Socialism

Chicken for dinner? This is how much cash you need in #Venezuela https://t.co/sZrJG0XLtq pic.twitter.com/3nzynpa0qN

— Yalda Hakim (@BBCYaldaHakim) August 21, 2018

As Seen On Twitter

Please do click on her profile

As a DSA chapter co-chair I just wanna set the record straight for a minute: communism is good

— Olivia Katbi Smith🌹أوليفيا كاتبي (@livkittykat) June 30, 2018

As Seen On Twitter

It costs $6 to visit Karl Marx’s grave because the owners couldn’t find a way to maintain the property without a source of income. Let that settle in. #Mark #Socialism #Irony pic.twitter.com/mT6CHZjlTZ

— Tim Huelskamp (@CongHuelskamp) May 9, 2018

As Seen On Twitter

Happy 200th birthday, Karl Marx! pic.twitter.com/zoSzfc4qrm

— Noah Smith (@Noahpinion) May 7, 2018

As Seen On Twitter

HISTORY: In 1958, the Chinese government led by Mao Zedong ordered the killing of all sparrows because they ate from crops.

As they were nearly driven to extinction in the country, the number of locusts surged and crops were devastated. pic.twitter.com/UhEVQfn2Pn

— The Spectator Index (@spectatorindex) March 18, 2018

Socialism as explained by socialist..or a four year old

With genuine socialism, you would be doing work that you actually enjoy and want to do. All work will be voluntary. No one would be made to do anything they don’t want to do. That is what happens under capitalism.

— The Socialist Party (@OfficialSPGB) January 30, 2018

Margaret Thatcher Exposed The Infantile Illusions Of Socialism

Via-Forbes

Kyle Smith

Margaret Thatcher’s economic policies, we are often told, were cruel, harsh, immoral. In fact she was a deeply moral thinker, and the moral superiority of the free market was central to her thinking. She made the case for it like no other major political leader.

Before Thatcher, the Conservative party had more or less acquiesced to the Labour view of the economy — as a fixed lump of wealth to be parceled out to whatever interest groups spoke up most loudly. But Thatcher freed up markets to vastly increase national wealth. There were, she declared, “only two political philosophies, noly two ways of governing a country. One is the Socialist-Marxist way in which what matters is not the people but the State. In which decisions affecting people’s lives are taken from them, instead of being taken by them. In which property and savings are taken from the people instead of being more widely held among them. In which directives replace incentives. In which the State is the master of the individual, instead of the servant.” The other, she said, was, “A free economic system” which “not only guarantees the freedom of each individual citizen, it is the surest way to increase the prosperity of the nation as a whole.”

The no-nonsense small-town grocer’s daughter learned, by careful study of the work of F.A. Hayek and Milton Friedman, both of whose lectures she attended, that her instincts about hard work, market competition, thrift and a sound currency were exactly the blast of oxygen Britain needed to save it from slow asphyxiation by the trade unions.

In 1981, during a round of fiscal tightening, she said of her opponents, “I tell you what they really mean, they mean, ‘We don’t like the expenditure we have agreed, we are unwilling to raise the tax to pay for it. Let us print the money instead.’ The most immoral path of all. Because what that is saying is let us quietly steal a certain amount from every pound in circulation, let us steal a certain amount from every pound saved in building societies, in national savings, from every person who has been thrifty.” Accusing Thatcher of being “heartless” is an infantile response, the protest of a child who howls at the prick of the needle that staves off disease.

The unions’ many supporters in the media and popular culture failed to recognize that big labor’s demands were unsustainable in the long run — Britain could no longer maintain coal, steel and shipbuilding without massive subsidies that simply transferred wealth from productive industries to moribund ones. Moreover, a country’s ability to keep increasing the standard of living depends on more growth, more efficiency, more output per hour worked. The nationalized union-run industries were a drag on everyone’s advancement.

