asked to fix this problem said it wasn't their issue. 
and here's the barracks room I was issued at my first duty station (that's all mold): 
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(3 replies)
The military in general is like a complete socialist economy: socialized health care, home loan programs, car loan programs, banking, insurance, housing vouchers, tenant and homeowner protections, groceries at cost, retirement and pension, and to top it all off the thing itself is the country's largest jobs program.
Indeed, the military tells you which uniform to wear on a daily basis. I do not understand the soldiers who say they despise socialism, when they're in the middle of it.
what has telling someone what to wear to do with socialism?
My husband and I, who are both Enlisted, have been saying for years that the military is proof that a form of socialism CAN work in the US. It's not "true" socialism because we still have an owning class, but ffs, it's a goddamned start. And its not just Active Duty who gets taken care of. Its also dependents, veterans (to an extent), and retirees. So there is the proof that the model is scalable.
At this point, I honestly believe that the biggest reason reason the government won't let the US have free or even affordable Healthcare isn't solely because of profits. It's because they won't be able to dangle free healthcare over the heads of poor teens to get them to Enlist. Same thing with the pension for re-enlistments.
I feel like those two items are purposefully withheld from the public to keep the military stacked.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(14 replies)
Free Healthcare and and Higher education are the main reasons enlisted soldiers join the US military; both things that countries that aren't Empires offer to all their citizens.
Bud if you think US military members are the elite you are clueless.
It's amazing how having health care, housing, consistent employment, and a lot of support services also end up creating the best US school system. But the radical left is hell bent on destroying the world. \s
The largest social program in human history is the US military.
load more comments
(3 replies)
So Mamdani's idea was not even new, and took it from the military? What was all that fuss about supposedly communist run groceries?
load more comments
(4 replies)
If you think the military personnel that use a commissary are "elite", you're sadly mistaken. Vast majority are enlisted personnel that are no better off than the average blue collar types.
This is hilariously out of touch with reality.
First off, how many redneck trailer park kids joined the military because of a paltry $3,000 signing bonus? The Bush administration scraped restrictions against felons after 9/11. Who, exactly, are the "elites" that shit in a bucket you light on fire once a week? Rich kid don't join the military.
Second, that's not how commissaries work at all. It's not socialism in any way. It's hyper-capitalist if anything.
A huge amount of resources are put into name brand items being shipped across the globe to lock in brand loyalty for life. It's not free either, only duty-free. No import costs. A $4 small pack of sour patch kids or $10 frozen 4-pack of frozen Jimmy Dean breakfast includes shipping costs. Containers from the States cost $80K+ to ship, which the commissary pays for. Every commissary is a business that operates as an independent business. Except for the ones managed by huge contacts to companies.
They're non-profit only because of host country laws about profits without import duties.
load more comments
(7 replies)
Go look at what an E5 earns for pay in a month and then you'll understand why the commissary is subsidized.
load more comments
(1 replies)
And ironically, as a tax payer, I'm not allowed to shop there even though I have access to the base…
load more comments
(1 replies)
Its more than a grocery store. I knew a guy who was buying german VCRs in the late 80's and early 90's and shipping them home. The german machines didn't have the copy protection circuit in them and would make perfect copies of any tape. The machines were all bought at cost from a US base's PX.
load more comments
(2 replies)
You can see the prices here. These are sales flyers, but pretty on par with Kroger or Walmart neighborhood stores. Little more expensive than lidl though. https://shop.commissaries.com/
load more comments
(2 replies)
view more: next ›