The threat of socialism looms over U.S. in 2020 and beyond

[HARDCORE]

Americans For Limited Government


The threat of socialism looms over U.S. in 2020 and beyond

By Rick Manning

This column is unusual. I usually do not write about experiences around the Capitol Beltway, but the opportunity to talk to dozens of radio, television and videoblog talkers and reporters at the Conservative Political Action Conference put on by the American Conservative Union changes that norm.

Most people have seen or heard about events coming from the conference as President Donald Trump’s speech along with speeches from the Vice President and others were front and center in many of the online headlines. As a leader in the conservative movement, I had the opportunity to be interviewed by more than thirty media outlets reaching more than 1,500 markets. One America News viewers tell me that my comments were aired prior to the President’s speech and friends contacted me after hearing me on the Lars Larson Show, to name just two of these opportunities.

And while all that is fun, what matters is what dominated the talk: the threat of socialism.

For the first time in my life the domestic threat to our freedom has never been more real, and that is why I chose to focus on attacking the root of the socialist tree through these media outlets.

Let’s be clear, socialism is immoral. It is immoral just as certainly as robbery is, because ultimately socialism is nothing more or less than sticking a gun in the face of someone to take the product of their labor and give it to another.

The Green New Deal makes it clear that force would be used to push compliance of various mandates. Ending the usage of internal combustion engines within ten years is a simple example of this taking. If you currently own a non-electric vehicle, that car would be rendered worthless within a decade as they became illegal. The closer you get to the deadline the less valuable they would become until they would be just chunks of metal.

Beef would become unavailable except for the wealthiest of the wealthy as cattle would be exterminated from the United States forcing the import of red meat for consumption. Milk, butter, cheese and ice cream would also all need to be imported as domestic dairies would be a thing of the past.

But full-blown socialism is even worse, because at its core, it is the government confiscation of all private assets and money and redistributing them at the whim of government officials. With democratic socialism it becomes a simple vote on who gets what, no matter who earned what. Free markets, which are the true expression of liberty, get abolished in favor of a political kleptocracy that determines who wins and who loses artificially negating merit.

The Green New Deal exemplifies this through its call for guaranteed incomes for those who do not want to work, after all, it is not fair for those gifted with ambition to do better economically with those without it. As Benjamin Franklin said, “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.” And socialism gives them the authority to justify taking whatever they want.

The immorality of a government system that strips away all individual power and puts it at the whim of others should be apparent, but in case it is not. Imagine a nine-year-old getting a bicycle paid for by parents who scrimped in order to pay for the present. While the child is proudly riding his or her new bike, a group of neighbor kids decide that it isn’t fair that they have old bikes, chase down the child knocking him or her off the bike and taking it for their own.

When asked about the bike, the group who stole it simply state that it wasn’t fair that this one child should have it when they didn’t, so they confiscated it and gave it to someone without a bicycle.

That is exactly what a Democratic socialist scheme does. It dictates terms to the minority creating a society driven by envy and avarice.

And while the end is guaranteed to be empty shelves and deprivation as those who work accept the verdict of the majority and do only the bare minimum required.

In the end socialism is scarcity, as the moral bankruptcy of legalized theft destroys as surely and swiftly as a fire unleashed upon the entire nation with nothing to stand in its way.

So the next time someone utters the big lie that socialism and communism are nice, don’t let it stand. Ask them how they would like it if someone moved into their home without permission, ate their food without paying, invited others to join them, and then physically removed the original homeowner because he or she had too much and needed to share.

When they look at you aghast, just tell them, there is nothing nice about socialism, it is evil and must be struck down before its roots get too deep.

That is the message I delivered across America from CPAC, please join me in helping destroy this scourge before it consumes our great nation.

The author is president of Americans for Limited Government.

[Boats]

American Democrats: Not capitalists, not socialists
BY: DAVE ANDERSON, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR / The Hill
RE: https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign...not-socialists

Note: THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL

Most Democratic politicians will tell you that they support capitalism. Left-wing Democrats like Senator Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will tell you they are socialists and that capitalism is their target.