“I am not declaring war on the unions or their leaders,” Thatcher said in 1980. “But I am challenging their illusion that Government can be a universal provider. The fact is that if the public sector unions take more it will mean less for those who work in the private sector….When expansion comes, it will be just as important to match pay to productivity as it is now during the recession. The new leadership being shown by management, the new realism being shown by workforces, must continue. If our own industries do not become more efficient and produce the products that people want, other nations’ industries will. They will get our business and our jobs.” She was as good as her word; as she held real government growth to 13 percent during her premiership, private industry blossomed. Real GDP rose by 23 percent.

That Thatcher enjoyed robust support of “the nation of shopkeepers,” as Napoleon accurately referred to the ultimate source of British power, confounded the hard left and their allies in important media outlets. But Thatcher simply put into practice the common-sense idea that government’s job was to create the conditions for the greatest advancement for the greatest possible number. Decreasing the influence of self-interested power brokers “cocooned in a world of their own” was critical to that mission; government is not your friend.

Quoting the 19th century French economist Frédéric Bastiat, she wondered in a 1978 speech, “Since the natural inclinations of mankind are so evil that its liberty must be taken away, how is it that the inclinations of the socialists are good? Are not the legislators and their agents part of the human race? Do they believe themselves moulded from another clay than the rest of mankind?”

No, Thatcher said: “You can’t make people good, kind, generous, thoughtful or dutiful by compulsion. True harmony comes from the willing cooperation of free men. It is not served by an over-regulated society. Socialists, on the other hand, believe in increasing the power of government, in reducing the choices left to the people, and hence in diminishing their liberties. Their methods are high taxation, regimentation, compulsion, closed shops and blacklists.”

Other leaders or would-be leaders of Western societies have made the case for capitalism as a necessary evil. Not so Thatcher: to her it was and is a necessary good. In her ringing 1977 “New Renaissance” speech, she said, The economic success of the Western world is a product of its moral philosophy and practice. The economic results are better because the moral philosophy is superior. It is superior because it starts with the individual, with his uniqueness, his responsibility, and his capacity to choose….Choice is the essence of ethics: if there were no choice, there would be no ethics, no good, no evil; good and evil have meaning only insofar as man is free to choose.”

The U.S. Election is a Referendum on Civilization

Via-American Thinker

By Daren Jonescu

That the election of November 6, 2012, has the potential to be a definitive moment in American history is now almost a truism. This conception may sound overblown to the ignorant and disengaged, but in fact it is a great understatement. As America is the only nation left in which freedom is still on the ballot, this definitive U.S. election means even more, in truth, than most voters may realize. It is a referendum on the survival of modern civilization.

A recent blog post at the Weekly Standard displays the results of a BBC election poll taken in various countries around the world. The results demonstrate that if the rest of the world were allowed to vote, Barack Obama would win in a Saddam-like landslide.

Throughout what is left of the civilized world, Obama's superiority to Mitt Romney, and in general Democrats' superiority to Republicans, is the default assumption, regarded as beyond question. One who objects to that opinion has a lot of explaining to do. And one who dares to admit thinking the United States of America a very agreeable proposition is regarded as either an infidel or a dope.

These two presuppositions -- that the Democrats are the good guys, and that America is essentially a bad thing -- should always be understood as a pair. Together, they reveal exactly what the modern Democratic Party and the American media have spent decades trying to hide from their fellow citizens -- namely, that to prefer the Democrats is to dislike America.

Boehner Takes On Radical-In-Chief

Via-The American Spectator

By Jefrey Lord 

"In sum, the fears of Obama's harshest critics are justified. The president of the United States is a socialist."
-- Stanley Kurtz, writing in Radical-In-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism

Within hours, John Boehner, a son of the Ohio working class, will become Speaker of the United States House of Representatives.

Just in time.

In an exhaustively researched book Radical-In-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism, released at the end of 2010, longtime journalist Stanley Kurtz provides a thorough documentation of what so many have suspected of President Barack Obama. Although he was initially skeptical, Kurtz's extremely detailed research done over two-years in archives and with information from fresh and knowledgeable sources has led him to a disturbing conclusion. In Kurtz's concluding, blunt words:

The president of the United States is a socialist.

