Posted on 05/30/2016 3:46:50 PM PDT by jazusamo
Socialism sounds great. It has always sounded great. And it will probably always continue to sound great. It is only when you go beyond rhetoric, and start looking at hard facts, that socialism turns out to be a big disappointment, if not a disaster.
While throngs of young people are cheering loudly for avowed socialist Bernie Sanders, socialism has turned oil-rich Venezuela into a place where there are shortages of everything from toilet paper to beer, where electricity keeps shutting down, and where there are long lines of people hoping to get food, people complaining that they cannot feed their families.
With national income going down, and prices going up under triple-digit inflation in Venezuela, these complaints are by no means frivolous. But it is doubtful if the young people cheering for Bernie Sanders have even heard of such things, whether in Venezuela or in other countries around the world that have turned their economies over to politicians and bureaucrats to run.
The anti-capitalist policies in Venezuela have worked so well that the number of companies in Venezuela is now a fraction of what it once was. That should certainly reduce capitalist "exploitation," shouldn't it?
But people who attribute income inequality to capitalists exploiting workers, as Karl Marx claimed, never seem to get around to testing that belief against facts — such as the fact that none of the Marxist regimes around the world has ever had as high a standard of living for working people as there is in many capitalist countries.
Facts are seldom allowed to contaminate the beautiful vision of the left. What matters to the true believers are the ringing slogans, endlessly repeated.
(Excerpt) Read more at creators.com ...
Lots of Bernie bumper stickers around.
Wrong Dr. Sowell. Socialism sounds awful and plain evil. It is the oppression of the individual. In other words, it si the oppression of people. It is force, it is coercion, it is envy and fear. It is darkness and death. It is an awful and very dangerous mistake to give them any credit at all. It is all an ugly, deadly lie.
Absolutely, thanks for linking.
Socialists are the smartest people in the country. Just ask them. And smart people know that smart people should be making the important decisions for us. :)
What world are you living in? The rich share their wealth with me and me getting free stuff ? Sounds pretty good to a lot of people.
It is to take a principle which should be living in the voluntary sphere (most notably, churches and their charity) and trying to force it to live in an involuntary sphere.
As soon as contribution is not voluntary, people will look for ways to cheat the system.
But they end up selling out their souls.
Great article by Sowell
And we see from all the college kids Bering for Sanders they buy into socialism.
Yes history and now prove it gas not and will not ever work for people
but people like Bernie simply brush reality off by saying others were not done right.
Yep, a good point.
Certainly nobody calls donating to FR, “socialism.”
How long before it all boils over? Not long I surmise given the conditions. We would have already exploded.
Amen...Furtherist thing from it! :)
Thus it has always been with Socialism and Communism. “We just haven’t tried it with the right people”.
They’re feeling the Bern in Bernezuela.
Just 4 sentences into the article and Sowell already has lib heads exploding across the fruited plain. He's good like that!! Even better, in only a few more sentences, he exposes the facts established in Venezuela that the socialists can't manage to supply beer and toilet paper. Screw up the simple stuff and even Bernie's true believer college students will turn on him like a pack of wolves.
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