The reality is that most Democrats do not support capitalism and Senator Sanders and Ms. Ocasio-Cortez are not socialists, at least if we use these terms in meaningful ways.

The Democrats do not have a monopoly on misusing language, but language, as the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said in a different context, has gone “on holiday” for American Democrats.

Capitalism in its pure sense supports a free market economy and no government intervention in the private sector. In the twentieth century capitalism in the United States (and Europe) was reformed – during the Progressive Era, the New Deal Era, and the Great Society Era.



What emerged as a result of these periods of transformation was a political-economic system that was a mixture of capitalist and socialist elements: this mixture has often been called the ‘mixed economy.’ A pure capitalist economy, the “laissez-faire economy,” has no conceptual room for a social safety net or regulations of private industry or rights for workers. A mixed economy, on the other hand, does.

It is frequently said that FDR in politics and John Maynard Keynes in economics "saved capitalism." In a sense this is true, but the new system they, and others put in its place, was not capitalism in any very interesting sense of the term. The term capitalism can only be stretched so far. Why else was the term "mixed economy" created other than to point to the inadequacy of using the term capitalism to describe this hybrid system?

So when liberals and centrists in the Democratic Party say they are capitalists, what they really should be saying is that they support the mixed economy. They support a political-economic system which values markets but which calls for major forms of redistribution and regulation.

Left-wing critics of mainstream Democratic Party platforms, and certainly all forms of Republican Party politics, which call themselves socialists, are also misusing the English language. Although there is no one accepted definition of socialism, most theories of socialism involve serious forms of government control of industry.

Indeed, the real fork in the road between socialist models of democracy and capitalist models of democracy is that the former have a central place for the nationalization of industry and the latter do not. Mixed economies that stand in between capitalism and socialism constrain and channel markets so that wealth, income, and power are more evenly distributed, but they do not involve the nationalization of industry.

The socialists of the Democratic Party today, although they do represent a left-wing of the party that has not been represented for decades, are social democrats along the lines of a range of European countries over the past 50 years, especially in Scandinavia -- in Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Norway.

They are not socialists even though they say that they are.

Countries which have single-payer health insurance, free college tuition, paid family leave, and robust Social Security programs sit between pure capitalism and pure socialism. Social Democrats like mixed economy theorists are not pure versions of anything.

The battle within the Democratic Party today in terms of the economy is a battle in between the two pure poles of capitalism and socialism. The labels that candidates for office and their consultants use to define themselves and their opponents are misleading and confusing.

The socialist label is certainly motivating for many young voters, but it is equally repellant to many older Democrats and certainly for a large sector of Independents. It is obviously a total non-starter for Republicans.

Incumbent Democrats who praise free markets align themselves with corporate America and fuel their campaigns, but they lose that broad swath of voters who are gravitating to the socialist Democrats and many working-class Americans who want major changes in the economic system.

There are real policy differences between liberal, centrist and socialist Democrats, but the labels make it harder for individual candidates to advance their candidacies effectively. Now the Democratic Party does not need to seek one unified message as diversity can be used constructively; moreover, Congressional races and gubernatorial races have their own identity. Yet the Party does not need to promote simplistic language and labels that steer people away from real policies and real issues.

It is time for liberals and centrists to stop saying they are capitalists and for left-wing Democrats to stop saying they are socialists.

If both terms were dropped by Democrats, then they could focus more on the concrete policies they support, and the specific approaches they have constructed to change people’s attitudes and build bipartisan solutions to difficult economic, social, and political problems.

About the writer: Dave Anderson is the editor of “Leveraging: A Political, Economic, and Societal Framework” (Springer, 2014). He is also the author of "Youth04: Young Voters, the Internet, and Political Power" (W.W. Norton & Company, 2004) and co-editor of "The Civic Web: Online Politics and Democratic Values" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003). He has taught at George Washington University, the University of Cincinnati, and Johns Hopkins University. He was a candidate in the 2016 Democratic Primary in Maryland’s 8th Congressional District.