Kurtz also focuses on the late American socialist Michael Harrington's "socialist realignment strategy" -- deliberately dividing Americans by class "with Republicans marked out as the aggressors," forcing the "have-nots" to act as a unified, pro-socialist -- and electorally dominant -- force.

Had this book been written in 2008 when Sean Hannity was uncovering the connection between then-Senator Obama, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright and, as Hannity correctly terms him, the "unrepentant terrorist" Bill Ayers, Obama would surely still be in the Senate, with either Hillary Clinton or John McCain now preparing their State of the Union address.

Yet ironically, perhaps it really is better that the book is still freshly sitting on bookstore shelves as John Boehner prepares to lead 63 Republican House freshmen into the majority on the morrow. It is a must read for every one of those 63 members and their new Senate counterparts.

Why?

 While Boehner will be installed with the title "Speaker of the House," in fact history has thrust him into the role of a commanding general in what has now become an American war against this "socialist realignment strategy" -- the political cancer that is socialism. Most importantly, he will have the fresh troops he needs to do battle with the pernicious political doctrine that the late F.A. Hayek all too correctly labeled as one that has the capability to

destroy, perhaps forever, not only developed individuals and buildings and art and cities (which we have long known to be vulnerable to the destructive powers of moralities and ideologies of various sorts), but also traditions, institutions, and interrelations without which such creations could hardly have come into being or ever be recreated. 

Two years into the Obama presidency, with a hard record of performance as opposed to airy campaign rhetoric about a post-ideological pragmatism, the American people have learned the hard way just why Obama has been so vague about certain aspects of his background. Including but not limited to government takeovers of car companies and financial institutions, the massive stimulus spending and resulting unemployment, the first FCC attempts to corral free speech on the Internet, and last but not least the all-out assault on the American health care system known as "Obamacare," Americans have absorbed the body blows of learning just what hard core socialism can begin to mean. 

The Wall Street Journal put it this way in a New Year's Eve editorial assessing what Americans had learned in the last two years -- and what lay ahead:

For today's left, the main goal of politics is not to respond to public opinion. The goal is to impose the dream of an egalitarian entitlement state whether the public likes it or not…. The lesson for Republicans is to understand the nature of their political opponents and this long-term bet.

Say again: "The lesson for Republicans is to understand the nature of their political opponents and this long-term bet."

It falls to John Boehner to understand that as he takes the gavel from Nancy Pelosi he and his new majority are not dealing with a collection of separate, seemingly disconnected issues. Whether the subject is repealing Obamacare or raising the debt ceiling, cutting spending or investigating the Department of Justice decisions on the New Black Panthers or trying al Qaeda terrorists in New York, the overarching issue is the attempt to impose what Kurtz calls "stealth socialism" -- deliberately dividing Americans by class and hence transforming America forever into some sort of European-style socialist state. A nation where, as the WSJ editorial also points out, the goal is to totally reshape America so that "the government will control 40% to 50% of all economic resources."

Let's put just one face on how the results of all this would work if Obama were to succeed -- and Boehner to fail.

Since Obama Medicare chief Dr. Donald Berwick has re-launched the "death panel" debate by inserting the government into end-of-life decisions by way of a secretly hatched fiat, let's discuss Linda O'Boyle to illustrate just why John Boehner's job has surprisingly cast him into the role of a general even more than a Speaker.

Linda O'Boyle was a 64-year old British mother of three sons and grandmother to four. She had bowel cancer, a disease that can bring excruciating pain. Her doctor prescribed Cetuximab, a medication she was told would improve her chances of fighting the disease.

Enter socialism.

