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Archive of posts published in the tag: socialism

Distinguishing Welfare from Socialism

Political terms evolve and Kevin Williamson makes an rare but important distinction. Providing for the poor from the public sector is not not synonymous with socialism.  Socialism is more about government control of the economy than mere redistribution. from Venezuela

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Bernie’s Road to Serfdom

from Bret Stephens at The Wall Street Journal, What’s Socialism, Dad? When Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez died in 2013, an obscure U.K. parliamentarian tweeted, “Thanks Hugo Chavez for showing that the poor matter and wealth can be shared. He made massive contributions

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Lurch Toward Socialism

from Millennials heed the siren call of socialism by Joel Kotkin at Orange County Register The biggest and most important development has been the massive support among the new generation of voters for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and his open embrace

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Smothered in Quasi-Socialism

from Mona Charen at National Review, How Bernie Sanders Became the Conscience of the Democratic Party The idea that “the rich” sit permanently atop a pyramid of worker drones is false. Consider the companies that were once ubiquitous but are now

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The Anti-Math Party

from Mona Charen at National Review, How Bernie Sanders Became the Conscience of the Democratic Party No problem, the self-described socialist counters, he will raise the money by taxing the “greedy one percent.” The problem is — arithmetic. The top one

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Democrats Shift a Hard Left

Bernie Sanders has opened a wound for the soul of the Democratic Party. Instead of socialism being an extreme wing of the Democratic Party it has become the center and the players have to define themselves based on that belief.

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Santa Claus with a Brooklyn Accent

from Mona Charen at National Review, How Bernie Sanders Became the Conscience of the Democratic Party “Socialist” was once an epithet in American politics, but the Obama years may have effected a change. Fully 25 percent of Americans, Pew reported

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Similarities Between Nazis and Commies

From The Telegraph, Leftists become incandescent when reminded of the socialist roots of Nazism by Daniel Hannan Marx’s error, Hitler believed, had been to foster class war instead of national unity – to set workers against industrialists instead of conscripting

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A Distinction without a Difference

From The Wall Street Journal The Democrats’ Socialist Surge by Jason Riley: excerpt: If the Democratic Party once felt the need to distinguish itself from socialism, that no longer seems to be the case. When Mr. Sanders entered Congress in

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Socialist Means and Ends

“What he denied was that they could maintain those values and still carry out their proclaimed program of extensive central planning. As he succinctly put it, “socialism can be put into practice only by methods which most socialists disapprove.”104 Even

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Schooling Bernie Sanders

Jeff Jacoby in The Boston Globe explains basic economics to the incredibly ignorant Bernie Sanders in It’s socialism, not deodorant, that starves the poor excerpts: “You don’t necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different

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Churchill’s Road to Serfdom

From National Review, Lion to the Last by Larry Arnn: Excerpts: In June 1945, a month after the Germans’ surrender, with the general-election campaign under way, Winston Churchill gave a 21-minute speech by radio. He was 70 years old. To the shock

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iSocialism

One of my favorite blog postings this year is The Left is Too Smart to Fail by Daniel Greenfield at Sultan Knish.  Science is for Stupid People is equally worthy and an excellent companion piece to the first article. Excerpts:

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The Greater Risk

Socialism is an insurance policy bought by all the members of a national economy to shield them from risk.  But the result is to shield them from knowledge of the real dangers and opportunities ubiquitous in any society.  Rather than

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The Worst Form of Capitalism

The Right frequently calls the President a socialist?  The left protests that it just isn’t true.  Is it? Socialism, fascism and communism all share belief in some large degree in government control of the means of production.  They all stand

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“Why the Worst Get on Top”

This is a critical chapter in Hayek’s 1944 classic, The Road to Serfdom.  The books is a deeply thoughtful examination of why planned economies lead to despotic rule.   In several different parts of the book Hayek explains that the motivation

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Ends and Means

Unfortunately, the relation between the ends and the means remains widely misunderstood.  Many of those who profess the most individualistic objectives support collectivist means without recognizing the contradiction.  It is tempting to believe that social evils arise from the activities

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The Tragic Illusion

.. the desire to organize social life according to a unitary plan itself springs largely from a desire for power. .. in order to achieve their end, collectivists must create power of a magnitude never before known, and …  their

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The Importance of Failure

“Too big to fail” is as antithetical to capitalism and economic growth as sugary high fat diet is to good health. Some free market supporters prefer the phrase “free enterprise” to capitalism, because of the bad name capitalism has developed. 

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Political Greed and Crony Capitalism

Ever since Michael Douglas’s character Gordon Gekko in the movie Wall Street declared “Greed is Good” capitalism has been cast in a sinister role that it has yet to overcome. The movie speech was rumored to be taken from a

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