The following is from an excellent op-ed in the WSJ 5-17-16. Readers know I am no fan of the Sanders ideology and I have alluded to many of the things stated below. More than anything else I am absolutely aghast that so many Americans, especially young Americans, buy into the Sanders rhetoric which can only happen because of lack of knowledge or historical perspective.
I hope you can access the WSJ article and take the time to do so… especially if you are a Sanders supporter.
But the point isn’t what Mr. Sanders may have thought of the Sandinistas in the 1980s or the Chavistas in the past decade.
It’s that the type of socialism that the senator espouses—$18 trillion in additional government spending over the next decade, accusations that Wall Street is a criminal enterprise and the continuous demonization of “millionaires and billionaires”—is not all that different from its South American cousins.
Democratic socialism—whether Chavez’s or Sanders’s—is legalized theft in the name of the people against the vilified few. It is a battle against income inequality by means of collective immiseration. It is the subjugation of private enterprise and personal autonomy to government power.
Mr. Sanders promises to pursue his aims on the Scandinavian model, as if that was a success, and as if Americans are Scandinavians. It wasn’t. We aren’t. Bernie’s Way paves the same road to serfdom that socialism does everywhere. That’s a fact Americans might have learned after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. We didn’t. Take the time to tell your kids what socialism is, and does, before they too feel the Bern. Write bstephens@wsj.com.
Source: What’s Socialism, Dad? – WSJ
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