Mrs. O'Boyle was told by Britain's National Health Service -- the kindly government institution that provides so-called "free" medical care -- that they decided she couldn't have the drug. They simply refused to pay for it on grounds of rationing resources. O'Boyle promptly withdrew her savings and bought the drug herself. Finding this out, the NHS angrily informed her she had broken their bureaucratic rules -- and henceforth would be denied all treatment. Mrs. O'Boyle -- beloved by family and friends -- was left to die a painful death, which she did, within months. Uproar ensued.

Result, the bureaucracy decided to edge away from this and that policy that resulted in the death of Linda O'Boyle. To issue another government edict from another set of bureaucrats.

But the chilling point remains for Americans. This is what happens when bureaucrats -- not doctors and patients -- wind up making medical decisions.

Plainly put, socialism killed Linda O'Boyle. While bowel cancer may have eventually brought about her death, make no mistake. Socialism took this woman's life.

What does the lesson of Linda O'Boyle mean for John Boehner? What does this have to do with the thorough details of Barack Obama's life and political vision as unearthed by Stanley Kurtz?

It means that Americans can now understand all too vividly just what Barack Obama's vision for America really is. They can understand whyObama and his allies think and act the way they do. They can understand the point the WSJ makes when it writes:

For today's left, the main goal of politics is not to respond to public opinion. The goal is to impose the dream of an egalitarian entitlement state whether the public likes it or not…

The imposition of this "dream of an egalitarian state" explains exactly why millions of Americans don't have a job or why oil drilling in the Gulf is banned or why the Federal Communications Commission is attempting to control the Internet, among other things. And it explains why we are headed for a health care system that will produce the inevitable tragedy of American Linda O'Boyles if Boehner doesn't work to stop this socialist agenda in its tracks.

Earlier in the WSJ, R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., the founder and editor-in-chief of The American Spectator, noted that:

In the tumultuous history of postwar American liberalism, there has been a slow but steady decline of which liberals have been steadfastly oblivious. The heirs of the New Deal are down to around 20% of the electorate…..As a political movement liberalism is dead. They do not have the numbers. They do not have the policies.

Tyrrell is right. Which makes the WSJ point of an American left -- 20% of the electorate -- hell-bent on imposing "an egalitarian state" on the other 80% all the more disturbing.

What are some of the things that Kurtz's research has unearthed?

What specifically is it that he has found that makes John Boehner's job more important than that of the average Speaker of the House?

Whether documenting Obama's attendance at events like the first Socialist Scholars Conference while a student at Columbia University, the role played in his thinking by Marxist theorists like Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, and the Communist Frank Marshall Davis (the latter an Obama family friend mentioned only by first name in Obama's Dreams from My Father) the parade of socialist mentors (like Jeremiah Wright), the role of Chicago socialist Mayor Harold Washington, radical friends, involvement with extremist left-wing organizations like ACORN or the Midwest Academy, Kurtz connects the dots not visible in 2008 with those that were surfaced during the presidential election by Hannity and others who are not the reluctant mainstream media.

Taken together with the record of the first two years of the Obama administration, Radical-In-Chief communicates the importance of the task that lies ahead of Boehner and his new colleagues.

Barack Obama and his allies are attempting to re-make America into a nation of perpetual class-warfare, a land divided between the "rich" and "the poor." Precisely the kind of country that would have kept the working-class John Boehner forever poor and denied opportunity -- an opportunity which, through his own hard work, will now make this working-class America kid with 11 siblings the third most powerful official in the government.

In leading this fight, both Boehner and other Republicans will have to be careful.

Says Kurtz: 

[W]hen President Obama says "Go for it" to Republicans who hope to repeal his health-care-reform law, he means it. Those who already see Obama as a socialist tend to think of his insistence on backing health-care reform in the face of collapsing political support as the suicidal impulse of a true ideologue. It's more likely that Obama has a long-term class-based realignment strategy in mind. Obama would love the Republicans to try to take away the health care he's offered to millions of uninsured. Taking a leaf from the Cloward-Piven [socialist] handbook, Obama hopes that a Republican campaign for repeal will ignite a political movement of the poor that will energize and radicalize the Democratic Party.