[Boats]

This Is What Voters Need To Know About Democratic Socialism
By: Rich Barlow - WBUR
RE: https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/201...ty-rich-barlow

The marginal income tax rate on the richest Americans is 37 percent. Should that be raised to 60 percent, and should it apply to incomes over $55,000?

If you say no, on the grounds that $55,000 plus a few bucks does not a rich man make, you wouldn’t like Denmark’s tax code of late. Perhaps you’d go along if steep taxes on such modest incomes bought us that democratic socialist nation’s robust economic equality. But you’d need to be clear-eyed: Nirvana isn’t purchased by soaking the rich only.

I wonder if that might dampen enthusiasm for democratic socialism, now outpolling capitalism among Democrats after Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s upset in a New York congressional primary. Equally red-hot is the movement’s Holy Grail, Medicare for All (M4A to wonks).

Single-payer health care has become religion for Democrats running in major states. In Massachusetts, both gubernatorial candidates, Bob Massie and Jay Gonzalez, support a state-level version, and congressional candidates like Ayanna Pressley want national M4A.

This democratic socialist tide has right-wing fabulists screaming Marxism! Denmark and other Scandinavian countries didn’t get that memo, being prosperously non-Marxist. Alas, our homegrown socialists make myths of their own. Ahead of Massachusetts’s Sept. 4 primary, let’s put reality guardrails around three of them.

Democratic socialism isn’t socialism. As severe a conservative as George Will abstains from the right’s socialist fearmongering, because as an educated man, he knows that Marxist and Soviet-style socialism involved government ownership of the means of production.

But in Scandinavia, seven out of every 10 workers labor for private enterprise. That’s fewer than in the U.S., but from the libertarian Cato Institute to progressive economist Paul Krugman, thinkers across the spectrum declare Denmark, Sanders’s role model, a market economy.

Democratic socialism has made it enviably affluent and equal. We were too, once, thanks to the New Deal, which socialists bemoaned because it wasn’t, well, socialist. The point is that our current inequality’s parent isn’t capitalism but Republican leaders’ crackpot and plutocratic theology, which deems capitalism incompatible with unions, regulation and public aid to the poor. Yet those things, blunting free markets’ sharper edges, enabled our postwar prosperity and Scandinavia’s current successes.

M4A isn’t “the only “realistic path” to reducing our costliest-in-the-world health spending. Private, multi-payer systems in Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands yield top-notch, universal care that’s a bargain next to ours.

If the advocate who wrote that quote meant M4A is the only politically realistic reform, that’s dubious, too. Yes, the privatized care that works abroad would mean radical changes here. But if you think they’d be more daunting than legislating private industry into oblivion, recall that Obamacare passed after every president since FDR failed to secure universal health insurance because Barack Obama negotiated a role for insurers.

While needing improvements, his handiwork covered 20 million uninsured Americans, a staggering achievement before his successor started sabotaging it.

As for state-level single-payer, Vermont, one of the bluest states with a sympathetic governor, found single-payer unaffordable.

Note: ... voters should know that democratic socialism is not all that socialist. Indeed, its numbers can look damn near Republican.

Massachusetts is wealthier. But Gonzalez as yet hasn’t said how he’d pay for it, and Massie’s funding ideas (for a plan whose cost he hasn’t estimated) range from a millionaire’s tax facing constitutional concerns to uncalculated savings from adopting single payer. In short, tallying his spending and revenue proposals is impossible.

More feasible than M4A would be a “public option” in Obamacare: a government-run health plan to compete with private ones. Even some conservative economists are open to that. Our current Medicare employs such public-private competition.

Like Republican tax-cutters, M4A advocates get, um, creative with math. The GOP always swears tax cuts won’t enlarge the deficit — which they inevitably do, while Republicans move on to the next tax cut. The first President Bush decried this “voodoo economics.”

Honest progressives have called out M4A supporters for stepping in similar voo-doo-doo, as during the 2016 campaign. Sanders supporters shrugged off Sanders’s transparently low-balled cost estimate for his plan, which wasn’t modeled on workable, real-life single-payer systems.

