Bcon

Will America be the next Cuba or Argentina or Venezuela? The Democratic Party seems to think socialism is a great idea and they want to give it a try. Just ask Rep. Maxine Waters and the Democratic candidates running for president. Democrats just don’t get it, that socialism always ends badly.

•••

There was a professor in a large college that had some exchange students in the class. One day while the class was in the lab, the professor noticed one young man, an exchange student, who kept rubbing his back and stretching as if his back hurt.

The professor asked the young man what was the matter.

The student told him he had a bullet lodged in his back. He had been shot while fighting C*******ts in his native country who were trying to o*******w his country’s government and install a new c*******t regime. In the midst of his story, he looked at the professor and asked a strange question:

“Do you know how to catch wild pigs?”

The professor thought it was a joke and asked for the punch line.

The young man said it was no joke.

“You catch wild pigs by finding a suitable place in the woods and putting corn on the ground. The pigs find it and begin to come every day to eat the free food. When they are used to coming every day, you put a fence down one side of the place where they are used to coming. When they get used to the fence, they begin to eat the corn again and you put up another side of the fence. They get used to that and start to eat again. You continue until you have all four sides of the fence up with a gate in the last side. The pigs, which are used to the free corn, start to come through the gate to eat that free corn again. You then slam the gate on them and catch the whole herd.

“Suddenly the wild pigs have lost their freedom. They run around and around inside the fence, but they are caught. Soon they go back to eating the free corn. They are so used to it that they have forgotten how to forage in the woods for themselves, so they accept their captivity.”

The young man then told the professor that is exactly what he sees happening in America and Canada. The government keeps pushing us toward C*******m/Socialism and keeps spreading the free corn out in the form of programs such as supplemental income, tax credit for unearned income, tax exemptions, tobacco subsidies, dairy subsidies, payments not to plant crops (CRP), welfare entitlements, medicine, drugs, etc., while we continually lose our freedoms, just a little at a time.

One should always remember two t***hs:

• There is no such thing as a free lunch.

• You can never hire someone to provide a service for you cheaper than you can do it yourself.

P.S. The only patriot that loves America running in 2020 is the man that is already in our White House. If you love your country, you won’t v**e for a socialist. Go, Trump!

Carol Kelly

Despite the odds, I have every confidence that Trump will be re-elected. I, also, believe that the radicals in the House will not maintain their power. The American people are not lambs being led to the slaughter. We are a free people and we want the government to work for us. I******s must not be given the v**e and neither should 16 year olds. The Democrats need to realize that we are not dumb animals out here to be tagged and led by the nose. Get over Trump’s e******n and stop these investigations unless it’s investigating Hilary and the crooked Democrats that would see the nation destroyed just to exercise their power. Get Obama!

debeda

Love the wild pig analogy. So very TRUE!

debeda

Bcon

I Amin total agreement with your expectations. I pray that we are in the majority.

The Critical Critic Loc: Turtle Island

Many of us grew up watching Dracula movies—Nosferatu, the “Undead.” Fearful of the sunlight that could burn him into cinders, Dracula lived in a coffin filled with his native T***sylvanian soil by day, only to come out at night to live off the life-giving blood of the living. But to continue his “unnatural” existence, this human-like vampire had to k**l his victims by draining them of their own blood, or in the process of turning them into “creatures of the night,” like himself. Welcome to the nature and history of socialism.

Almost every Dracula movie ended with his nemesis, usually Dr. Van Helsing, the determined vampire h****r, finding Dracula in his coffin as the dawn was beginning to appear. He would drive a stake through the vampire’s heart or would open a nearby window so sunlight could fall upon the sleeping bloodsucker. Dracula’s centuries-old body usually would rapidly decay into dust. The “undead” had now died, and the world was freed from this “unholy” aberration.

But, invariably, in the next film, the life-destroying monster, in fact, had not been properly k**led, or one of the poor humans he also had turned into a vampire took his place to plague the living.

Sometimes Dracula initially would be portrayed as an attractive gentleman, appealing to the ladies (such as in the 1979 Dracula starring a young Frank Langella). But soon his true, evil nature showed itself as he fell upon his human prey and made them into “ungodly” creatures. Welcome to the seeming unending resurrection of the socialist idea in renewed appealing forms.

How very appealing was the socialist idea in the late 19th and early 20th centuries before the First World War! All the burdens of life and everyday work, all the seemingly unjust inequalities of material wealth observable in society, and all the uncertainties of health care and old age would be lifted from the weary shoulders of the “common man” with the arrival of socialism.

Socialism would set everything right. Humanity would be freed from the shackles of capitalist “wage s***ery,” everyone would be provided with all the necessities and amenities of material existence and desire, with all living in the e******y of “social justice” and the accompanying end to oppression and tyranny being abolished around the world.

What a life-draining nightmare was set loose on mankind! Beginning with the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917 through all the other c*******t “victories,” either through Soviet conquest or domestic revolutions and civil wars like in China or Cuba, the harshest and most terrible tyrannies fell upon all the luckless peoples given a socialist paradise to live within.