Which is to say, when John Boehner takes the gavel as Speaker of the House, he will now be leading the fight in the House of Representatives not just against Obamacare or any other specific Obama-backed piece of legislation or regulation.

The new Speaker and his 63 troops -- and those new Senators like Florida's Marco Rubio, Kentucky's Rand Paul, and Utah's Mike Lee -- will be leading the charge against Obama's version of Michael Harrington's "socialist realignment strategy."

It will be the first political battle royal of the second decade of the 21st century. To borrow from the late, unlamented Saddam Hussein, this will be the mother of all political battles. Coming to a head in November of 2012.

One can only hope as Boehner and his new conservative troops set out on this battle that they will remember this from Ronald Reagan's 1964 speech for Barry Goldwater. A speech from another time -- yet for the same battle Boehner faces today;

You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children's children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done.

That "first step into darkness" that Reagan spoke of is here. Now. Obamacare is in fact that first step into darkness of which Reagan spoke. As the WSJ noted, it is the "main chance" for the left. Obamacare will "fundamentally change the relationship between government and individuals if it is not repealed or replaced." We are now on the path that Ronald Reagan warned could only lead to disaster -- just as it has in fact done for Linda O'Boyle.

John Boehner's task is to get America off that path.

It won't be easy, either. But failure is not an option.

The Immorality of Class Warfare

Via-American Thinker

By Henry Oliner

"Boule de Suif" is a famous short story by French writer Guy de Maupassant about a group of passengers in a horse-drawn coach trapped behind Prussian lines during the Franco-Prussian War. The passengers include two nuns, an upper-class factory owner and his wife, a petty bourgeoisie couple who own a small shop, a politician, a wealthy aristocratic couple, and of course the prostitute named Elizabeth Rousset. The name "Boule de Suif" translates to "Bowl of Fat," a reference to the prostitute from a time when fat women were considered very attractive.

Before their detention, the passengers enjoy each other's company, and the prostitute even shares a basket of food with her co-travelers. They realize that the Prussian officer is holding them until the attractive prostitute beds her captor. At first they support her refusal to submit, but over the period of captivity they rationalize why she should submit so they can all go free. Ms. Rousset submits to their will and her captor, and the captives are set free.

After her humiliating sacrifice, the passengers shun her with icy silence and even refuse to share food with her even though she had graciously shared her food beforehand. Rousset becomes increasingly outraged at her treatment at the hands of this cross-section of nineteenth-century French society.

This moral ambiguity of needing help from one scorned by the recipient appears in other literature. One of my favorites is Hombre, the 1967 western directed by Martin Ritt and starring Paul Newman as John Russell, a white man raised by Apaches. A similar social cross-section on the stagecoach holds Russell in contempt, and one woman, upon learning that he is an Indian, insists that he ride up top with the driver rather than share the company of the other passengers.

Russell ultimately uses his survival skills acquired from his Indian upbringing to save the "civilized" riders from the clutches of a criminal gang. The social core represented by the cross-section on the coach is again saved by the very element they hold in contempt.

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand makes the same point in her far less subtle story about the oppression of the industrialist producers and creators by the socialist looters, who both detest and demand the former's social contribution.

Listening to the declarations of class warfare by congressmen who demonize wealth and the wealthy, I am reminded of these stories of the moral hypocrisy displayed by those who demand without respect. They require more and more, yet they blame these subjects for any setbacks caused by said subjects' imperfections or unwillingness to bend to the will of those who scorn them.

The reality is that our society depends on growth that only our business and entrepreneurial sector can provide. Our government is addicted to economic growth to fund its expanding social programs. While the wealth-demonizers picture the wealthy as stereotypical fat cats -- in top hats and tails in chauffeur-driven limousines, with cuff links in the shape of the dollar sign, lighting their big cigars with hundred-dollar bills, with their fur-draped women dripping in huge diamonds standing by their yachts -- the reality is that most of the people they would characterize as wealthy in real dollar terms are not very different from you and me. They drive the same vehicles, shop at the same stores, and attend the same churches.

