As the regimes of our most leftist presidents ever recede in the rear-view mirror, apologists are again trotting out one of socialism’s great myths to explain why their sublime heros’ tenures were such disappointing failures. The myth of which I speak – let’s call it Socialism’s Myth #2 – has been used repeatedly to explain the failure of Marxism in the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, Venezuela, numerous European countries, and a gaggle of “emerging” African nations. As each failure becomes obvious, Myth #2 is proclaimed: namely, that socialism failed because it simply “wasn’t implemented properly.” All would have been well if only things had been done correctly.
Socialism’s central idea is that a successful economic system can be constructed on Karl Marx’s famous principle: “From each according to his abilities; to each, according to his needs.” Each fresh-faced, new generation of American students sees socialism as a wonderful new idea just waiting to be tried. It seems so “fair,” so “just,” so consummately “righteous.” How could it possibly fail? But over the past century, the aforementioned nations have repeatedly demonstrated that socialism is actually a deeply flawed idea that has repeatedly been tried and found wanting.
Socialism’s Myth #1 is, of course, the whopper that socialism can actually work. But it cannot, because it denies a fundamental facet of human nature – i.e., that individuals will not work and achieve unless they have a personal stake in the enterprise’s product or outcome. True socialists call this a character flaw, but we are all made this way. A system that denies it is bound to fail.
I have known people who thought Marxism’s foundational principle came from the Bible. All of socialism is based on it, but it is a complete pipe-dream. It can never work without the added “incentive” of force. Even so, it still inevitably fails because (as Margaret Thatcher famously said) “…eventually you run out of other people’s money.”
In my 2007 visit to Russia, a citizen told me that the USSR collapsed because people had carloads full of make-believe money, but there was nothing in the stores to buy. Soviet factories could not produce goods for the artificially low prices set by the Central Committee. Factory workers liked to say, “They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work.” It simply could not continue.
As the Obama administration’s dazzling promises of social justice, racial harmony and universal prosperity inexorably sank into the mire of high taxes, anti-business regulations, and minimum-wage jobs, I wondered how many times we should have to hear the same tired, old excuses before politicians, educators, and most Americans finally comprehend that socialism is a fundamentally flawed concept that can never truly function as imagined.
We should know this by now, but in 2007 we got snookered again by another slick-talking huckster – wearing an impeccably pressed $2000 suit – who promised to “fundamentally change” the country. We ran after him like the children following the Pied Piper of Hamelin. (When will we ever learn?) Now, here we are again, with New Yorkers going ga-ga over another silver-tongued salesman promising free stuff for everyone, with only the filthy rich paying the bills.
Our last “messiah” was as good as his word. He certainly changed the country – although probably not in ways most people expected. Did voters anticipate a serious drive toward socialism? Probably not. By remaining deliberately vague about his plans, Barack Obama allowed voters to write-in the change they “hoped” this dazzling new figure would bring. The Obama inside circle carefully avoided any mention of the S-word, knowing that the public would be wary of it.
This writer joined a small cadre of journalists who understood where President Obama wanted to take us. In 2008 I wrote that the Obama camp was going for the “moron vote” because his program, as we grasped it then, appeared to run completely counter to the interests of most ordinary Americans. For my “alarmist” predictions I was roundly denounced – even by family and close friends – as prejudiced, probably un-Christian, and most certainly racist.
“Why can’t you just give the guy a chance?” asked old friends who disagreed with my analysis. (I doubt if the way things turned out looks very good to them now.) In my article of June 2008, I made the following observations, which proved uncannily prescient:
“Mr. Obama wants to take us not forward, but backward – back to the New Deal, higher taxes, less economic freedom, a managed economy and the Fairness Doctrine. Mr. Obama distrusts private business, and has a ‘can’t do’ attitude about the future. He believes the ordinary person simply can’t make it without big government’s help.
“But Mr. Obama distrusts not only business: he distrusts the American people. Are we the indomitable people who built the greatest nation and the wealthiest, most robust economy in history? No! We are pitiable, wretched victims of a failed government and a ‘broken’ system who need his ‘ministry’ in order to avoid ruin…
“The irony is that Mr. Obama’s policies would not empower the down-and-out, but would permanently prevent them from improving their status. Creation of wealth enables economic advancement. Envy-taxes, income-transfer or welfare do not. This seems beyond the ken of Mr. Obama’s followers. Indeed, it seems beyond Mr. Obama, himself.”
Despite Mr. Obama’s soaring promises of a bright new future, middle-class incomes stagnated to levels of 10 years earlier. During his regime, millions of Americans were unemployed for so long, that they stopped looking for work. This removed them from the unemployment-rate calculation – making the nation’s employment picture seem better than it really was.
So while the Obama Gang celebrated an unemployment rate that eventually fell below 6%, voters saw things more realistically, knowing that many of their comrades and relatives were still unemployed or had taken part-time work just to keep afloat. Like many of my fellow citizens, I couldn’t recall a time when I personally knew so many people who were out of work – some of them for long periods of time. According to the New York Times, only 61.8% of adult Americans were employed late in Mr. Obama’s second term. It was the lowest percentage in 15 years.