Civil liberties were abolished with no spoken or written speech permitted other than the “official line” of the ruling C*******t Party. Socialist central planning meant that the government determined what was produced, where, by whom, and in what quantities. Every person’s educational opportunities, living quarters, and employments were assigned and commanded by the State in the name of the collective “common good.” Dissent, disagreement, or even suspected lack of enthusiasm for the advancement of the bright, beautiful socialist future (as defined and dictated by those at the political helm of the “people’s state”) was met with arrest, imprisonment, banishment to s***e labor camps, or death by torture, starvation, or simple execution.

Human life was stripped of privacy, with everything under surveillance by agents of the secret police or potentially reported by informers or. Fear and suspicion wereinseparably intertwined with any interpersonal relationship or association, whether in the government-assigned workplace or with neighbors in government-owned apartment complexes. Friendships, therefore, were precarious relationships that could end in betrayal and a knock on the door in the middle of the night from the secret police that resulted in an individual or an entire family disappearing without a trace.

It was not enough for the Socialist State to command and control your public words and deeds. Propaganda and indoctrination were used in an attempt to mold how people thought about the world and themselves. The contents of the individual’s mind were to be a product of the central plan as much as the types and quantities of the physical goods produced at “the people’s” factories.

The human cost of the great socialist experiment to remake man and humanity for a new collectivist heaven on earth did not come cheap. Historians of the c*******t experience around the world have estimated that as many as 200 million people—innocent men, women, and children—may have been k**led in the socialist meat grinders: 64 million in the Soviet Union and up to 80 million in China, with millions more in the other socialist societies around the globe.

Did these sacrifices for that better socialist future pay off? Did it deliver on its promises? In every socialist centrally-planned society, shortages, shoddy goods, and stagnant standards of living enveloped the lives of the vast majority of the citizens of these countries. Anyone who had the opportunity to visit the Soviet Union (as I did in its last years) could not help but notice the zombie-like emptiness in the faces of many on the streets of Moscow, as they trudged on foot from one government retail store to another in desperate search for the basic essentials of everyday life. There would be long lines of people at one store waiting to purchase some poor quality consumer item or basic food products. At other government stores, there would be empty shelves with no customers. All of the stores were manned by listless, bored, and indifferent government employees just waiting for their shift to end.

What else could be expected from an economic system that prevented any individual initiative or incentive to work, save, and invest, since private enterprise had been abolished and declared to be the basis of exploitation and injustice? (In the last five years of the Soviet Union, the C*******t Party leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, had allowed small and limited private business enterprises, and these, however few and restricted, were the only pockets of economic vibrancy.)

The Austrian economists, especially, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich A. Hayek, had shown already in the 1920s and 1930s that the nationalization of private property and the end to market competition and a market-based price system did away with the ability for any rational economic decision-making. To reasonably determine what to produce, with what methods of production, and in what relative amounts, they explained, there needed to be some effective method of economic calculation. But with no market-based prices reflecting actual supply and demand conditions in changing circumstances, a centrally planned economy was, in a sense, flying blind. Its outcome is what Mises once entitled one of his short works on this topic—planned chaos.

Vampire-like, socialist political and economic systems drained the life force out of the societies in which they ruled. No ambition, no drive, no prospects for a better and happier life was the state to which socialism reduced humanity in those parts of the world.

The only opportunities for a better life came from being one of the C*******t Party bloodsuckers of the ruling power elite. They had special stores, special medical clinics, special holiday resorts, special living accommodations, special opportunities to travel abroad to other socialist countries or even “the enemy” West from which forbidden goodies could be brought back home. The rest of the society was truly the exploited “masses” from whose meager and government-misdirected labor those limited privileges and prosperity came for the ruling Red Draculas of the c*******t state.

The last decade of the 20th century saw the collapse of Marxian socialism in the Soviet Union and the “captive nations” in Eastern Europe that were conquered by Stalin at the end of the Second World War. The death of Mao Zedong in 1976 was followed in the 1980s with economic reforms in China that did not change the political stranglehold the Chinese C*******t Party had on the country but introduced a variety of limited and controlled market-based institutional t***sformations that has brought radical improvements in the everyday lives of hundreds of millions of people.

Many underdeveloped countries in what used to be called “the third world” turned away from the model of Soviet-style socialist central planning in the 1980s and 1990s and put the people there on paths of more market-oriented material and social betterment. Indeed, in some of these countries, abject poverty and frequent starvation have been nearly eradicated due to the introduction of freer markets and competitive entrepreneurial activity.

But like Dracula rising once more from the grave, socialism has been making a comeback among academics, college and university students, and a growing number of intellectuals. It is reflected most recently in the Democratic Party primary win of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (who was a Bernie Sanders activist in 2016) over an established Democrat incumbent in a New York City congressional district. She hails herself as a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). If you go to the website of the DSA, they outline their promise and hope for a new “progressive” socialist America to replace the current oppressive and exploitative American system of “neo-liberalism,” which is the political left’s catchall label for capitalist things they h**e and wish to overturn.

They insist that theirs will be a truly “democratic” society. A small handful of wealthy capitalists should not dictate and determine the economic direction of the U.S. economy for their own private profit. No, the country’s future should be in the hands of all the people through democratic decision-making.

