We happened to visit Leo’s Organic Barber Shop on a recent rainy day. His reading selections are pretty sparse, other than the Press Herald, and previous editions of the Wall Street Journal. We enjoy the latter since they priced themselves out of our range for regular delivery.
For a number of years, we got the Weekend Edition for $1 a week. We loved it, and usually found enough wide-ranging material to last us for several reading sessions. Before you knew it, they jacked the price up to $200 a year for that one edition per week, and we just couldn’t justify that expense.
No matter; we keep getting mailings marked “Welcome Back.” Which in itself is a commentary on how modern marketing approaches dive off the deep end of common sense.
Enough with the mindless distraction. Looking for something different, we happened upon “The Week,” a publication we hadn’t seen before. And we came across an item that caught our interest:
https://theweek.com/articles/786937/rise-democratic-socialists
It dovetails ever so nicely with out recent piece on The Full Anastasia. That would be this one:
http://othersideofbrunswick.blogspot.com/2018/11/maine-wire-full-alexandria.html
If you’re the type who follows up on links, you’ll find that “Democratic Socialism” is a formalized and organized movement among us.
Democratic Socialist v. Social Democrat; it’s a difference without distinction in our mind. Eddie Beem, the lead opinion writer in The Forecaster, clings to the latter term because in his mind it portrays him as something other than a pure and committed socialist. It gives him a clear conscience about his socialist inclinations.
If you read the item I linked to along with its referenced sources, you’ll find that the inevitable outcome for the policies espoused is socialism. Unless you believe that entities like auto manufacturers can survive as “cooperatives” or “worker run” enterprises. Go ahead if that’s your desire, but don’t expect any support from us.
We don’t know if you know the difference between “static analysis” and “dynamic analysis.” The former is what utopians and dreamers use when they propose some sweeping economic change like doubling taxes or Medicare for all. They assume that when their idea is implemented, nothing else outside that realm will change; people and companies will not change their behavior to compensate and preserve their interests as best they can.
Hence, everything that follows becomes an “unexpected” or “unintended” consequence. Failure was not foreseen, because they didn’t look beyond their idealism.
Dynamic analysis is what realists use to weigh policy proposals. It requires that you consider the consequences; will higher taxes drive people out of state? Will more generous welfare attract people from elsewhere and disincentivize work?
Along these very lines, these citations in The Week article jumped out at us, and in our minds, clearly demonstrated the utter lack of critical thought on the part of socialist thinkers.
One of Sanders' supporters, 28-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, stunned the political world last month by winning her New York City district's Democratic primary on a platform of "Medicare for All," free public college, the abolition of ICE, and guaranteed work and housing. "In a modern, moral, and wealthy society, no person should be too poor to live," Ocasio-Cortez says. Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez has called Ocasio-Cortez and other democratic socialist candidates "the future of our party."
To pay for a similar safety net in the U.S., including free medical care and college education for all, Sanders would raise more than $1 trillion a year through higher taxes on most individuals and corporations. But the new guard of democratic socialists, organized under the banner of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), would go much further. Ocasio-Cortez, for example, has said she believes capitalism "will not always exist in the world."
Sanders, it seems obvious, doesn’t think that levying a trillion or more in new taxes will change the economic behavior of individuals and corporations. And Ocasio-Cortez, drinking the Kool-Aid shooters he passes around, doesn’t see capitalism as the source of our economic wealth:
"In a modern, moral, and wealthy society, no person should be too poor to live," Ocasio-Cortez says.
The critical point here, which she fails to see through her rose-colored glasses, is that without capitalism and the economic vitality we currently enjoy, we will no longer be A WEALTHY SOCIETY, and hence the means to provide for all the free things like health care and college educations will cease to exist.
As most of us realize, government can only provide that which it first takes from others. And when there is nothing left to take, there will be nothing it can provide. But many of us don’t know.
Reality can be such a bummer. Like snow before Thanksgiving.
If you haven’t yet accepted that there is a real and organized thrust to completely undo the underpinnings of our society and its economic engine, you better study up, pilgrim.
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