Although most Americans are not exactly students of political history and governance, they could clearly see how Mr. Obama’s socialism-push affected their own lives and livelihoods. Exhibit A was obviously the sluggish economy and the paucity of good-paying full-time jobs. But Exhibit B would have to be Obamacare – the 2010 law which placed one-sixth of the nation’s economy under governmental control. Originally sold as a wonderful new system that would lower medical expenses without disturbing current insurance plans and medical relationships that Americans wanted to retain, this “dream” legislation – enacted without a single Republican vote – became a nightmare for millions across the country.
Other commentators have detailed the many ways in which the changeover to socialized medicine has hurt citizens. I won’t try to repeat those analyses, but suffice it to say that millions had their health-insurance policies cancelled because they didn’t meet the new law’s standards. Myriad others are paying much higher insurance premiums and/or larger deductibles. And legions learned that their trusted doctors are no longer available under the new law’s terms.
Finally, as a kind of “last straw” millions of workers got reductions in work-hours that put them below 30 hours a week – the AHCA’s arbitrary threshold for “full-time” status. Businesses are now required to furnish medical insurance coverage for full-time workers, unless fewer than 50 such people are on the payroll. The 50-employee threshold also represented another perverse reason for businesses not to expand, grow and hire new workers.
The Affordable Health Care Act – was ever a law so oxy-moronically named? – was cleverly rolled out through several election cycles to conceal its most onerous provisions until just after the “next” election. But that tactic could work only so long. Enough of the truth finally emerged to show how disadvantageous the whole business was going to be. There is little doubt that this dawning realization helped to produce the election “tsunami” of 2014 which swept Republicans into control of the Senate, and the electoral “earthquake” of 2016 that catapulted Donald Trump into the presidency. Politicians all over the world, who thought they had the USA figured out, woke up to the shocking reality of a new day when all the cards were thrown into the air, and a New York tough guy who gave as good as he got and never gave up.
That many Democrat politicos foresaw neither the wave nor the earthquake indicates how clueless Mr. Obama, Hillary and their minions were about the electorate’s hostility toward socialism and its dismal economic fallout. For most of his term, Mr. Obama claimed that the economy was sub-par only because Republicans had “blocked” the good things he wanted to do. It was another whopper, and finally the longsuffering Hoi Polloi saw through it. Even Mr. Obama’s faithful young and minority voters deserted him, as these two groups suffered from unemployment rates far higher than in the general population. The jig was finally up, and there was nowhere left to hide from the wrath of the voters. Obama-socialism had crashed, and Mrs. Clinton possessed neither the personality nor the oratorical gifts to revive it.
Socialism’s earliest American application, at Jamestown, Virginia, was a complete failure, as the colony’s leaders quickly realized that individuals simply would not exert themselves unless they stood to gain from their efforts. The colony began to thrive only after people were granted title to their own land and full ownership of what it produced.
Nevertheless, Americans have a recurring fascination with socialism for at least four reasons:
- Because they like the benefits they get (or hope to get) from it.
- Because our primary economic system – privately owned capitalism – has natural ups and downs. People get frightened when the “downs” go too low.
- Because politicians cannot resist tinkering with capitalism’s workings to make it “fairer” and more accessible to more people. But individuals’ lack of discipline or substance often crash these political incursions.
- Because new generations of young people, constantly arriving, are ignorant of socialism’s many failures and of the two great myths upon which it rests.
Have we seen the last of socialism? Hardly that. Currently we are spending two-thirds of all federal outlays – amounting to 14% of the country’s Gross Domestic Product – on:
- Social Security and other income support programs;
- Medicare, Medicaid, and all other health programs;
- Numerous programs for education, job training and social services.
Polls continue to show that these programs enjoy wide support from the American people, although there is less support for the taxes needed to keep them going. This is the great conundrum that Republicans always face when they try to reverse our slide toward socialism and eventual bankruptcy.
Leftists have now won a Democrat mayoral primary election in New York by promising their “true believers” that they would keep the gravy train rolling. At last they would implement socialism correctly. Of course, to do this they must first rid the country of Donald Trump. That will be their first order of business. My estimate is that it will be their only order of business until they sense that the voters are actually looking for something more than “we hate Trump!”
Democrats’ newest champion of socialism is Zohran Mamdani, a communist showman who is wowing the people of that great city – as well as leftist media shills all over the country – with his extravagant pronunciamentos on the grandness of communism that he wants to give New York and all of America. The Great Mentioner has even posited him as “presidential timber” in Democrats’ holy quest to “fix” everything that the hated Donald Trump has messed up. In politics anything is possible, of course, but I leave it to the reader to calculate his chances. (If we elect him, we’ll deserve everything we get.)
Republicans who ran the 115th Congress had a golden opportunity to begin dismantling the gigantic socialist edifice we’ve built over the last century. But they wasted the chance because too many of them didn’t like the cut of Mr. Trump’s jib, or because they preferred the quasi-socialist status quo, or because they actually thought he wouldn’t complete his term. It was a mistake of historic proportions.
But now a second chance has appeared – literally delivered by a slight twist of Mr. Trump’s head which avoided an assassin’s would-be fatal shot. Consequentially, the Providentially delivered 47th president is charging forward on fronts too numerous and detailed to be reviewed here. But suffice it to say he aims to use the second term the People have given him to right the ship of state and move the country into a new golden age. Who knows when another chance like this to really accomplish something will come along? Probably not in my lifetime. Maybe never.
Long ago my elders taught me that you must use the tools that you have; not waste time wishing that you had different tools. Numbers of Republicans could have benefitted from that lesson during Mr. Trump’s first advent. Let’s hope they’ve seen the light.
