SHARE WITH BERNIE FANS: The Totally, Utterly Irrefutable Case Against Socialism

I guess Marxists don't even bother to read Marx anymore. Socialism is the means by which Communism (and actual Fascism) is achieved. It's nothing more than a stepping stone.

Do a bit of homework. All of your Euro buddies who have socialized services were able to do so because the good ole US of A has been the world police for them. They cannot defend themselves, because their entire budgets (funded by confiscatory taxes) are used up by their socialist programs. They are now on the verge of changing things, though, as DJT is demanding that those countries pay their fair share of NATO expenses and--oh--"immigrants." Venezuela, here they come!

I guess Marxists don't even bother to read Marx anymore. Socialism is the means by which Communism (and actual Fascism) is achieved. It's nothing more than a stepping stone.

I simply can't understand the older folks in Nevada ...I'm talking 65 and over who voted for Socialism They KNOW better

I guess Marxists don't even bother to read Marx anymore. Socialism is the means by which Communism (and actual Fascism) is achieved. It's nothing more than a stepping stone.

:socialism sucks:

socialism is not Communism

many of our allies have socialist systems

this is just more fear mongering from the radical right

Well, Marxists are stupid.

Socialism is an economic structure and it has never worked. It destroys peoples initiative and drive at the very least and in the end leads to resistance and rebellion, not to mention starvation and death. They understand this, so to fully implement it, a system of tyranny must be imposed, call it what you will, commies... nazis... whatever. All same same in the end.

It must be forced on the people and that is what we are seeing here... Today... in spades!

Fuck commies and fuck nazis and FUCK SOCIALISM!!

Agreed. And as Bernie CORRECTLY points out the ultra rich have created socialism for themselves at the top(bank bailouts, tax shelters, tax loopholes etc.). Of course, the latter are perfectly okay with those same people who deride those who wish to make life just a little more comfortable for those at the middle and bottom. Heaven forbid they say. : (

They aren't going to change their mind, just like Trump supporters ignore all criticism of Trump. In both cases it's a cult of personality.

Fuck commies and fuck nazis and FUCK SOCIALISM!!

socialism is not Communism

many of our allies have socialist systems

this is just more fear mongering from the radical right

I guess Marxists don't even bother to read Marx anymore. Socialism is the means by which Communism (and actual Fascism) is achieved. It's nothing more than a stepping stone.

The Totally, Utterly Irrefutable Case Against Socialism

July 11th, 2019

COMMENTARY BY
Lee Edwards, Ph.D.
Distinguished Fellow in Conservative Thought

Lee Edwards is a leading historian of American conservatism and the author or editor of 25 books.


When a dozen of conservatism’s best minds take on Socialism and expose it for the utopian fraud it is, attention must be paid.

In a brief foreword to a special issue of National Review, Editor-in-Chief Richard Lowry admitted that many conservatives thought socialism in America had been “vanquished” after the collapse of Soviet Communism 30 years ago. But as T. S. Eliot insisted, “There is no such thing as a Lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause.”

The experts examine socialism in its many guises, beginning with Charles Cooke’s blunt assessment that socialism is not and never can be “democratic.”

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Cooke, the editor of NationalReview.com, writes that voters should not be fooled by the left’s attempt at rebranding.

“There is no sense in which socialism can be made compatible with democracy as it is understood in the West.” At worst, says Cooke, “socialism eats democracy, and is swiftly transmuted into tyranny.” At best, socialism “stamps out individual agency, places civil society into a straitjacket of uniform size, and turns representative government into a chimera.”

Cooke’s description of socialism as tyrannical was confirmed by Ugo Okere, a socialist candidate for the Chicago City Council, who explained that “democratic socialism, to me, is about democratic control of every single facet of our life.”

That would mean, presumably, rewriting the first words of the Constitution to something like, “We the people of the United States in order to form a more democratically controlled Union … ”

What has Okere’s “democratic control” produced in the socialist “paradise” of Venezuela?

Ricardo Hausmann, the former chief economist of the Inter-American Development Bank, has written that “Venezuela’s economic catastrophe dwarfs any in the history of the U.S., Western Europe or the rest of Latin America.”

How catastrophic? Under Chavez-Maduro socialism, the child mortality rate has increased 140%. Ninety percent of Venezuelans now live in poverty. This year inflation will hit an unbelievable 10 million percent. (That is not a typographical error.) All this in a country with the world’s largest proven oil reserves—far greater than those of the United States.

Cooke concludes his essay with lessons learned from 6,000 years of civilization, including “never relinquish the right to free speech, the right to free conscience, the right to freedom of religion, the right to bear arms, or the right to a jury trial.”

Whatever you do, he warns, don’t be seduced by socialists bearing promises. But if you are seduced, “get out before it’s too late. You have nothing to lose but your chains.”

The distinguished author Joshua Muravchik, a fellow at the World Affairs Institute, takes a historical approach to the myths of socialism.

He writes that the initiator of Soviet terror, tyranny, and violence was its founding father, Vladimir Lenin, who exhorted his followers to exert “merciless mass terror against kulaks, priests, and White Guards; persons of doubtful standing should be locked up in concentration camps” (i.e., the Gulag).

To what end? Not just to accumulate political power, but in pursuit of a sacred mission—a socialist world.

When the farmers resisted collectivization, Lenin’s successor, Josef Stalin, engineered a famine in which at least 5 million and perhaps as many 10 million starved to death—the Holodomor.

