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Are Democrats Socialists?

Deer in the Headlights

Does it matter that the chair of the Democratic National Committee doesn’t know if her party is socialist?

MSNBC’s Chris Matthews was grilling Debbie Wasserman-Schultz on the meaning of Sen. Bernie Sanders’s popularity within the Democratic Party. Mrs. Wasserman-Schultz responded by boasting that the Democrats “really are a Big Tent Party.” Then Matthews veered out her comfort zone of horse-race politics and self-congratulatory posturing.

“What is the difference between a Democrat and a Socialist?” he asked.

Mrs. W-S chuckled. Uncomfortably.

“I used to think there was a big difference,” Matthews went on. “What do you think it is?” Mrs. W-S evaded, blathering on how it is that the difference between Democrats and Republicans is what will really count in the upcoming election.

Karl Dickey, at the Examiner, holds that Democrats, today, are socialists: “one only needs to look at the Democratic Party’s platform to understand that it is a socialistic political party.”

Meanwhile, Juan Williams, discussing the issue on Fox News’s The Five, argues that there is a big difference between Democrats and socialists: Dems just like regulation and redistributing wealth; socialists want to nationalize industry and run everything through a central bureau.

And that is the definition that anti-socialist economists Yves Guyot and Ludwig von Mises settled on. Technically, Williams is right.

But the fact that the head of the Democratic Party waffled on the distinction says more about the party than a definitive answer would have.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Deer in the Headlights

 

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folly free trade & free markets too much government

The Alternative to the Public Option

The congressional “progressive” caucus still wants to impose a public health insurance option, allegedly to “reduce the deficit.”

According to caucus kingpin Raul Grijalva, deficit hawks are “hypocrites” for predicting that government spending would balloon were a public option imposed. Their “excuse . . . that it was going to be too expensive is phony,” according to Congressman Grijalva.

The progressives’ notion seems to be that accelerating the pell-mell government takeover of the medical delivery industry is the very best thing one could do to reduce the deficit.

If that’s the case, then why not also “reduce the deficit” with respect to other sectors of the economy in which government spends any money at all — that is, in any economic sector — by launching a government takeover that eventually swamps private markets altogether?

By “progressive” logic, communizing the whole economy must be the best way to foster fiscal sobriety in DC.

Absurd, I know.

Perhaps Grijalva’s deceived by his franking privilege. The public option for postal delivery works so well. For him. For the rest of us, we have to pay the billions the USPS loses every year.

The solution to the USPS’s constant, persistent failure is not to regulate and nationalize Fed-Ex and UPS and every other alternative.

Real progress requires the opposite of Grijalva’s “progressivism”: Pry government out of both health care and postal delivery. This is not a radical idea. It is only . . . well . . .

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.