The Pledge of Allegiance

It's creepy, says Alex Tabarrok. He quotes Cato's Gene Healy:

From its inception, in 1892, the Pledge has been a slavish ritual of devotion to the state, wholly inappropriate for a free people. It was written by Francis Bellamy, a Christian Socialist pushed out of his post as a Baptist minister for delivering pulpit-pounding sermons on such topics as "Jesus the Socialist." Bellamy was devoted to the ideas of his more-famous cousin Edward Bellamy, author of the 1888 utopian novel Looking Backward. Looking Backward describes the future United States as a regimented worker's paradise where everyone has equal incomes, and men are drafted into the country's "industrial army" at the age of 21, serving in the jobs assigned them by the state...Bellamy's book inspired a movement of "Nationalist Clubs," whose members campaigned for a government takeover of the economy. A few years before he wrote the Pledge of Allegiance, Francis Bellamy became a founding member of Boston's first Nationalist Club....

While I am sympathetic to the argument that the pledge is somewhat creepily about placing the state before yourself, I don't think that's going to persuade many people. After all, a lot of John McCain's campaign rhetoric is about placing the state before yourself. Furthermore, the argument Gene and Alex make is a poor one.

They essentially seem to be saying the pledge is guilty by association:

• Socialism is bad.
• The pledge was written by a Socialist.
• Therefore, the pledge is bad.

By this standard, The Jungle and 1984 are also creepy because both Upton Sinclair and George Orwell were socialists. (True, Orwell isn't the same type of socialist Bellamy seemed to be and the final few chapters of The Jungle are hilarious/horrifying knowing what we know now.)

The picture Alex uses - showing that the original way to the salute the flag is the same salute the Nazis ended up using - is even sillier. Insinuating that the pledge is fascist because it had the same salute as the Nazis is a very Jonah Goldberg-esque argument.