At RealClearPolitics, Betsy McCaughey asks this question at the end of her article:
“Democrats in favor of socialism need to take a hard look at the results in Venezuela and Cuba. Is that what they want for America?”
Oh good grief, of course they do. They just want to ensure that they are at the top of Failed Socialist Experiment #76 so that they can a.) get obscenely wealthy and b.) thus be shielded from the outcome of the failure. What happens to the working classes is, as always, irrelevant.
As for the author: it’s well-meaning but naïve people like this who fail to understand fully the evils of socialism and its proponents.
Yup, Socialists are either crazy (Let’s try the same thing, it’ll work out different this time!), stupid (Socialism is great!) or evil (Yeah, it’ll suck for you, but I intend to be on top!).
The only people (and I use the term loosely) who seem to really think Socialism can work are college students (too inexperienced to know better) or college teachers (never been outside the Ivy-covered walls to live and work in the real world, because when the real world doesn’t match the theory the real world must be wrong).
I think what emboldens Socialists in this country is that the few who’ve actually studied Marx know that America is exactly the type of nation he envisioned turning to Marxism, i.e. a modern, industrialized Capitalist nation. Everyplace it’s been seriously attempted before has been either feudal (USSR, China) or third-world (basically everyplace in Africa and South America). They lacked the pre-existing conditions that Marx himself saw as necessary to a successful Communist revolution.
Not saying he’s right, or that the Socialists are, but they DO have a point that it’s never been tried in the manner set down by Marx. They still don’t have a grasp of human nature, that the people put into power under Socialism will NOT relinquish that power under Communism or that people won’t work so that others unrelated to them can benefit.
I had a Philosophy prof in college who was a Marxist, she insisted that we needed a strong central government in order to bring about Socialism, but that the people put into power by that government will just turn it all over to the people when it’s time to switch from Socialism to Communism. Oddly, her specialty in Philosophy was Ethics…..
Venezuela has been in the top 10 in GDP per capita. It doesn’t matter how rich a country starts, socialism can make it poor.
Unfortunately, most of the foot soldiers for socialism are more concerned with envy and are okay with that.
There’s also a quasi-religious aspect to Marx, in that Human Progress & the Arrow of History will Inevitably bring about the perfect Communist Society.
All this Bourgeois Reactionism is just delaying that inevitable.
It’s really just another 19th Century pseudoscience that should have been long discarded along with phrenology and mesmerism.
“There’s also a quasi-religious aspect to Marx…”
Nothing quasi- about it. It IS a religion, or more accurately, a Belief System. THAT is one of the major reasons it still gets shilled by the same crowd. Hard to kill a religion. Hard to give it up. How often have you heard of someone converting to another religion? Not a common action, is it? Note that it generally requires someone to fill that void with a replacement belief.
The Soviets knew they would have to eliminate Christianity and all other religions to make communism work. Well, they tried. The Chinese are attempting it again.