Socialism: Whatever The Majority Wants
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., have amassed a huge following among millennials by propagating the myth that the only way to solve society’s problems is to seize wealth and property away from law-abiding citizens so that the federal government has significantly more power over all of our lives.
However, history has proven repeatedly that the collective ownership and management of property eventually leads to death, destruction, coercion, and tyranny. More than 167 million people have been killed, exiled, or imprisoned by socialist and communist regimes in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. That’s comparable to more than 50,000 attacks as deadly as those that occurred on September 11, 2001.
In a recent interview with NPR, Sanders said he needs to “do a better job maybe in explaining what we mean by socialism … Obviously, my right-wing colleagues here want to paint that as authoritarianism and communism and Venezuela, and that’s nonsense. What I mean by democratic socialism is that I want a vibrant democracy.”
According to Sanders, socialism is nothing more than advocating for higher minimum wage, single-payer health care, and a “vibrant democracy” – whatever that means. Interestingly, all these policies are also classified as “liberal” in U.S. politics, leaving many to wonder whether Sanders thinks liberalism, progressivism, and socialism are all synonymous terms. If so, why bother touting the benefits of “socialism” at all?
Of course, this isn’t what “socialism” is, and Sanders knows it. Socialism is the widespread collective ownership and management of property. A socialist society might have single-payer health care, which is undoubtedly a socialist policy, but that’s not the only socialized industry in a socialist economy. In a truly socialist system, government controls most of the economy, in part to ensure that wealth is continuously redistributed.
Socialists are deeply concerned about “wealth gaps” between different classes. They want to create a society in which wealth is equitably redistributed so that everyone has what they need, but not necessarily what they want. They don’t care about private property rights, individual liberty, free enterprise, or, in many cases, even religious freedom.
Their primary concern is one thing, and one thing only: taking property and wealth away from the people who have earned it. They don’t support creating a truly free society, because they believe freedom leads to wealth gaps, and that can never be tolerated in socialism.
They think the “rights” of the collective – which continuously shift and inevitably become whatever the majority of people in society wants – trumps all individual rights.
In a free market, decisions are made by individuals, who voluntarily choose to exchange money, goods, and services with each other, as well as to create or support charities that help those who need assistance. In socialism, the answer is the majority of people in society determine the answers to all of these questions, and those who disagree are forced to go along with those choices, even if it violates their deeply held beliefs.
So, for example, in a single-payer nation, nuns are forced to pay for abortions and condoms, even though abortion and contraception are against their religious beliefs. In a socialized agricultural society, Hindus and members of PETA would be forced to pay for animals to get slaughtered, even though they think killing animals is immoral. In a society with socialized education, a majority of people might decide, for example, that women shouldn’t be educated, stifling the rights of girls.
In socialism, whatever the majority wants, the majority gets – even if that means hurting others in the process or stealing their property simply because most voters think they would benefit from having it.
This is exactly the sort of system Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders want. They might spend a lot of time talking about things like increasing the minimum wage, but what they’re really after is controlling our entire society.
That’s why Ocasio-Cortez proposed the “Green New Deal,” which would destroy countless thousands of businesses, including all of the fossil-fuel industry; impose “upgrades” for every building in the country; effectively eliminate the private health insurance market and put government in charge of the health care system; create a free college tuition program; provide a federal job to anyone who wants one and a basic income to people who are “unwilling” to work; end air travel; and add thousands of new federal regulations, among numerous other radical policies.
Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez are socialists, and socialism is, at best, well-intentioned tyranny. Don’t be a tyrant.
Read full article on Fox News
Justin Haskins is the executive editor and a research fellow at The Heartland Institute and the editor-in-chief of StoppingSocialism.com. He’s the author of “Socialism Is Evil: The Moral Case Against Marx’s Radical Dream.” Follow him on Twitter @JustinTHaskins.
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