Socialism
December 19, 2021 — John Hinderaker
I didn’t know that there is an election going on in Chile. But there is, and observers say that the Left is favored to retake control of that country, which has seen unprecedented prosperity since it adopted free enterprise policies beginning in the 1980s. Dan Mitchell has the story. Most notable is this animation, which shows the opposite paths taken in recent decades by Chile and Venezuela, formerly one of
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October 28, 2021 — Steven Hayward
Anyone remember the Obama Administration’s lugubrious “Life of Julia” slide show video, promoting their cradle-to-grave socialist vision for a single American woman? It seems to have been scrubbed from the internet, but my favorite part was the segment where Julia “decided to have a child,” with no mention then or after of a thing called a “father.” It seemed to be spontaneous procreation! Well, now the Biden Administration has come
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October 17, 2021 — John Hinderaker
I am so old, I remember when socialists claimed that people would be better off under socialism. What’s weird is not that historical experience has forced socialists to abandon the pretense that socialism is beneficial to anyone outside their ruling elite, but rather, that socialism still exists. A case in point, from a leftist named Carl Beijer: The Left is literally rooting for Biden Breadlines. Also, as someone whose mother
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October 2, 2021 — John Hinderaker
It has been a while since we have checked in on the socialist disaster of Venezuela. For a while it looked as though Maduro’s criminal gang might be driven from office, but the threat has passed and instead, millions of Venezuelans have simply left. Now that country’s socialist government has announced that it is devaluing its currency by (if my arithmetic is correct) one million times: Venezuela on Friday launched
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August 8, 2021 — Steven Hayward
It appears even Venezuelan socialists can figure it out sooner or later: Venezuela Backs Away From Price Controls as Citizens Go Hungry CARACAS, Venezuela—President Nicolás Maduro’s government has begun dismantling price controls, a major policy shift that aims to ease widespread unrest by letting shops sell food at market prices but is worsening Venezuela’s already punishing inflation. . . “Before there was nothing; now there’s everything,” said Jesús Barrios, 36,
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July 13, 2021 — Steven Hayward
As everyone knows, socialism is back big (except in nations that have had it already, like Cuba, Venezuela, California, Seattle, etc). So it is not surprising to see headlines like this: For sustainable finance to work, we will need central planning The holy grail of sustainable finance is figuring out how to distinguish sustainable from unsustainable investments. Get this right, and the public and private sectors have a guide to
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July 11, 2021 — John Hinderaker
Earlier today, demonstrations against Cuba’s Communist dictatorship broke out across the island. The New York Times, long an apologist for Castro’s tyranny, acknowledges the current reality: Shouting “Freedom” and other anti-government slogans, hundreds of Cubans took to the streets in cities around the country on Sunday to protest food and medicine shortages, in a remarkable eruption of discontent not seen in nearly 30 years. Heh. Yes, “Freedom” is an anti-government
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November 22, 2020 — John Hinderaker
Our friend David Horowitz wrote this essay, which he titled “Fighting Words.” It is a call for freedom-loving Americans to fight back against the totalitarian Left. By now it should be obvious – even to conservatives – that we are in a war. It is a conflict that began nearly fifty years ago when the street revolutionaries of the Sixties joined the Democrat Party. Their immediate goal was to help
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July 1, 2020 — John Hinderaker
Seattle’s CHOP is finally being dismantled. After a series of shootings and sexual assaults, and many complaints and lawsuits by victimized citizens, the authorities have had enough. The Seattle Police Department compiled this video that shows some of the violence that characterized CHOP throughout its brief life: It sounds like the process of liberating the captive CHOP zone is going reasonably well, although the police department notes some issues: As
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April 24, 2020 — Scott Johnson
In the course of her short career in Congress Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has surely earned the right to a mocking compilation of her wit and wisdom like Quotations from Chairman LBJ or George W. Bushisms: The Slate Book Of Accidental Wit And Wisdom Of Our 43rd President. If AOC were a target of the left, rather than one of its idiot heroes, the book would be out by now. Quotations from
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March 11, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
As it did in 2016, the Democratic party this year flirted with a socialist presidential candidate, but ultimately rejected him for a pragmatist. Bernie Sanders’s quest for the nomination seems doomed. The party almost certainly will select Joe Biden. The case for nominating Biden was three-fold. First, he was Barack Obama’s vice president. This was probably important to black voters, and it was black voters who carried Biden to victory
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March 10, 2020 — John Hinderaker
Scandinavian history, that is. Bernie Sanders calls himself a socialist and has demonstrated a lifelong devotion to Communist regimes in the USSR, Cuba and Venezuela. But now that he is running for president, he deflects accountability by claiming that by “socialist” he means countries like Sweden and Denmark–countries which are not in fact socialist and which have, in many ways, more conservative policies than we do. Bernie finally was called
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March 8, 2020 — John Hinderaker
Before this New York Post story, I had never heard of Carlos Maza. But a lot of people had; he has 150,000 followers on Twitter and YouTube. Maza is a social justice warrior, and he hates rich people. This is how he describes himself in his Twitter profile: “Marxist pig. Liberal fascist. Queer scum. He/Him. YouTube profits off of hate speech. IG: gaywonk.” He has specialized in exposing the hypocrisy
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March 1, 2020 — John Hinderaker
At Front Page, Daniel Greenfield analyzes the source, by zip code, of donations to the Bernie Sanders campaign: Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. Their employees are three of the top 4 Bernie donors. Apple is in fifth place. These dot coms are not exactly organizations known to employ members of the proletariat. *** Geographically, Bernie’s top dollar zip code is 94110 in San Francisco. The average household income in this part
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February 28, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
Whenever Bernie Sanders’s socialism comes up in the Democratic debates, he deflects criticism by saying he favors something along the lines of Denmark’s model. Sanders’s debate rivals almost invariably let this answer pass. (I think Pete Buttigieg tried to take it on in the last debate but couldn’t get the floor.) In reality, the policies Sanders advocates bear little resemblance to those of Denmark and other Scandinavian countries today. They
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February 28, 2020 — John Hinderaker
Dan Proft is an excellent radio host in Chicago who now also has a syndicated radio show and podcast. I have been on the Chicago show a number of times, and joined Dan’s syndicated show yesterday afternoon for what I thought was an interesting discussion of socialism, capitalism and the Nordic model in the context of the 2020 election. Here is the conversation, which is around 14 minutes long. I
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February 26, 2020 — Steven Hayward
I think it was Tom Bethell, back when he wrote the must-read Washington column for The American Spectator, who asked the pertinent question when Bernie Sanders was first elected to the U.S. House of Representatives under the Socialist Party affiliation in 1990: How will we be able to tell the difference between Bernie’s socialism and the “mainstream” Democratic Party in Washington? That illuminating question has become suddenly urgent now that
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