Tag Archives: Socialism

Welcome To The Socialist Paradise Of California, by Michael Snyder

Posted on May 11, 2021 | Leave a comment

The People’s Republic of California is not quite the egalitarian utopia of which the socialists dream. From Michael Snyder at themostimportantnews.com:

If you like extremely high taxes, a ridiculously inflated cost of living, horrifying bureaucratic nightmares, rising crime rates, endless homeless encampments and “health restrictions” that make it nearly impossible to operate a small business successfully, then you are going to absolutely love California.  Vast hordes of people have fled the state over the past 12 months, and so that means that there is now plenty of room for more socialists to move in.  But before you come, you will want to make sure that you have completely discarded any lingering notions of “freedom” and “liberty” because they won’t be of any use to you once you arrive in California.

Over the past few years, California has gotten a bad rap for being an absolutely filthy place, but the truth is that authorities are going to great lengths to try to clean things up.

In fact, they just removed 180 pounds of feces from one homeless encampment alone…

This week, Echo Lake Park in Los Angeles California, the location of a former homeless encampment, received a much needed, and long overdue, deep cleaning.

The park was closed last month and since then, city officials have been working to clean and revitalize the park and have reportedly removed over 170 tents and other debris, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Among the 35 tons or 70,000 pounds of garbage, there were literal piles of poop, amounting to 180 pounds of feces and 564 pounds of urine according data from L.A. Sanitation & Environment workers. This did not include excrement collected from portable or permanent restrooms. Other hazardous waste like needles used for drugs, gasoline, and kerosene amounted to 300 pounds of the total trash collected, the LA Times noted.

Critics of California often focus on the worst parts of the state, and that is very unfortunate.

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Bus Driver Economics, by Jeff Thomas

Posted on April 5, 2021 | Leave a comment

To turn one job into two jobs, split it in half and have each worker work half-time. Welcome to socialist economics. From Jeff Thomas at internationalman.com:

 

Bus Driver Economics
 

Economics should not be an especially difficult subject to understand. In essence, it’s simply the study of how money functions. However, academics, theoreticians, politicians, and financial leaders all stand to benefit if they can manage to complicate the basic principles and muddy the waters of economic comprehension.

No individual has been manifestly more successful at this than the economist John Maynard Keynes. Educated at Cambridge, a bastion of Socialist thinking, Mister Keynes famously published The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money in 1936, forever changing the world’s perception of economics.

This was quite an amazing feat, especially as Mister Keynes’s goal was not to explain economics, as had traditionally been the object of the subject; his goal was to distort the study of economics—to confuse economic principles in order to promote socialist concepts.

Socialism had, since its beginnings, been unpopular with many people, as it clearly did not work economically. So, in order to make socialism more broadly acceptable, Mister Keynes, in his book, suggested essentially that, although 2 + 2 = 4, with socialism, 2 + 2 could somehow equal 5.

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Socialism Never Works, by John Stossel

Posted on February 14, 2021 | Leave a comment

Once you shut down economic freedoms you inevitably have to shut down political freedoms. From John Stossel at townhall.com:

Socialism Never Works
Source: AP Photo/John Bazemore
 

Last week, I reported on two myths about socialism. My new video covers three more.

Myth No. 3: Socialism works if it’s “democratic.”

As the Democratic Socialists of America put it, “Society should be run democratically — to meet public needs, not to make profits for a few.”

Sounds nice. If socialists are elected, then we’ll have a more just society.

But Venezuela’s socialists were elected.

“They can start off democratically elected,” says economist Ben Powell, director of the Free Market Institute at Texas Tech, but “once they centralize control over the economy, it becomes impossible to ‘un-elect’ them.”

Hugo Chavez was elected but became an authoritarian who chose his successor, Nicolas Maduro. Maduro now gets “elected,” by having opponents arrested and “ordering state employees to vote for him or they lose their job,” says Powell.

“Socialism always becomes authoritarian?” I ask.

“Everywhere you try socialism, that’s what you get,” he replies. “It’s hard to exercise political freedom if you don’t have economic freedoms. If you’re dependent upon the state for your livelihood, you lose your ability to use your voice to oppose (the state) because you can be punished.

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Where Did the New Mad Left Come From? by Victor Davis Hanson

Posted on December 21, 2020 | Leave a comment

Utopianism at the point of a gun (or spear) is one of humanity’s oldest psychoses. From Victor Davis Hanson at nationalreview.com:

A demonstrator holds a sign during events marking Juneteenth in New York City City, June 19, 2020. (Brendan Mcdermid/Reuters)

Utopianism is age-old, as are its tragic consequences — and we haven’t seen the worst yet.

Bouts of extreme leftism are frequent in history. Plato’s Apology, Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, and Vladimir Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? — all offer us insight into the mind and methods of the hard Left.