If Stalin was “a tyrant of stupefying brutality,” writes Muravchik, he was outdone by Communist rulers Mao Zedong, whose Cultural Revolution resulted in at least one million deaths, and Pol Pot, who wiped out one-fourth of Cambodia’s population in his attempt to emulate Mao.

Why did they kill so many? Muravchik provides the answer: “It was their devotion to an ideal [socialism] that prompted them to slaughter millions of unresisting innocents.”

Economist Jeffrey Tucker begins with the damning comment: “Among the most conspicuous of socialism’s failings is its capacity to generate vast shortages of things essential for life.”

In Maoist China, he points out, there was no meat and no fat in which to cook anything. In Bolshevik Russia, there was never enough housing or food, not even loaves of bread.

What happened when Nikita Khrushchev took over as Soviet leader following Stalin’s death in 1953? He and his colleagues tried desperately to “cobble together” a system of planning that made sense without relying on “bourgeois” market forces.

They failed miserably. In Tucker’s words, Khrushchev “spent his last years as a discredited, dejected, and sad old man on a park bench.”

If you love deprivation, constriction, and general limits on material aspirations, says Tucker, plus a “tyrannical ruling class that oppresses everyone else, you will love what socialism can and does achieve.” Indeed, he concludes, “misery seems to be its only contribution to economic history.”

Socialists, says National Review correspondent Kevin Williamson, are guilty of a fatal conceit: They think they can develop a system so powerful that it can consider every variable in society and propose scientific answers “about how many acres of potatoes to plant, and when and where to plant them.”

But free-market economists Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek (a Nobel Laureate) showed that “complete knowledge was not attainable on social, economic, or political questions.”

Therefore, says Williamson, the more intelligent and non-ideological governments have largely given up on central planning.

Even the Nordic social democracies, so dear to the self-styled socialists of the United States, “mostly have been divesting themselves of state enterprises.”

Reasonably successful state-run enterprises, such as the Swiss railroads, “have been converted into stock corporations or reformed in other market-oriented ways.”

The subtitle of Hayek’s last work “The Fatal Conceit” is “The Errors of Socialism.” Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., have failed to learn from those errors, says Williamson, asserting that “you cannot call yourself the party of science and the party of socialism too. You have to choose one or the other.”

Socialists flaunt their compassion, argues former National Review Editor-in-Chief John O’Sullivan, because it gives them an excuse to impose their will on others “unlawfully and even murderously.”

Modern socialists tend to disapprove of placing conditions on aid to the poor—“workfare”—viewing the receipt of aid as “an unqualified right.”

That sounds generous, says O’Sullivan, but it traps the poor “in long term dependency” and undermines what the scholar Shirley Letwin calls the “vigorous virtues” among their neighbors.

Before a single socialist regime had established itself, says O’Sullivan, 19th-century writers like Fyodor Dostoevsky, W. H. Matlock, and Rudyard Kipling saw “the horrors that lay concealed within socialism’s humanitarian promise.” Their examination of country after country refutes the fraying excuse that socialism has never been tried.

In the later stages of Soviet Communism, for example, a woman would sell herself for a pair of jeans; in Venezuela today, “people exchange family heirlooms for a little food.”

Although the French welfare state is often offered as a shining example of progressivism, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, declares you must look at “actual France, not the fantasy France of progressive propaganda.”

He challenges the French elite who believe they have the right “to order society for the benefit of everyone.”

Given the results of their leadership—low growth, mass unemployment, social strife, and a general mood of pessimism—Gobry suggests that “they might want to rethink their idea of progress.”

BT (Before Thatcher), the Great Britain of the 1970s was generally described as “the sick man of Europe,” due to its prolonged experiments with statism and the pervasive stagnation they produced.

In 1960, according to historian Andrew Stuttaford, the U.K. boasted Europe’s most productive economy, but that was before the Labour Party came to power and nationalized almost every industry in sight.

The mid-1970s were hard on most Western economies, but the U.K. “appeared to be in a hell of its own,” says Stuttaford. Inflation shot up 300%. Gross domestic product fell, unemployment rose, the pound crumbled, industry buckled, “and some of Britain’s best and brightest headed for the exit.”

The winter of 1978 was characterized by grotesque images—the dead unburied, the sick untreated, the trash piling up in the streets.

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[link to www.heritage.org (secure)]

You can write a billion articles trying to equate Bernie Sanders with Venezuela or communism - but fact is, Sanders policies are more in line with Norway and Denmark or even your own FDR. Oh and the social democracies of Northern Europe PWN the US on the democracy index, as well as press freedom, health, education, happiness and prosperity indexes. Getting your country to the top of those indexes would truly MAGA


Nobody is gonna stop you making money, they're just going to make you pay your taxes and then use those taxes on the welfare of citizens rather than big corporations and bombs. Why is that so terrifying to you?

The Totally, Utterly Irrefutable Case Against Socialism

July 11th, 2019

COMMENTARY BY
Lee Edwards, Ph.D.
Distinguished Fellow in Conservative Thought



CONTINUED AT:
[link to www.heritage.org (secure)]

:Bernie sign:

You don't even have to talk about weird little countries like Norway or Denmark. The UK, France, Canada, and a host of other allies have mixed socialist systems.

We're pretty damn socialist already, what with social security and medicare, and don't forget bailing out the banks every ten years or so.

socialism is not Communism

many of our allies have socialist systems

this is just more fear mongering from the radical right

Love ya Doc, but I can’t see any Libtard taking the time to read all that. They have the attention span of a Methhead

With our current system of bail outs and printing money for the rich, just print 3 extra signs. Give an extra to Bernie and keep 2 for yourself.