George Rebane
[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 26 June 2019.]
Today’s dramatic tack to the left by the Democratic Party and its legion of presidential candidates has brought capitalism vs socialism to center-stage in the public forum. The Democrat candidates share a common vision for their fundamentally transformed America, but each of them has fashioned their own particular path to their promised land. By this I mean that each has outlined a particular sequence of wealth transfer and confiscation policies designed to solidify support from their leftwing core and attract the maximum of mid-road and undeclared voters to the collectivist cause.
Their message is simple and effective – ‘we’ll give you a lot more free stuff, and tax the bejeezus out of the evil and greedy rich to pay for it all’. After half century of controlling public education in America, we now have at least two generations of voters who know absolutely nothing about capitalism, and little or nothing about socialism. What the Millennials and the lightly read have been taught is that socialism works – look at how we describe Europe. Today capitalism for these Americans is akin to a dirty word that refers to a broken social order which allows the rapacious rich to rape the middle-class and the poor who have no opportunities to advance. America’s history has been taught as a three century long dystopian trail of tears that has spread its misery worldwide.
Today socialism is viewed by tens of millions of Americans as an ideological better of capitalism, republicanism, libertarianism, conservatism, … – an idea that today is definitely suited for being promoted in polite company. When the conversation turns to comparing and contrasting socialism with other ways of organizing society, then inevitably the notion of sustainable socialism surfaces. And such conversational turns could even yield some productive ideas if the participants agree that socialism, as capitalism, is not an all-or-nothing form of governance – both exist and operate in variable configurations and degrees of implementation. No markets have been totally unregulated, and even in Europe no government controls all means of production and distribution, as is practiced in socialist China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, Vietnam, Cuba, and divers African dictatorships.
Between ordinary people, the big rift or tear in understanding socialism begins when it becomes clear that socialistic governments can operate only under centralized planning and control, which always requires a massive and continuous transfer of wealth from a diminishing troop of producers, those whose means of production have yet to be nationalized. The short form of this understanding is that socialism’s lifeblood is other people’s money, since socialism has never been good at generating all the wealth it wants to redistribute. This is the dirty little secret about socialism that its promoting elites always keep from their established minions and, with greater care, from the sought-after new cadres of supporters.
Promoting socialism has enjoyed considerable success in our universities and colleges which are and have been overwhelmingly staffed by progressive professors and administrations. Collectivist content, long at home in the humanities, is now being mandated into the institutions’ STEM curricula while the remnants of Western civilization studies are exorcised. This itself explains why so many of our young blindly embrace collectivism while living in an abundantly rich country to which over half the world would like to immigrate. The need to reconcile these existential facts about their environment never enters their carefully constructed worldview.
With such a ‘constituency in waiting’, it is a small wonder that so many Democrat politicians have come out of the woodwork, each seeing himself successfully campaigning against their hated and daily vilified incumbent president. And given President Trump’s propensity to keep his accomplishments out of the news, the Democrats have a real chance at replacing him if along the way they don’t destroy each other and let the cat out of the bag that they don’t have a believable policy, let alone a plan, between them. The big hope with all the promised free stuff is that the voters never discover that by itself a loudly and oft-repeated promise is NOT a plan for delivering on that promise.
My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the addended transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively. However, my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR. Thank you for listening.
[Addendum] Recently Jonathon Rockoff described the latest and greatest development in gene therapy that promises to cure some dreaded diseases (here). That’s the good news. But the bad news for many beyond those with the dreaded diseases is that the therapy costs almost $2M per treatment. There are many living among us who go ballistic about such a price being outrageous, unfair, egregious, cynical, and evil. Why? Because it limits its benefits to only the very rich people. None on the left realize that markets for things new and beneficial always start with the rich customers, and then a miracle happens as competition enters and prices drop to allow the rest benefit from it. If you prevent that natural order of things, then things like that don’t happen. And this is always a puzzle for the light-thinking lefties.
Then there is the lady, recently writing in our local Union, who laments the unfairness of certain millionaires having the gall to pay off the student loans at graduating ceremonies of only certain colleges (Ms Becky Goodwin, we heard her here). Why not pay off all student loans? Discriminating in such manner again draws the opprobrium detailed above. Why don’t we have a government big enough and rich enough to provide such a benefit to her graduating children and all the nation’s students? To such individuals a system like ours is manifestly undemocratic, selfish, and should be changed at first opportunity.
And we must definitely include Umair Haque of the UK, prolific propagandist on Medium.com and formerly ranked on ‘Thinkers 50’, an auto-promoted list of the world’s top management thinkers. Mr Haque also had some kind of relationship with the Harvard Business School. The man is about as hard-left and virulently anti-American as I have encountered anywhere, and I have followed his work product for the last several months as part of my ongoing effort to stay current with leftwing thought. His latest rant is against capitalism, and I recommend it to all as an example what passes today for the intellectual outpourings of the Left (here). In my experience, I have yet to find a more ignorant ‘intellectual’ than Umair Haque.
And here are some points to consider –
- EU held up as template for success, a success succored by the powerful American economy and foreign policy implementing a decades-long Pax Americana;
- But growth and ability to deliver on basic services like healthcare and power has constantly been strained in Europe – prices going up and product/service going down;
- EU countries have quietly been attempting to return from socialism – GB (Maggie), Germany, Denmark, Sweden, France, …;
- Result is that despite the largess of peace and world trade, EU growth is low and unemployment high – levels correlate with levels of socialism;
- Author W.R. Mead documents 6.8% unemployment, 1.3% on defense (Estonia 2.4%)
- In meanwhile our liberals keep using the fact that no EU country has yet to crash and burn, and/or turn to tyranny as ample proof that socialism works, and that the EU is a stable exemplar of socialism’s success. They work with different facts, and no one offers any hope that a socialist will ever reason with facts;
- Basing their economic paradigm on redistributing OPM, socialists have never been good at economic management or successfully predicting the impact of their policies on the economy. They are, however, excellent at manufacturing exigencies why their plans don’t work out – their guiding star in this effort was the USSR’s perennial explanation of its agricultures failure to meet its 5-year plans, 70+ years of “bad weather”;
- Socialists are people with whom historical Americans will never have much in common. They are a nasty lot that look at the uncompliant Americans as a population segment that must be literally whipped into shape through more detailed and voluminous regulations, more enforcing government guns in the street, an enlarged ‘criminal justice’ system, re-education programs, and finally, their version of ‘the wall’ – the one they put you in front of, not the one to keep our borders secure.
[29jun19 update] Ramirez shows how we are forced to determine who gets federal monies, and how we are to be represented in Congress – the Democrat solution.
[3jul19 update] Umair Haque on Medium.com is a propagandist with a loud voice. He is also an acolyte of communism who labor hard in the vineyards of socialism. His almost daily screeds against the US and capitalism are a staple on that outlet. He is the posterchild of a leftist trumpeter who is either abysmally ignorant of anything he expounds on, or remarkably cynical and convinced that his readers have the aggregate smarts of a doorknob. As testimonials to this assessment, I invite your attention to his ‘(Why) The Future is a Choice Between Two Socialisms’ and ‘What American Collapse Teaches Us About Human Nature’. We also met him here.
rebanesruminations.com 
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