Tag: socialism

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ideological culture political challengers too much government

The C-Word Emerges

Bernie Sanders, communism, socialism,

“We’re not going to throw out capitalism,” declared Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire former New York City mayor now seeking the Democratic Party’s nomination for president. 

“Other countries tried that. It was called communism and it just didn’t work.”

Bloomberg was responding to a question by MSNBC’s Hallie Jackson at Wednesday night’s Las Vegas debate regarding his thoughts on Sen. Bernie Sanders’ proposal to “require all large companies to turn over up to 20 percent of their ownership to employees over time.”

“Let’s talk about democratic socialism, Mr. Bloomberg,” countered Sanders. “Not communism — that’s a cheap shot!”

But is it? 

The Vermont Senator has a long history of offering effusive praise for repressive socialist and communist regimes, including the Soviet Union, Cuba, and Nicaragua. After lauding the late Fidel Castro for providing healthcare and education and “totally transform[ing] the society” — while ignoring Castro’s complete disregard for human rights — Bernie judiciously added, “Not to say that Fidel Castro or Cuba are perfect, they are certainly not.”

Sanders has also called for “public ownership of the major means of production.” Unlike Karl Marx, I guess Bernie doesn’t sweat the small stuff.

“What a wonderful country we have. The best-known socialist in the country,” offered Bloomberg, referring to Sanders, “happens to be a millionaire with three houses! 

“What did I miss?”

Asserting a need for a second residence, the Vermont senator replied, “Well, you missed that I work in Washington.” 

“That’s the first problem,” Bloomberg interjected.

The first of many.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Bernie Sanders, communism, socialism,

Photo by Gage Skidmore

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Madame Guillotine

guillotine, Kidman, Senate,

A Maine woman running for the U.S. Senate has chosen for her campaign logo the guillotine.

Yes, she calls herself a ‘democratic socialist.’ Well, on Twitter it is ‘DemSoc.’

Her name . . .

No, start again. On the campaign Twitter page the candidate’s “preferred pronouns” are listed as “they/them.” So, their name is Bre, and they proudly promoted the new logo on February 5th: “I was gonna wait until tomorrow to show off these beauties, but Trump got acquitted and I feel like folks could use something to look forward to.”

But . . . why?

For my part, the blood running in the streets was my least favorite part of the French Revolution, and I would, uh, downplay it, no matter how murderous I might ever feel. 

You know, were I a DemSoc.

Upon being challenged with its most famous historical use, she had a . . . politic . . . response: “I’m aware of the French Revolution, and how the story ends. A guillotine t-shirt reminds others about it in hopes that we’ll all be motivated to address the very serious problems with our government before a similarly violent uprising becomes inevitable.”

When asked who it was for, she replied, “More of a ‘what.’ The guillotine is for the plutocratic & kleptocratic norms that have undermined our democratic process. We have to develop ways to subvert the stranglehold of wealth on our government. There will not be a more convenient revolution. The symbol is a reminder.”

I wonder what she would say if her rivals chose as campaign logos the hangman’s noose and the electric chair.

But hey, her, er, their guillotine is attractive, and, because it lacks a drop of red, emphasizes the ‘democratic’ part of ‘democratic socialism’ . . . by hiding the blood.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom

The Most Deadly Disease

Anyone knowledgeable about medicine — or history, for that matter — is taking very, very seriously the coronavirus outbreak in China, and its subsequent spread across the globe, including to the U.S.

More than 70,000 Chinese have been diagnosed and over 1,700 have died, along with one death in each of France, Japan, Hong Kong and the Philippines. 

Over the weekend, Taiwan — the independent island nation a hundred miles off the coast of a hostile, threatening People’s Republic of China (PRC) — announced its first fatality. The deceased Taiwanese taxi driver, whose health was already compromised by diabetes and hepatitis B, likely caught the virus from customers traveling from China. 

Last week, China finally allowed the World Health Organization to allow Taiwanese experts to participate in discussions about containing the virus. Unlike China, Taiwan boasts one of the best medical systems in the world.

Also over the weekend, news broke that Chinese President Xi Jinping had mentioned the coronavirus in a speech given many weeks before officials first alerted the public. 

