Bernie

Bernie

I watched Bernie Sanders, the old snake oil salesman make his pitch last night for socialism in an hour long Fox News Town Hall in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.  As I’ve said before, this guy is no dummy.  He came out of Brooklyn to Vermont with his Marx, Alinsky, Russell and Debs firmly tucked away in his repertoire. He makes his pitch to the average person so appealing and sugar coated, that I was almost saying “where do I sign?”.

Forgetting the anti-Trump rhetoric, socialism always starts out with dissatisfaction of the status quo, and with idealistic promises for the future.  Everyone is entitled to “free stuff”, particularly those that are deemed to have been culturally denied in the past.  This includes free health care, free abortion, free education and a myriad of other free social services, including a guaranteed job and at least a $15/hr minimum wage.  Additional little fillips are “wealth taxes” on “the rich” and on successful corporations, reparations for minorities and forgiveness of college loan debt.


How are these all to be paid for?  Why, by increased taxation, of course, coupled with a redistribution of wealth from the capitalist “fat cats”.  In other words, socialism proposes to penalize the wealthy innovators to provide “free stuff” to everybody else, including those who are idlers in society.


Obviously this does not come naturally, so other means are necessary.  It is absolutely essential to take the guns away and disarm everyone.  Speech disagreeing with “politically correct” social justice mundanity must be curtailed and termed as fascist or “white supremist”.  Laws against emigration and movement by wealthy people and companies need to be enacted.  Stronger government and erosion/cancellation of individual and civil rights must lead the body politic toward totalitarianism and away from any remnants of democracy.  These drastic measures are necessary because taxation can only go so far.  Confiscation requires a strong, dictatorial government.  Socialism, communism and fascism require a commitment to the use of force.  You cannot decide what to do with the other guy’s money unless you are committed to use force to take that money from him. All socialist programs are mandatory and enforced by the government.  This is the reality of socialism — a pseudo-religion grounded in pseudo-science and enforced by political tyranny.


So it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see why socialism never works in the long term, and always leads to the Maduros, Stalins, Maos, Castros and other dictatorial butchers, and to the deaths of over 120 million of their own people in the 20^th century.  Alternatively, socialism/communism morphs into market-oriented dictatorships like China, Vietnam and Laos.


 And yet socialism is no longer a parlor game for academics but a political alternative taken seriously by millennials and other thinkers, who don’t recognize that much of what they enjoy in life is a result of free market capitalism and would disappear if socialism were to be implemented.  We can maybe excuse some youngsters like AOC’s naiveté because of youth and inexperience.  How do we excuse people like Bernie, Markey, Krugman, Reich and others who should know better?


Ray Gruszecki

April 16, 2019