Workers should collectively manage factories and enterprises, and the society as a whole should assure and provide a large array of “free” things for everyone: health care, child care, education from kindergarten through college, and housing and t***sportation would all be “publicly provided to everyone on demand, free of charge.” Also, everyone would be guaranteed an annual universal basic income. Plus, the workweek would be reduced and vacation time increased to give everyone more leisure to create work opportunities for any of the unemployed who might still wish to be employed even in a world of all this “free” stuff provided by the government. (How and who is to pay for all these “free” items of material life remains an unanswered question, other than a general presumption that “the rich” will be appropriately taxed to foot the bill.)

Since everything would be politicized with government involvement even more than currently in America to supply this promised “free” life of material post-scarcity existence, democratic decision-making would be extended to, well, everything. The DSA says the U.S. Senate should be abolished, and the entire e*******l process replaced with a system of proportional representation in more directly democratically elected bodies. There would be “civilian boards for various government services, program councils (at the national, state, and local levels) for those who receive government services, and municipal and state-level citizens assemblies that would be open to all that would be tasked with making budget decisions.”

- Continued below

The Critical Critic Loc: Turtle Island

- Continued from above

Anyone who has ever gone to town hall meetings knows that there is nothing “democratic” about the people who show up to speak out on agenda issues or in the v****g done by the local council members. The numbers of attendees vary, but they are mostly invariably made of small groups of bee-in-their-bonnet busybodies. They are clearly people with too much time on their hands possessing political and ideological axes to grind, with the desire, nine times out of ten, to foster regulations, controls, restrictions, and taxes on others so they can achieve their local social engineering goals.

A handful of municipal meddlers speak out at these town hall council meetings, creating the impression through their “sincerity” and vehemence that they are voicing the “real” needs and interests of the community. Where are the vast majority of the citizens of that community? The actual majority of that town or city is going about the normal business of life: coming home from work, spending time with their families, doing chores around the house, or out shopping for food or other family necessities, or just having some downtime with friends before the next day of work begins.

This ordinary and normal majority are the ones producing the goods and services in the private sector that represent the wealth and prosperity of society. They are busy managing their personal and family affairs to keep them (hopefully) in financial order. They are seeing that their house and immediate neighborhood are kept in order by mowing the yard, repainting a fence, or participating in some church or charity good works due to a personal sense of right, calling, or duty.

For most of them, politics never enters the equation; but, nonetheless, their actions actually keep “society” running and functioning smoothly on a day-to-day basis. They represent what William Graham Sumner (1840-1910) once called the “forgotten man,” those who peacefully and productively create all the things representing “the wealth of nations,” and which the socialist planners and regulators want to get their hands on through the power of the government.

To shift even more decision-making away from the private sphere to the political arena means to t***sfer control over people’s lives from themselves to the professional and amateur busybody meddlers who show up at those government meetings and influence the way the elected representatives v**e.

And those elected representatives don’t mind a bit having the power to make such decisions since the spending on them is the financial trough from which they buy the support of those whose v**es they need to stay in political office. Plus, it increases the duties and commands of the local bureaucracies who easily find ways to use the regulatory and redistributive powers placed in their hands to serve their own interests.

The more control is t***sferred out of the hands of the private citizenry and into the hands of these “democratic” socialists, the more the tyranny of the pressure-group cliques and community know-it-alls end up running everyone’s life.

Extend that from the local affairs of municipal administrations to the state and federal governments, and soon there is little that happens in the society that the political regulators and social planners would not be in charge of.

Similar to how Dracula’s friendly and attractive smile was t***sformed into bloodsucking fangs draining away the life of those initially mesmerized by him, so the Sirens’ call of “free” everything (that, in reality, someone will have to pay for) under the umbrella of “democratic” fairness and justice is soon metamorphosedinto a tyranny of politicians, bureaucrats, and “democratic socialists” determined to use the political process to impose their minority petty prescriptions for a better world on all of us. The arena of individual autonomy decreases and the prison walls of collectivist control and command tighten and grow higher around everyone.

Have no doubt that this includes not only health care, retirement pensions, public housing, or guaranteed jobs and minimum incomes. The new “democratic socialist” agenda, like that of the “progressive” left in general, is to micromanage language, human relationships, social status, and group classifications of victimhood vs. privilege.

It is nothing less than the same tyranny of all the earlier forms of socialism and central planning experienced over the last one hundred years in more explicitly brutal forms, just more rhetorically enveloped in the appeal of “participatory democracy” than the earlier c*******t cries for a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” It remains the same life-draining Dracula returned once more from the dead.

By: Richard M. Ebeling

(He is BB&T Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Free Enterprise Leadership at The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina.)

debeda

OUTSTANDING essay!!!! Thanks for sharing! I've never heard of the Citadel, I'll have to look it up.

The Critical Critic Loc: Turtle Island

Thank you for taking the time to read it, debeda. In your research, I’m sure you’ll like what you find. Rated #1 colleges for veterans. 2019

GmanTerry

Very well presented. Thank you.

Semper Fi

debeda

I looked them up. I didn't know there were 6 military colleges, I always think only of West Point. It's beautiful!