That’s how the totalitarian PRC rolls. At all levels. One victim of the virus is Dr. Li Wenliang, who warned back in December that the disease was spreading. First, he was reprimanded and then “apprehended by Wuhan police for spreading ‘rumours,’” reported Aljazeera. 

“As more information leaks out from Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak,” a recent Taipei Times editorial argues, “it is clear that Beijing was unable to prevent the virus from spreading out of control precisely because it lacks the accountability, freedom of speech and free flow of information that form the bedrock of democracies.”

Yet another way that freedom affirms life and totalitarian tyranny kills. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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The Blue Plate Special

Blue Plate Special, Democrats, socialism,

The biggest stories don’t always come in threes, but they sure did this week.

The Iowa Democratic Caucus debacle, President Trump’s State of the Union Address, and the Senate’s acquittal of the president after the House’s impeachment — big stories of big losses for Democrats.

As I write this, we still lack a “winner” on the Democratic side in Iowa. Blame is publicly given to the goofy “app” the Iowa Democratic Party bought to make the caucusing and counting oh-so-much easier. But I wouldn’t blame Bernie supporters for engaging in a little conspiracy conjecturing — the maker of the app has close ties to the Clinton machine. 

And if you cannot sniff a concerted anti-Bernie agenda on the part of establishment Democrats, your sniffer is broken.

Indeed, The Young Turks ably showed how major-media news sources skew stories away from the socialist from Vermont — by emphasizing the candidacies of Biden and Buttigieg.*

One can see why centrist Democrats would want to scuttle a serious socialist movement within their party, but it may be too little too late. After decades of courting the Gimme-Gimme vote with Loot the Rich demagoguery, socialistic attitudes have long been on the menu. So getting a hot, steaming socialism served back at them as a Blue Plate Special?

Priceless.

Literally.

But not costless.

For the cost is reasonability and decorum. After Trump ceased speaking before Congress yesterday, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi ripped up copies of the president’s address just to show her disdain for the president.

But it also shows frustration. The speech is over. Impeachment is over. Iowa is, incredibly, not yet over. And Pelosi’s party — under her guidance — is in complete and utter disarray.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Ana Kasparian makes a pretty convincing case that Senator Bernie Sanders is the most popular of the three, and could even bring in independent voters.

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free trade & free markets too much government

The Anti-Worker Ism

California, socialism, labor, progressivism, Democrats

Progressives who lean socialist used to hide their worst intentions. Now they are letting it all hang out.

There have always been overt socialists in the U.S., of course. They would sometimes protest the reluctance of fellow travelers to fully embrace socialism’s moniker. But the sentiment “Ah, screw it, let’s just admit we want to destroy everything currently in existence” seems on the ascendance. Even a few major Democratic candidates for president are on board.

Exhibit 112 is the new nationwide push to stomp the gig economy.

Especially freelancing.

This follows Exhibit 111, the recent and so far successful push to stop independent contractors from engaging in voluntary transactions in California. (Many lawsuits are underway.)

After scanning the coiled legalese of 111 — I mean AB5, California’s law — many companies decided that ending relationships with California-based freelancers was prudence with a capital P. And that rhymes with G, and that stands for Golden. Which the Golden State used to, uh, B.

Not every self-employed person has been thrown out onto the street. There are carve-outs. Actually, the only known victims are taxi drivers, cleaners, nurses, comedians, writers, editors, musicians, transcriptionists, citizen initiative petitioners, etc., etc.

The crackdown on non-9-to-5 work arrangements has also resulted in much gnashing of teeth by gig-seekers of all ideological stripes. 

Obviously, then, such massive destruction of economic freedom must be inflicted on the federal level too. So House Democrats put AB5’s gig-killing provisions into Exhibit 112, that is, into HR2474, pending legislation.

Democratic candidates for president Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders have endorsed the California statute, a national version, or both.

Ludwig von Mises had a word for this. He called socialism “destructionist.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Revolutionaries for Bernie

Jurek, Bernie Sanders, gulags, USSR, Soviet Union, socialism,

It seems like just last week we were arguing about how it is not OK to go around “punching Nazis.” 

Now we have a Bernie Sanders campaign employee fuming about putting people he disagrees with into “re-education camps.”

“The only thing that fascists understand is violence,” said a Field Manager in the campaign’s Iowa office, as caught on all-too-candid camera by Project Veritas. “So, the only way you can confront them is with violence.”