As our tax code has become increasingly progressive and thus ever more dependent on the wealthy to support the government, we have become more sensitive to the economic decline from the corrections of normal business cycles. But the financial contraction we are currently experiencing is both more rare and more difficult to correct, so it is even more sensitive to the contraction. This partially explains why stimulative policies that appeared to work during cyclical corrections are failing now.

The ruling class has become more dependent on the wealthy and yet holds them in the same contempt in which the stagecoach riders held the French prostitute and the Apache passenger. There is something morally repugnant about expecting rescue and salvation from the same people you demonize.

Tuesday's Election Was a Vote to Bring the 19th Century to an End

Via-American Thinker

By J.R. Dunn

The 19th century was the nursery for contemporary politics. Every form of modern political activity -- fascism, communism, socialism, liberalism -- has its roots in that epoch. (Yes, I'm fully aware of such figures as Locke, Burke, Madison, and Jefferson, but their work was hijacked and twisted all out of recognition, in large part by French revolutionaries and assorted German academics. Edmund Burke was so appalled by this that, having invented modern liberalism, he turned around and invented modern conservatism.)

Anything coming out of the 19th century is going to be imbued with rationalism, the dominant intellectual credo of the period. Rationalism has nothing to do with rationality per se; it is instead an ideology (note that "ism" -- always a giveaway) based on a severe simplification of Cartesianism, humanist doctrine, and the results of modern scientific research. For our purposes, rationalism can be defined as a reductionist doctrine holding that the universe and everything within it is a mechanism, governed by simple laws easily discovered, understood, and manipulated. A rationalist is a very smart individual who, if he doesn't know all the answers, can tell you where to get them. A political rationalist is all this and more, since political rationalism is the arena in which the limitations of the ideology first became apparent. Namely, rationalism, taken to its logical extreme (and how could it be otherwise?), leads inevitably to chaos, misery, and death on continental scales.

Most leaders of the modern era were political rationalists: Lenin, Mussolini, Woodrow Wilson, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Clement Atlee, FDR, Lyndon Johnson, Harold Wilson, all the way down to Mr. Barack Obama, who lives in Washington in a building called the "White House." Whether communist, fascist, progressive, socialist, or liberal, all believed in the tenets of rationalism. Since the universe is a mechanism, and everything within it shares that quality, then society, in all its varied manifestations, was a mechanism to these rationalists as well. The social and political machinery was open to manipulation, along with all the little machines within -- humans, they were called. All were perfectible, and all could be made right with the proper formulae.

The doctrine of political rationalism remains in force today, even though it has been derelict for over a century. It got that way thanks to Planck, Einstein, and the new physics. The discovery of the quanta and its various tricks (still being uncovered to this day) rendered any consideration of a "rational" universe ludicrous. Particles (perhaps better called "entities") could be in two places at once, could move backwards in time, could interact though separated by billions of light years. (This implies that there is no such thing as a "universe" at all, at least one containing empty space, as far as the particle itself is concerned. Try to come up with a "rational" explanation for that.) While the universe does have rules, they are not our rules, and they do not follow any rational plan or formula. Physicists long ago threw in the towel and today think in terms of probabilities rather than absolutes (some very reluctantly, including Einstein himself, who argued for decades with Neils Bohr and others that the universe must have a deterministic basis).

There are many areas of modern life that this century-old news has not reached. This includes much of the educational establishment and even many areas of science itself, e.g., the descriptive schools such as zoology or botany. It also includes the world of politics, and specifically liberal politics. Liberals, whether American Democrats or European progressives, still insist that the world is a rational construct based on simplistic, easily understood rules, and that the levers can be successfully worked by the likes of Barack Obama and his czars, despite all evidence to the contrary. They continue following the same paradigm as did their 19th-century predecessors, exactly as if nothing at all has changed. You'd almost call them "reactionary."