America has experienced surges of mainstream anarchism, socialism, and communism, most profoundly during the late 19th century, amid the Great Depression, during the Soviet-American alliance of World War II and afterward, and in the 1960s. But rarely have these radical movements openly and without apologies made such inroads into and inside government and the establishment as during the past decade.

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Democrats Push To Keep Schools Closed So Kids Will Be Dumb Enough To Accept Socialism

Posted on November 20, 2020 | Leave a comment

From The Babylon Bee:

ALBANY, NY—There has been a lot of debate on whether or not to reopen schools. And while the science is clear that schools are not a big risk for the spread of COVID-19, Democrats have expressed another fear over people going to school: children learning enough that they no longer trust the wisdom of government or believe in socialism.

“People keep talking to me like I’m dumb and I don’t know what I’m doing,” said New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. “It’s because when people learn things they think they know better than me — me, the governor — so no more schools. I’m shutting them down.”

The move has been praised by other Democrats, such as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “Whenever I talk about my plans to give people lots of free stuff, people always bring up math,” Ocasio-Cortez complained. “I don’t know what that is, but apparently it’s some crazy right-wing thing you learn at schools that makes you not like socialism. Maybe people should just stay away from schools.” Ocasio-Cortez also pointed out that schooling is unnecessary for the future occupation of staying home while the government sends you checks.

As for teachers’ unions, their position is that schools can stay closed forever as long as they all still get paid. Still, there is concern that people may try to learn on their own, which is why Democrats are also asking for the help of Big Tech to block queries against their policies and to put a “this is disputed” label on anything questioning Democratic politicians.

https://babylonbee.com/news/democrats-pushing-for-schools-to-remain-closed-so-kids-will-be-dumb-enough-to-accept-socialism

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Utopia Envisioned: Welcome to the Socialist States of Amerika, by Vasko Kohlmayer

Posted on November 2, 2020 | Leave a comment

The reality of a socialist state is liable to be a bit different than today’s socialist revolutionaries envision it. From Vasko Kohlmayer at lewrockwell.com:

Previously we suggested that the unfolding disarray we are witnessing in America is in reality an attempted neo-Marxist revolution. We have also spoken at some length about the important role that Black Lives Matter is playing in this process.

To obtain a realistic assessment of our predicament, however, we must be careful not to overstate the long-term significance of BLM. BLM is not the ultimate cause of our crisis. The groundwork for it had been laid long before BLM came into existence. It had been prepared in decades prior by leftists who kept systematically undermining the foundations of our society under the auspices of the Marx-inspired philosophies and ideologies we listed in this piece.

BLM is neither the mastermind nor the originator of America’s plight. BLM is merely the militant wing of America’s Marxist movement, which is the primal originator of the present strife. Violent groups such as BLM and Antifa emerge into prominence when problems and contradictions in a society reach a critical point and the overthrow of the existing system becomes a realistic possibility. It is at this stage that the militants come to the fore and try to foment the maximum disarray possible. If they succeed in creating enough havoc, Marxist politicians who have infiltrated the government attempt a coup. If the system is sufficiently discomposed, the coup has a good chance of succeeding.

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United (Socialist) States of America? by Robert Bridge

Posted on October 24, 2020 | Leave a comment

The US has been creeping towards socialism for decades. A Democratic victory would turn the creep into a gallop. From Robert Bridge at rt.com:

 
 
United (Socialist) States of America? Trump-Biden showdown is a battle for the capitalist soul of the country
©  Getty Images / StockGood
 
The final presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden highlighted what is really at stake: not the political fortunes of two politicians, but rather what a future America might look like.

Perhaps not since the Great Debates of 1858, between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, which focused on the issue of slavery, has there been a political struggle of more epic consequence than the one raging right now in the US. That is not cheap hyperbole. The outcome of the 2020 election has the power to radically transform the nation – socially, culturally, and politically – to the point where it may become wholly unrecognizable in a very short time. I will leave it up to the reader to decide if that is a good thing or not.

On the debate stage, Trump and Biden may seem a lot like your typical American politicians, promising voters a paradise complete with paved roads and timely trains if they would just give them a chance. Behind the sloganeering of these two men, however, are vastly different blueprints for what a future America will ultimately look like.

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The Progressivism of the Future Is Really Just the Socialism of the Past, by Anthony P. Mueller

Posted on October 19, 2020 | Leave a comment

In terms of political philosophies, there really is nothing new under the sun. From Anthony P. Mueller at mises.org:

The world is currently in the midst of a newly aggressive drive to bring about a new socialist order through a powerful and “efficient” technocratic state. This new order has been labeled as “progressive,” but it is merely the latest version of the socialist impulse which we have seen before in the form of socialism and communism.