It is one thing to get called a “fascist!” or “Nazi!” by a leftist for disagreeing with a leftist, it is another thing to be sucker-punched by a leftist for disagreeing with a leftist — and something far, far worse to be put into a concentration camp for expressing non-leftist-approved views.

His name is Kyle Jurek. Project Veritas has certainly not dubbed him a typical Bernie voter. His views are described as “extreme left-wing fringe,” and the utility of the clandestine recordings, taken over months, said to lie in the insight they provide “into the mentality of many Sanders staffers and what they truly believe.”

Jurek’s beliefs include extra-legal violence and Soviet Gulag revisionism, expressed with f-bombs and mf-barrages. “You want to fight against the revolution, you’re going to die for it, mother—” Jurek lashes out at “fellow” Democrats . . . and MSNBC . . . and Trump voters. He talks about setting Milwaukee afire. And not rhetorically.

 We’ve long worried about the Vermont senator, who has defended horrific Soviet and Cuban rule throughout his long history of communist apologia.

I guess the real test is how Jurek’s comrades — er, fellow Sanders supporters — react to the revelations. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

N.B. As this commentary posts, the only official response has come from the Iowa state director for the Sanders campaign, Misty Rebik, who dismissed the video, saying, “The hundreds of thousands of Iowans we’ve talked to this caucus season don’t care about political gossip . . .” Jurek has not been dismissed. A search of the Washington Post and New York Times websites show neither paper has reported on the story.

The Babylon Bee made the obvious “democratic gulag” joke.

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Jurek, Bernie Sanders, gulags, USSR, Soviet Union, socialism,

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Listen to the Warm

Greta

I like publicity stunts as much as the next activist. But haven’t we had enough of the whole Greta Thunberg bit yet?

On Wednesday, the 16-year-old Swede provided testimony on an apt stage, let us grant her that — the U.S. House of Representatives’ foreign affairs subcommittee joint hearing on the global youth climate change movement. 

She didn’t prepare any remarks, though. She merely “attached” the IPCC Special Report on Global Warming “as her testimony.” Her rationale? “I don’t want you to listen to me, I want you to listen to the scientists.” And “to unite behind science.”

You know, for “real action.”

It was what happened right after she demanded “real action,” though, where the stark reality of the situation became clear: a grown man in a suit, elected to Congress, asked, “Could you expand on why it’s so important to listen to the science?”

And then the non-scientist spoke . . . not very expansively.

 Forget that science qua science isn’t to be “listened to,” it is to be engaged in, with conjectures, research and refutations. (There was nothing like that at the hearing.) Forget also that the science is increasingly less clear on the severity of what warming we see. Remember only that an elected official used a girl to imbue a text (the IPCC report) with moral legitimacy, dubbing it “best available ‘united science’” — the better to push an unargued-for massive coercive government intervention into the life of our civilization.

Is no adult in the room ashamed of what they are doing . . . exploiting a cute youngster to subvert rationality?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Greta

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Labor’s Holiday

Haymarket Riot

Most of us celebrate Labor Day by not working. Labor and celebration being distinct, this is not really as funny as it may sound.

The celebration became federal law in the late 19th century, a time beset by “labor unrest” and “agitation.” At least two major violent incidents at that time can help us understand the origins of our Labor Day, and reduce the current collective blood pressure.

The date of the first was May 4, 1886, a labor demonstration at Haymarket Square in Chicago that went very bad. This Haymarket Affair is one of those handful of stories in our high school history books we tend to remember, involving bombs, deaths, anarchists, hasty prosecution, hangings, pardons, and much more. People still argue about who is to blame. What we don’t argue with is the aftermath: the Second International of communist and socialist parties chose, in 1889, the ancient celebratory day of May 1 to commemorate the Haymarket riot as “International Workers’ Day.”

It has come to be known as “Labor Day” in some countries.

But other, less radical labor activists had already pushed a Labor Day for their cities and states before Haymarket, and they had chosen early September as the proper time for a celebration of “the working man.” A majority of states had enacted early September labor holidays by 1894.

In June of 1894, Congress passed legislation making the first Monday of September “Labor’s Holiday.”

