There is a real threat to our freedom today, the Democratic Party is moving further and further to the left, or more commonly known as socialism. There is a very strong draw for common folk to lean that way. Yet, it is the common folk who are hurt the most from such a system. They are promised free health and medical insurance, free college education, everyone will have jobs, they will feed and they will take care of everyone’s housing needs. Whether you work, can’t work or don’t want to work, etc. it doesn’t matter. The man on the street will look at those promises and say, “What is wrong with that? Sounds terrific to me. They will pay off my educational debt and my hospital bill, etc. I’ll have money to buy that new car I have always wanted.”
The common folk may not even wonder who is going to pay for it. If they were to ask, the answer would be ‘the government’. The government always has the money to do whatever it wants to. Nobody wants to ask where the government is going to get the money? The standard answer to that question is always: Oh! They will just tax the wealthy 70 to 90%. (That well will dry up fast)
Phil Donahue interviewed the great economist, Milton Friedman, years ago and was telling him how he was against capitalism because it was based on greed. He said, “When you see around the globe the mal-distribution of wealth, the desperate plight of millions of people in undeveloped countries, when you see so few haves and so many have-nots, when you see the greed and the concentration of power, did you ever have a moment of doubt about capitalism and whether greed is a good idea to run on?” Friedman responded by saying, “Well, first of all. Tell me, is there some society that doesn’t run on greed? You think Russia doesn’t run on greed? You think China doesn’t run on greed? What is greed? Of course none of us are greedy; it’s only the other fellow who’s greedy. The world runs on individuals pursuing their separate interests. The great achievements of civilization haven’t come from government bureaucrats. Einstein didn’t construct his theory under instruction from a bureaucrat. Henry Ford didn’t revolutionize the automobile industry that way. In the only cases in which the masses have escaped from the kind of grinding poverty you’re talking about, the only cases in recorded history, are where they have had capitalism and largely free trade. If you want to know where the masses are worst off, it’s exactly in the kinds of societies that depart from that. So that the record of history is absolutely crystal clear: that there is no alternative way so far discovered of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by a free enterprise system.” Donohue added that; “Isn’t that rewarding the ability to manipulate the system?” Friedman responded by saying, “Do leaders choose their appointees on the basis of the virtue of the people appointed or on the basis of their ability and political clout? …I think you’re taking a lot of things for granted. Just tell me where in the world you’re going to find these angels who are going to organize society for us? I don’t even trust you to do that!”
Margaret Thatcher, British Prime Minister added her thoughts on Socialism; “I would much prefer to bring [the Labor Party] down as soon as possible. I think they’ve made the biggest financial mess that any government’s ever made in this country for a very long time, and Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people’s money. It’s quite a characteristic of them. They then start to nationalize everything, and people just do not like more and more nationalization, and they’re now trying to control everything by other means. They’re progressively reducing the choice (freedom) available to ordinary people.” The left seems to prefer demonizing the right, to confronting the facts. That may be because, the facts of life are ‘conservative’.
Ayn Rand had a weekly news article where she wrote about; philosophy, politics, culture, society and other topics including reason, Individualism, and even Capitalism. She said this about capitalism; “America’s abundance was created not by public sacrifices to ‘the common good,’ but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes. They did not starve the people to pay for America’s industrialization. They gave the people better jobs, higher wages and cheaper goods with every new machine they invented, with every scientific discovery or technological advance — and thus the whole country was moving forward and profiting, not suffering, every step of the way.”
The following story is the story of Socialism and Communism (they are the same). “The story of my parents’ Escape From; free health care, a free education, and guaranteed housing.” In the summer of 1968, my mother and father, both in their mid 20s, packed one bag each and left a cramped apartment they shared with relatives in Budapest, Hungary, and boarded a train to enjoy a once-in-a-lifetime vacation in Rome.
The process of obtaining permission from authorities to take this holiday — which my parents were enormously fortunate to have received — would strike an American as a bizarrely grueling bureaucratic exercise. But since nearly any effort to secure a “luxury” item in communist Hungary — owning a car or visiting a country with free enterprise or religious freedom, for instance — met a similar shakedown; the process seemed about right to them. The real trick for my parents was to act eager, but not too eager. What they couldn’t divulge to most who knew them was that they would not return. They would be abandoning all their belongings (modest as they were), secure lifetime jobs, government-provided health care and benefits, everything they knew, to defect to a country that they were taught was rife with injustice and depravity. Luckily, decent people never believe their governments. No, there was no starvation, nor were there death camps in Eastern and Central Europe — at least, not during this iteration of collectivism — yet thousands of people took flight, year after year, sneaking under wires, climbing over walls, hunching down in airplane landing hatches, floating in balloons . . . devising a million creative ways to flee communism. The most infamous impediment to the free movement of people was the Berlin Wall. Built in 1961, the wall stood for 28 years. It was the symbol of the Soviet Union’s Iron Curtain, trapping millions of people in a tragic socialist experiment. The wall became an emblem of the Cold War, as well, which Daniel Johnson, author of the superb article “Seven Minutes that Shook the World,” called “the first conflict that came close to annihilating Western civilization.” … On Sept. 11, 1989, as an Associated Press story from that time relays, “thousands of East Germans, crying, laughing and shouting with happiness, poured into Austria from Hungary early today en route to freedom in West Germany . . . .” By David Harsanyi. That was the story of a people who wanted free health care, a free education, and guaranteed housing (socialism).
Yet, as Democrats justify grandiose proposals by decrying income inequality, many of those who immigrated to the United States from socialist countries see great irony. After all, unending income equality is what drove us to leave our native lands in the first place.
Karl Marx, when asked what his objectives in life were, said, “To dethrone God and destroy capitalism.” To the communists there is no such thing as innate right and wrong, to them deception is but a form of strategy.
Another said, my family left post-Mao Communist China in the mid-1980s precisely because there was so much equality to go around. As a child, I lived in Guangzhou, the third largest city in China. Everyone in my city were equally having, no running hot water, no modern toilet facilities, no refrigerator, no washer, no dryer, and no color television.
David O McKay, President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, said over 50 years ago; “…that communism, with its godless ideology, its complete subjection of the individual to the state, and its complete materialism… is diametrically opposed to everything for which the church stands.”
Vice President Mike Pence said, “It was freedom, not Socialism that gave us the most prosperous economy in the world. It was freedom, not Socialism that ended slavery, won two world wars and stands today as a beacon of hope for all the world. It was freedom not Socialism. America has the most wonderful constitution in the world, a constitution devised by great, and brilliant men who had lived under a tyrant government who oppressed. These men did not sacrifice for greed, many of them lost their fortunes and many even lost their lives for the sacrifice they made in order to work out our constitution. Our constitution guarantees our freedom from oppression. A socialist government has to be able to tell people what they can do and how to do it, to make their system work, that is oppression.
Communism and socialism are the same, as they work to the same end. That, my friends, is Socialism. A place and time where everyone is equally poor except the leaders, it is the modern day ‘Green Deal’, let us not be taken in.