A War on Private Property

Summed up in a single sentence, the plans of the communists aim at the abolition of private property. From there, the other major demands follow, such as abolishing the family, nation, and countries, and finally, as Marx noted, “communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality.” In as much as the program of liberalism “if condensed into a single word….is private ownership of the means of production” (as described by Ludwig von Mises), the program of the communists is the abolition of private property.

A Promise of Efficiency and Expertise

Yet Marxian socialism—i.e., communism—has not found many followers in the United States. The communist appeal to justice and equality found more resonance in the old world. To have an appeal to the Americans, socialism had to be packaged differently. In the United States, the gospel of socialism appeared under the name of “progressivism” and was preached as bringing society to the highest degree of efficiency.

Under President Woodrow Wilson, progressivism attained its first peak as the dominant philosophy of the state. Society was to these socialists a single organization. The bureaucrats as public administrators found a vivid expression in the political novel Philip Dru: Administrator: A Story of Tomorrow by Edward Mandell House, who was a very close friend of Wilson and who served as the president’s most important political and diplomatic advisor.

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Slouching Towards the Socialist States of America, by Chris Farrell

Posted on October 16, 2020 | Leave a comment

America is in danger of being fundamentally transformed in ways most SLL readers will hate. From Chris Farrell at gatestoneinstitute.org:

  • What was troubling 24 years ago is now at a fevered pitch. What was then a disturbance is now a revolution. What was then subversion is now a coup….. “Journalists” within the news media do not report factual developments, and those who do find their Internet presence suppressed by the social media giants. Many enlightened liberals are participating naively in their own destruction in a fashion and on a scale not seen since 1917 Russia.

  • One party is effectively saying it will pack the courts, including the Supreme Court, with politically friendly judges, so that the judiciary will be an extension of one political party rather than part of a system of checks and balances, the separation of powers or a co-equal branch of government. One party is openly saying it will remove the electoral college, so that sparsely populated, rural states would be totally outvoted by cities. One party is openly saying that it would add more states, such as Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico, to provide it with more Senators to create a permanent one-party rule. And one party is openly saying it would reverse core parts of our Bill of Rights so we could be jailed for free speech, or for owning a gun to defend ourselves, as the minutemen did, against “enemies foreign and domestic.”

  • This was the situation that brought about the downfall of Venezuela: the government confiscated guns, then people had no way of protecting themselves when the storm troopers showed up.

  • We have had a good run as a democratic republic – but the country is in danger of being fundamentally and permanently disfigured in a way that will make it unrecognizable. The crime and the cover-up will have been successfully completed. No scrutiny, no justice, no consequences, no memory, no country. The real shame, as in Venezuela, is that many will not even notice until it is too late.

 

(Image source: iStock)

Attorney General William Barr is on a Capitol Hill whispering campaign to select Republicans, telling them that US Attorney John Durham will not move against the anti-Trump coup plotters before election day. One wonders if he has bothered to tell President Donald J. Trump. The consequences for the republic are dire. We slide ever closer to being a failed state. When the justice system is compromised – and it is – we are no better than any other banana republic. No exaggeration. In mid-July, Obamagate indictments were overdue. It is mid-October.

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Hitler and the Democrats: Leftwing Kindred, by Vasko Kohlmayer

Posted on September 26, 2020 | Leave a comment

Hitler was a socialist. From Vasko Kohlmayer at lewrockwell.com:

“Michigan Democratic Rep. Brenda Lawrence compared President Donald Trump’s presidency to Adolf Hitler’s rule during the Holocaust” it was reported earlier this month. Please note that this statement was made in a public forum by a national level Democrat who is a member of the US House of Representatives.

Early in August Jim Clyburn, the House majority whip and one of the most powerful Democrats in Washington said this of Donald Trump on CNN: “I feel very strongly that he is Mussolini, Putin is Hitler.” Given how unhinged the Democrats are these days, we actually have to commend Clyburn for his relative restraint. The South Carolina democrat assigned Hitler status to Putin while being content to downgrade Trump to the level of Fuhrer’s Italian sidekick.

Needless to say, the pejorative “Hitler” is the Left’s favorite term of abuse which they hurl freely at those who disagree with them. But who really was Adolf Hitler? Since his name features so prominently in the Left’s language, it is important that we understand where he stood ideologically. Being clear about who Hitler was will be of great value. For one thing, this knowledge will help us identify those elements in our own political landscape that are ideologically allied with him. This, in turn, will enable us to protect ourselves against these elements and also give us the moral clarity to warn them of the dangerous path they are on.

When trying to come to grips with Hitler, we need to realize that he was first and foremost a socialist. Socialists, of course, come in different stripes and varieties. What they all invariably share, however, is their conviction that society should be commanded by the State. To put it another way, socialists hold the view that the State should be in charge. They believe that the State should set the course not only for the nation’s economy but also be in control of the public square as well as of the private lives of its citizens. In sum, a socialist is someone who believes that society should be run and controlled by the State.

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