It is a good thing that the universe is not a mechanism. It is a good thing because political rationalism has developed into one of the most destructive forces in human history. Rationalist political systems are the equivalent of natural catastrophes such as plague, earthquake, or an asteroid strike. During the 20th century, rationalist politics killed well over two hundred million people under such regimes as the Soviets, the Maoists, and the Khmer Rouge, along with social-nationalist offshoots such as the Nazis and the Italian Fascists. (Rationalism has killed no small number in the U.S. too, but in a quieter, more shadowy fashion. My upcoming book, Death by Liberalism, clearly demonstrates that such government programs as criminal justice reform, fuel standards, and environmental regulations have resulted in the death of at least 500,000 Americans in the past fifty years.) This seems a high price to pay for what amounts to a metaphysical error. But not only does pure rationalism go unrewarded, but it is evidently so alien to the actual nature of the universe as to be actively lethal. The Nazis and communists would have murdered no matter what the nature of their system. But even in the United States, operating according to high moral standards and with the best of intentions, political rationalism remains deadly.

It was this that American voters rejected at the polls Tuesday. Few things in history have been so profoundly and completely disproven as mechanistic politics. For reasons I do not completely understand, the death toll in this country has remained hidden. But a cursory glance at rationalist programs such as the New Deal and the Great Society, not to mention the nameless fumblings of Jimmy Carter (an engineer and a rationalist par excellence), are more than enough. Liberal politics is responsible for economic, social, and political damage on a historical scale, and the American people are aware of it.

Despite the record, as soon as Barack Obama got into office, he began enacting programs as clearly rationalistic as any ever attempted in this country, based on centralization, deficit spending, collectivism, and an unprecedented level of government control. All this would be easily recognized by the Fabians, the Progressives, and the Fascists.

The result has been as disastrous as any previous liberal effort: a dragging economy facing stagflation and possible further collapse, unemployment at highs not seen for decades, a level of new regulation that has all but paralyzed economic activity. And yet greater disasters will emerge tomorrow through ObamaCare, with its regulations and mandates already strangling the health care system even before they go into effect. Hope and Change is leading to the same results that anyone with even a superficial knowledge of the 20th century, with its New Deals, Five-Year Plans, Great Leaps Forward, and Great Societies, would have expected.

The voters have seen two years of it, and they have had enough. ObamaCare was the final straw. Obama, Zeke Emanuel (that's right, there are more than one of them), and Donald Berwick, rationalists all, appear hell-bent on making the mistakes identical to FDR's Brain Trust and the Great Society whiz kids (not to mention various commissars and Red Guards), whatever the cost in human misery and lives.

The voters refused to settle for that. They had heard the horror stories from Europe, had seen the rich Canadians racing across the border to Americans hospitals for treatments that somehow "weren't available" in the heath care utopia up north, and, more to the point, saw their own health care begin to deteriorate even as the ink of Obama's signature dried. They are not dialecticians or intellectual historians, but they know a stupid thing when they see a stupid thing, and they have voted to end it.

(One thing that Americans do not know about socialized health care, because it has been deliberately ignored in the "debate," is that the number of accidental deaths under the British National Health Service has skyrocketed to 95,000 per year due to filth, incompetence, and the effects of bureaucracy. The equivalent number in the U.S. would be 450,000 annually. Yet Donald Berwick, personally charged by Obama with "transforming" the American health system, says, "I am romantic about the NHS ... I love it!")

For generations we have been in the hands of men of certain strange limitations, men who evidently believe that the years still have 18s in front of them, men who think that nothing of import has taken place in the last century and a half, that no real progress in the intellectual, industrial, scientific, or medical senses has occurred. These men believe that the universe is a simple place, one created for them to meddle with. These men think they have the answers. These are men of such powerful self-delusion that they can ignore incredible levels of human misery, entire cities destroyed, wrecked economies, sections of continents reduced to near-barbarity, and mountain ranges of corpses in their eagerness to drive the "masses" onward, to push the ignorant peasantry toward that bright, glowing vision that beckons just out of reach.

