Hey Millennials: Here’s the Truth About Socialism, Kim Jong-un, and Nicolás Maduro
Lawrence McQuillan • Thursday June 14, 2018
A recent story in the New York Times discussed
the increasing willingness of political candidates in the United States
to run as socialists. Times reporter Farah Stockman wrote that the
Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is surging, even in
conservative-leaning states. “Since November 2016, DSA’s membership has increased from about 5,000 to 35,000 nationwide,”
Stockman wrote. “The number of local groups has grown from 40 to 181,
including 10 in Texas. Houston’s once-dormant chapter now has nearly 300
members.”
Franklin
Bynum, a 34-year-old attorney, avowed socialist, and DSA member, won
the Democratic nomination for criminal court judge in Houston. At least
16 other socialists appeared on the ballot in primary races across
Texas.
Many of the candidates and much of the support come from millennials, the largest generation of Americans in history. In
part, millennials’ attraction to socialism can be traced back to Occupy
Wall Street and the 2016 presidential campaign of Senator Bernie
Sanders, a self-described socialist.
These well-publicized movements emphasized inequalities in income,
access to capital, criminal justice, healthcare, childcare, access to
education, and housing affordability. Amy Zachmeyer, a 34-year-old union
organizer who helped restart the Houston DSA chapter said that
socialism “resonates with millennials who are making less money than
their parents did, are less able to buy a home, and drowning in student
debt.” Millennials’ attraction to socialism is reflected in surveys.
A 2016 survey
of 18- to 29-year-olds by Harvard’s Institute of Politics found that 16
percent self-identified as socialists, while 33 percent supported
socialism.
Only 42 percent supported capitalism, while 51 percent did not.
Another survey in 2017 found that 51 percent of millennials identified socialism or communism as their favored socioeconomic system. Only 42 percent favored capitalism.
· Jorge
Roman-Romero, 24, who leads a new DSA chapter in Tulsa, Oklahoma, said,
“It’s not a liability to say that anymore,” referring to calling
oneself a socialist candidate.
For example, DSA chapters should read “Can There Be an ‘After Socialism’?” by University of Pennsylvania history professor Alan Charles Kors, which
tells the story of socialism that Bernie Sanders and the Democratic
Socialists of America won’t tell and that millennials don’t hear. Here
is an extended excerpt:
“” The
goal of socialism was to reap the cultural, scientific, creative, and
communal rewards of abolishing private property and free markets, and to
end human tyranny. Using the command of the state, Communism sought to
create this socialist society. What in fact occurred was the achievement
of power by a group of inhumane despots: Lenin, Stalin, Mao Tse-tung,
Kim Il Sung, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, Castro, Mengistu, Ceausescu, Hoxha,
and so on, and so on . . .
No
cause, ever, in the history of all mankind, has produced more
cold-blooded tyrants, more slaughtered innocents, and more orphans than
socialism with power. It surpassed, exponentially, all other systems of
production in turning out the dead. The bodies are all around us. And
here is the problem: No one talks about them. No one honors them. No one
does penance for them. No one has committed suicide for having been an
apologist for those who did this to them. No one pays for them. No one
is hunted down to account for them. It is exactly what Solzhenitsyn
foresaw in said:
“Socialism has a lot of different messages to different people. I think
the issue of socialist ideology and what that meant or means is not
terribly important.” Perhaps it’s not important to Sanders, but it was
to the tens of millions of people who died at the hands of socialists or
who currently toil under such regimes in Kim Jong-un’s North Korea and
Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuela.””
· A 2014 United Nations report on North Korea
listed the conditions that ordinary citizens face in North Korea:
“extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced
abortions and other sexual violence, persecution on political,
religious, racial, and gender grounds, the forcible transfer of
populations, the enforced disappearance of persons and the inhumane act
of knowingly causing prolonged starvation” (p. 14). Two million to three
million people are believed to have starved to death in North Korea in the 1990s, including “deliberate starvation” of political prisoners.
· Venezuela’s government has practiced socialism since 1998. The result
is an annual inflation rate today of 9,000 percent, an economy that
shrinks 15 percent annually, empty shelves, crushing poverty, a fleeing
population (10 percent of the population has emigrated), 12 percent of
children under five suffer from malnutrition and a socialist president
who prohibits outside aid, even from the Vatican.
So millennials, this is what socialism looks like in practice and where concentrated government power inevitably leads.
As
the old adage warns: A government powerful enough to give you
everything you want is powerful enough to take away everything you have.
That includes life itself.! !
Rather than being a Utopia, socialism and communism in practice create a hell on earth.
***
Lawrence J. McQuillan is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Entrepreneurial Innovation at the Independent Institute. He is the author of the book California Dreaming: Lessons on How to Resolve America’s Public Pension Crisis.
posted by Lillian Martinez at
5:41 p.m.
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