Tag Archives: Socialism

Socialism Is Destroying America, by Jacob G. Hornberger

Posted on September 13, 2019 | Leave a comment

The destruction has been a bipartisan effort; both parties love socialism. From Jacob G. Hornberger at fff.org:

Leave it to the progressives (i.e., liberals or leftists) to point out, indirectly, that conservatives and Republicans are as devoted to socialism as leftists are. The point is well made in an article by Tim Butterworth, a former Democratic Party legislator in New Hampshire.

 

The title of the article pretty much says it all: “’Socialism’ Made America Great.” That’s, of course, the standard mindset of liberals/progressives/ Democrats. But it’s also the standard mindset of conservatives/Republicans! The difference is that the left admits it, proudly, while the right denies it.

Butterworth uses several examples to buttress his point. The big example he uses is the Interstate Highway System, which, he correctly points out, was one gigantic socialist public-works project — the biggest in the history of the world. He points out that it cost $500 billion in today’s dollars, with 90 percent coming from the federal government and 10 percent coming from the states.

Butterworth, of course, has it wrong about socialism making America great, but at least he has a grip on reality. He understands that the Interstate Highway system was a giant socialist project, and he’s proud of that fact. He is also happy to be called a socialist for supporting it.

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The Hollow Promise of a Statist Economy, by MN Gordon

Posted on September 1, 2019 | Leave a comment

We can’t all get free shit, somebody has to produce it. From MN Gordon at economicprism.com:

Not a day goes by that doesn’t supply a new specimen of inane disclarity.  Muddy ideas are dredged up from tainted minds like lumps of odorous pond muck.  We do our part to clean up the mess, whether we want to or not.

These days, individuals, who like John Locke “love truth for truth’s sake,” are far and away in the minority.  Out of the bowels of America’s higher learning institutions comes a young populace with soiled brains.  What’s more, you’ll likely end up on the hook for their idiocy.

Take one Andy Vila, for instance.  The 21 year old immigrated from Cuba to Miami with his parents in 2004, receiving asylum and ultimately citizenship.  Nonetheless, the socialism he escaped from as a kid has become a rallying cry for his political activism.

The fantasy that big government can redirect goods, capital, and services, as Marx remarked, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” has garnered burgeoning support from America’s up and comers.  The anatomy of this transformation travels a common path.  For Vila, who as a teen identified as a “Libertarian-style Republican,” several dosages of fake learning took him down the rabbit hole:

“Course readings led him to question his beliefs further.  He started attending left-leaning campus events, interacting with students of varying racial and socioeconomic backgrounds.  He discovered a Miami beyond his manicured suburban neighborhood.

“By year’s end [2017], he had developed a disdain for capitalism and the political right.  Now the sociology and geography major wants sweeping reforms, including Medicare for all, free access to higher education and a Green New Deal.”

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Socialism isn’t a failure. It’s a fraud. By Mark E. Jeftovic

Posted on August 20, 2019 | 4 comments

Socialism is a lie, which is obvious from its basic premises and should not have needed over 100 years of failure to demonstrate. No one of sound mind can ignore that history, even if they don’t put two and two together from the basic premises. From Mark E. Jeftovic at guerrilla-capitalism.com:

“Want to be rich? Start a good business.
Want to be really  rich? Become a socialist.”
— Unknown.

There is no shortage of empirical data that socialism fails every time it has been tried, and leaves the largest body count in it’s wake. Dr. Kristian Niemtietz’s “Socialism: The Failed Idea that Never Dies” documents the three distinct stages socialism goes through

  1. The Honeymoon Phase
  2. The What Aboutery Phase
  3. And finally, when all that’s left is a smoking crater and a pile of bodies, “the not real socialism phase”

Niemietz documents each occurrence of socialism in the 20th century in his book to show that central planning and redistribution simply do not work.

Then there’s the Black Book of Communism, which tallies up the body count of the socialist regimes of the 20th century (over 100 million souls).

So it’s curious, why are our intellectual, cultural and sundry political and economic elites decrying capitalism and promulgating socialism as a cure for societies perceived ills?

The answer, I think, is because socialism isn’t actually meant to succeed economically. It’s successful if it keeps the population under control, and the elites in charge.

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The Bolsheviks aren’t coming. They’re already here. By Simon Black

Posted on July 2, 2019 | Leave a comment

The US has been drifting towards socialism for over a century. From Simon Black at sovereignman.com:

The average Westerner who hasn’t traveled very much believes Moscow to be a cold, bleak, desolate capital city that’s filled with Stalinist-era architecture and a population that lives in utter misery.

But the reality of this place is nearly the complete opposite.

Moscow is a bright, beautiful, cosmopolitan city. I’ve always found Moscow to feel more European than most European capitals, with gorgeous architecture that never seems to end.

Moscow is easily as nice as Paris, London, or Vienna… with a population larger than all three. I like it here more and more every time I visit.

It has some of the nicest restaurants in the world, beautiful parks and monuments, and a highly sophisticated, educated, cultured population.