Now M4A’ers are at it again, touting a study as supporting Sanders’s claim his plan would spend $2 trillion less than our current system. Actually, fact-checking confirms that the study accepts such savings only if Sanders’s plan could cut health providers’ payments as deeply as it aspires.

But it couldn’t, this study (and another) say, because covering currently uninsured Americans, eliminating patient co-pays and deductibles, and expanding certain types of care — all in Sanders’s plan — couldn’t be done with steep provider cuts.

GOP racism, hypocrisy about deficits, and hardheartedness about poverty fuel socialism’s popularity. I’ve urged voting for Democrats this fall (I’d include democratic socialists) to dethrone a GOP gone bonkers. But first, Democrats must choose nominees in primaries, some pitting traditional liberal candidates against self-fancied socialists. Perhaps the s-word is just lazy rhetoric on the latter’s part.

But words, which express ideas, matter. Numbers, too. On Primary Day, voters should know that democratic socialism is not all that socialist. Indeed, its numbers can look damn near Republican.

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Personally I hate politics - its a nasty trade and/or profession if you want to call it that!
Mud slinging untruths on all sides not just one or the other. America is ripe for these high end runners as they know people are sick and tired of being sick and tired. And what do we get? MORE OF THE SAME - election after election. The system is top heavy and many in office are dead wood if you ask me. Overpaid and over-stuffed and living the life of Riley!

They all come in with big promises only to find out - it ain't going to happen. Voter's (I'm one those many that has been taken to the cleaners election after election. The issues are the same year after year. The main promised made are always left to decay from their broken promises.

I personally hate politics - always have. The big winners are the contributors for those who get elected. Big money makes more big money and there is little trickle down to those busting their ass year after year to make ends meet.

We the Voter's put these folks in - so we have live with the end results. Little change and higher taxes always gets us year after year. The low end of pole is kept there in order that the top 1-2% can make all the money.

They always promise to make things better "but to no avail" what we get is MOTS (more of the same).

The good thing we have is our Military Folks - they watch our backs and many sacrifice their lives for those who wouldn't go where they've been. Brave men and women whose dedication leaves little doubt that they will go "where millions won't" so that the US doesn't become a fallen country. Our graveyards are full of those Hero's one and all and yet for some reason each year they battle - and yet - another battle is always just over the horizon. God Bless those folks who watch our backs.

Folks we are in vicious circle where Peace is rarely heard anymore. We even fight amongst ourselves now. Our internal issues need to be amended if we are to survive. Strife doesn't make right. We all try to better ourselves and there is always something that drags us down and prevents many the future and what it holds.

I don't very often make personal comments but the system today is not good! Trump is not going to fix the internal issues of America. He's beyond that scope of looking out for the poor and mistreated. He's in the clouds of power and that is where he wants to remain and will walk over anyone to get his results. I voted for him but he's let me down and he's let America down by causing more stress and the separation of powers.

God Bless Us All - is all I can say

Boats

[reconeil]

I hate to keep saying what I've often said for about 40 years or so, as to our governing leaders often doing what is unarguably either stupidly-naive, actually favoring their political party OVER America, and/or just having: "A Bad Case of The Stupids". But,...I must.

Though, I must sort-of change my saying nowadays, what with all the absolute political nonsense and stupidity prevailing, especially like Dems forever wanting a NATIONALLY SUICIDAL Wide Open Southern Border, and preferring: "Big Brother" or Government Dictatorial Socialism (a PROGRESSIVE variation of Marxism or Communism) OVER; "Liberty & Freedom". ABSOLUTELY AMAZING!!!

Besides calling all hypocrites alluded to above posing as wise national leaders, are actually no better than NAIVE MORONS (being nice), if things don't soon change and many national leaders don't start honoring their oaths (AS SWORN TO),...I must update my longtime old saying.

Unfortunately for America and all We True Americans,...America has A Terminal case of The Stupids.

Hopefully many leaders will come to their senses, do what paid for and SWORN TO, and in general Common Sense, Sane Sovereignty, and American Liberty & Freedom will prevail.

Neil