The peasants will be driven no farther. This week, they voted an entire worldview dead. Not that it will simply lie down, zombie doctrine that it has been for a century or more. It will have to be beaten down, drawn, quartered, and burned, with the ashes scattered to the winds. The process will require years. But the old, failed paradigm has been given a death blow. American eyes have opened at last, and they will not close again. Plenty of battles remain, but it is safe to believe, in the words of one of the great modern conservatives, and Democrats, in the true sense: "Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."

Now if we can only get the GOP to let go of the 1950s. That'll be a hell of a battle.

On Leftists, Progressives and Socialists

Via-Human Events

by Walter E. Williams

One of the greatest sources of confusion and deception is the difference between leftists, progressives, socialists, communists and fascists. I thought about this as I caught a glimpse of the Oct. 2 "One Nation" march on Washington. The participants proudly marched with banners, signs and placards reading "Socialists," "Ohio U Democratic Socialists," "International Socialists Organization," "Socialist Party USA," "Build A Socialist Alternative" and other signs expressing support for socialism and communism. They had stands where they sold booklets under the titles of "Marxism and the State," "Communist Manifesto," "Four Marxist Classics," "The Road to Socialism" and similar titles.

The gathering had the support of the AFL-CIO, Service Employees International Union, stalwarts of the Democratic Party such as Al Sharpton and organizations such as the NAACP, the National Council of La Raza, Green for All, the Sierra Club, and the Children's Defense Fund.

What goes unappreciated is that socialists and communists have produced the greatest evil in mankind's history. You say, "Williams, what in the world are you talking about? Socialists, communists and their fellow travelers care about the little guy in his struggle for a fair shake! They're trying to promote social justice." Let's look at some of the history of socialism and communism.

Nazism is a form of socialism. In fact, Nazi stands for National Socialist German Workers' Party. Nazis murdered 20 million of their own people and in nations they captured. The unspeakable acts of Adolf Hitler's Socialist Workers' Party pale in comparison to the horrors committed in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Between 1917 and 1987, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin and their successors murdered, or were otherwise responsible for the deaths of, 62 million of their own people. Between 1949 and 1987, Mao Tse-tung and his successors were responsible for the deaths of 76 million Chinese. The most authoritative tally of history's most murderous regimes is in a book by University of Hawaii's Professor Rudolph J. Rummel, "Death by Government." A wealth of information is provided at his website.

You say, "Williams, isn't it a bit unfair to lump the "One Nation" communists, socialists and their supporters with mass murderers such as Hitler, Stalin and Mao Tse-tung? After all, they expressed no such murderous goal." When Hitler, Stalin and Mao were campaigning for political power, you can bet they didn't campaign on the promise to murder millions of their own people, and probably the thought of doing so never crossed their minds. Those horrors were simply the end result of long evolution of ideas leading to consolidation of power in central government in the quest for "social justice." It was decent but misguided earlier generations of Germans, Russians and Chinese, like many of today's Americans, who would have cringed at the thought of genocide, who built the Trojan horse for a Hitler, a Stalin or Mao to take over. But as Voltaire said, "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

While America's leftists, socialists and communists condemn Hitler, they give the world's most horrible murderers a pass. First, they make a false distinction between fascism, communism and socialism but more importantly, they sympathize with the socioeconomic goals of communism and socialism. The primary goal of communism and socialism is government ownership or control over the means of production. In the U.S., only a few people call for outright government ownership of the means of production. They might have learned that government ownership would mess things up. Instead, they've increasingly called for quasi-ownership through various forms of government regulation, oversight, taxation and subsidies. After all, if someone has the power to tell you how you may use your property, it's tantamount to his owing it.

I believe most Americans find the ideals and principles of socialism, communism and progressivism repugnant, but by our sanctioning greater government centralization and its control over our lives, we become their dupes or, as Lenin said, "useful idiots."



Dr. Williams is a nationally syndicated columnist, former chairman of the economics department at George Mason University, and author of More Liberty Means Less Government