The desire for utopia and the rise of Bernie Sanders is due in no small part to the failure of fiscal conservatives to teach enough Americans about the truth regarding socialism in all its forms. I’ve been linking to articles on the topic for a while — you can find four categories of them on this page.
Here is Richard M. Ebeling writing at the Foundation for Economic Education:
It’s really just the existing interventionist-welfare state.
Very often bad and failed ideas do not die, they simply reappear during periods of supposed social and political crisis in slightly different intellectual garb, and offer “solutions” that would merely help to bring about some of the very types of crises for which they once again claim to have the answers. Socialism in its various “progressive” mutations represents one of the leading so-called solutions of our time.
The Marxian-style socialism of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries is now long passé.
The latest manifestation of this appeared on August 24, 2017 in the New Republic in an online article by John B. Judis on, “The Socialism America Needs Now.” He is heartened by the wide appeal, especially among younger voters, that Bernie Sanders received during the 2016 presidential contest. He thinks that this may herald a rebirth and a renewed possibility for a socialist alternative to the current American political and economic system.
Having traveled over the decades from the 1970s to the present from a radical, revolutionary socialist to a more “moderate” one today, Mr. Judis admits that the Marxian-style socialism of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries is now long passé. The embarrassing experience of “socialism-in-practice” in the form Lenin and Stalin created in the Soviet Union or by Chairman Mao in China will not fly anymore.
From Soviet Central Planning to “Liberal Socialism”
Central planning seemed not to work too well, and the “communist” variation on the socialist theme also had a tendency to be authoritarian with some drawbacks for human life and liberty. (He tactfully avoids mentioning that Marxist-inspired regimes in the twentieth century murdered well over a 100 million people – with some estimates suggesting the number might have been closer to 150 million or more in the name of building the “bright, beautiful socialist future.” (See my article, “The Human Cost of Socialism in Power”.)
Read more: FEE.org
Image credit: www.fee.org.