President Grover Cleveland signed the bill into law mere days after the Pullman Strike ended — with a not quite universal judgment that he had mishandled it. Cleveland’s intervention in the strike led to a higher body count and more property damage than the Haymarket riot. That being said, it does not appear to have moved President Cleveland as much as you might think — he did not spearhead the Labor Holiday legislation, and his signature is not as important as it may seem, since congressional support was high enough to override any veto.

Associated then with activism to increase the economic and legal power of unions, to this day the official Labor Day in September serves as an alternative to the more radical celebrations in May. But both seem antiquated, now. Our alleged “radicals” today have shifted their focus from labor remuneration and working conditions to providing to workers and non-workers alike free stuff. 

And union participation in America, which waxed up until about the time I was born, has waned since. Only the government worker segment is heavily unionized today.

Nowadays, Labor Day has about the same symbolic and political significance as Arbor Day.

The most important lesson may be this: we talk about how divided the country is, politically and culturally. But the level of foment is not nearly as violent as it was when Labor Day became a national holiday.  

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob

Haymarket Riot

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The Fifth Century Begins

slavery, 1619, freedom, chains,

When socialists and woke scolds talk about slavery, you can almost hear the chains and smell the leather of the slaver’s whip — and not always in a good way.

Project 1619 is the New York Times effort to acknowledge 400 years of Africans in America. Thankfully, the project’s page is more coherent and forthright than Matthew Desmond’s New York Times Magazine farrago of August 14, “In order to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation.”

Indeed, that piece (like others in the series) is such a tangle that there is no hope to unravel it in this limited space. Just note that Desmond does his darnedest to help the enemies of liberty tie slavery into the idea of free markets, private property, and free association.*

Project 1619, on the other hand, accepts the complexity of slavery in America without being idiotically tendentious. It recognizes that the captured Africans brought to Virginia shores in August 1619 were treated as indentured servants. Unfortunately, unlike the Englishmen arriving under indentured servitude, the first Africans in Virginia lacked explicit contracts. So negotiating their way out was . . . problematic. Still, one African, arriving two years later, was soon freed and became a landowner. And it was he who was awarded another African as a slave for life, in civil court in 1655, marking the real start of chattel slavery in America.

Which is to say, slavery in America was not exclusively a matter of race.**

Why is this important? Because slavery is wrong not because racism is wrong (as wrong as that is), but because people have a right to freedom.

Could it be that socialists emphasize racism regarding slavery because they fear that focusing on freedom might scuttle their socialism?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* See my discussion of slavery yesterday.

** This becomes clear once you read Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, or learn how Thomas Jefferson’s wife was related to Sally Hemings

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Slaves All?

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A bizarre argument is gaining popularity: the United States of America not merely allowed slavery in its first hundred years, it depended upon it, grew rich by it . . .  and, “therefore,” not only the federal government but also its constitutional principles and even capitalism are all tainted . . . and . . . “therefore” . . . we must have socialism!

Why long-dead chattel slavery requires political slavery now is hard to figure.

And no, you should not need to read George Fitzhugh’s Cannibals All! or Sociology for the South to see that socialism is slavery.*

But these days it is more common to link slavery with . . . freedom (this is hard even to type) in the form of free markets. 

Leftists who make this linkage are helped by some popular historians who argue that since the   antebellum South (1) grew faster, economically, than the North, (2) slavery was profitable for slaveholders, and (3) slaves became more productive in picking cotton, the “peculiar institution” was key to American success. Vincent Geloso, a visiting assistant professor of economics at Bates College, writing for the American Institute for Economic Research, ably shows that not one of these three theses hold up to scrutiny.

Most importantly, though, Geloso demonstrates that the slavery system was like all other interventionist systems, with some people (slavers) benefiting at the expense of others (slaves, of course, but also free people . . . through a variety of subsidies).

Geloso uses the term “deadweight loss” to make his case that slavery made America poorer.

He is certainly not wrong. But once you understand why freedom and prosperity are linked, not much economic jargon is necessary.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* This pro-slavery southerner did argue against the very idea of liberty and free labor on the grounds that freedom is bad and socialism is good. Indeed, “Fitzhugh disliked ‘political economy’ (as economics was then called), which he saw as ‘the science of free society,’” economist Pierre Lemeiux explains, “as opposed to socialism, which is ‘the science of slavery.’” That forthright appraisal is about all that’s good in Fitzhugh.

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Photo by Jun on flickr

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