The city is quite prosperous too. But it wasn’t always that way.

Moscow was once the capital of the Soviet Empire… the most infamous and failed experiment with Socialism in the history of the world.

Russia’s humiliating tale of Socialism grew out imperial discontent– a period starting in the 1500s when wealth was concentrated in the hands of the Tsar and his key lieutenants. Everyone else lived as peasants in abject poverty.

My friends and I toured a museum at the Kremlin over the weekend and saw endless artifacts from the days of the Empire– golden chalices, diamond-encrusted silverware, magnificent carriages.

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Free Things and Unfree People, by Richard M. Salsman

Posted on July 1, 2019 | Leave a comment

We cannot all have the right to make somebody else provide us with free things. A right that is not universal is not a right. From Richard M. Salsman at aier.org:

As politicians today assert, so loudly and sanctimoniously, that things like food, housing, health care, jobs, childcare, a cleaner-safer environment, transportation, schooling, utilities, and even college should be “free,” or publicly subsidized, almost no one asks why such claims are valid.  Are they to be accepted blindly on faith or affirmed by mere intuition (feeling)? It doesn’t sound scientific.  Shouldn’t all crucial claims pass tests of logic and evidence?

Typically, a freebie claim receives conditional praise: “it sure sounds good, but it’s probably too costly.” My guess is that freebie proposers like hearing that compliment, which also makes them inclined to offer still further freebies. As for cost warnings, my guess also is that freebie proposers like hearing how others will work on the accounting and locate the necessary funding, especially as it’s already been shown that democratic governments can, almost without limit, tax, borrow, print money, mandate private spending, or nationalize industries. Do these measures harm prosperity?  Yes, but that’s of no concern to the freebie promisers.

Why do freebie claims “sound good” to so many people?  They don’t sound very good to me.  Why not? Because they sound mean, even heartless. Why? Because they’re illiberal, hence fundamentally inhumane.  I hope I’m not alone in recognizing that promised freebies are not gifts of nature or manna from heaven, but things produced by actual living human beings who choose to employ their minds and bodies. Who owns the products and services of these minds and bodies? Who should determine whether and how goods or services should be created, exchanged, invested, consumed or bequeathed?  Indeed, who owns these minds and bodies?

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Going Where, Exactly? by James Howard Kunstler

Posted on June 7, 2019 | Leave a comment

Politicians can promise away, but the country is $22 trillion in the hole and that number grows by at least a $1 trillion a year, and the pie is shrinking. From James Howard Kunstler at kunstler.com:

In response to what has become a nation of shameless racketeering, vivid wealth disparity, and shocking destitution on display in city streets, the party of the common man seeks remedies in the redistribution of capital. Seems more than fair to many. It’s not for nothing that they style it “social justice,” the cutting edge of an economic system called socialism — with overtones, of course, of settling racial and gender scores for good measure.

Socialism might seem to be the answer to all this unfairness and indignity. And naturally it focuses on the two activities that have turned into the worst rackets in America: higher education and health care, a.k.a. “Eds and Meds.” Both are now cruel bloated parodies of what they used to be, turning their customers into debt serfs and bankrupts, apart from their dismal failures of basic mission: to prepare developing minds for reality and to “first do no harm.”

The proposed remedy is for the national government to take responsibility for running them and to make their services free to all. That would do nothing, of course, to reform the patent idiocies of the gender studies departments; or rescue the sorry victims of obesity and diabetes from their toxic consumption of whoppers, pizza, and slurpees. Those dynamics operate on feedback wheels of futility for which there is no happy ending outside of drastic changes in thought and behavior.

The Left now promises redemption from these great quandaries with the tag-team of Robin Hood and Santa Claus ushering in a new golden era of free stuff. It’s understandable perhaps, considering how desperate so many citizens of this land are, and how desperation feeds rescue fantasies. And the Left may even get a chance to try this wizardry after the next election. But it’s really not where history is taking us. America is not going to go socialist, it’s going medieval. Why is that?

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Why Social Democracy is Failing Europe, by Alasdair Macleod

Posted on May 3, 2019 | Leave a comment

Socialism and freedom cannot coexist. From Alasdair Macleod at mises.org:

There is a certain tension in the phrase, “social democracy,” and the description of someone as a social democrat. Social in this context is socialism by the state. A democrat supports the freedom for individual electors to express and defend personal interests in regular plebiscites. The two positions are incompatible.

At this point we should note that in economic terms there is little philosophical difference between European socialism and communism. Both seek to relieve capitalists of the means of production in favor of the state, either by ownership or control. Marx himself saw socialism as a temporary phase on the way to full communism. However, we all know from experience that communism fails by impoverishing everyone except a coterie of leaders. The same problem of the state’s inability to calculate prices, other than with reference to labor costs, and to foresee what consumers require on the morrow bedevils both socialism and communism. The principal difference between the two is the speed at which economic disintegration takes place, tied to the rate at which the socializing state removes personal freedoms and destroys wealth.

Social democrats assume that moderate socialism does not lead to those outcomes, which is a mistake1. They are deceived.

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