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It’s time to give socialism a try
WAPO ^ | March 6, 2018 | Elizabeth Bruenig

Posted on 03/07/2018 6:54:05 AM PST by PROCON

In the United States, we’ve arrived at a pair of mutually exclusive convictions: that liberal, capitalist democracies are guaranteed by their nature to succeed and that in our Trumpist moment they seem to be failing in deeply unsettling ways. For liberals — and by this I mean inheritors of the long liberal tradition, not specifically those who might also be called progressives — efforts to square these two notions have typically combined expressions of high anxiety with reassurances that, if we only have the right attitude, everything will set itself aright.

Hanging on and hoping for the best is certainly one approach to rescuing the best of liberalism from its discontents, but my answer is admittedly more ambitious: It’s time to give socialism a try.

(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...


TOPICS: Business/Economy; Chit/Chat; Government
KEYWORDS: liberalism; sedition; socialism
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To: PROCON

There’s nothing “liberal” about socialism. This chick is ths product of 50+ years of socialist-democrat brainwashing and indoctrination.

If this woman wants a real taste of socialism, she can relocate to a real socialist paradise like Venezuela, mexico, europe, china, cuba, north korea, or zimbabwe.

Of course, the locals would probably kill and eat her, but she doesn’t need to know that. Let her experience socialism in all its glory.


101 posted on 03/07/2018 9:16:23 AM PST by factoryrat (We are the producers, the creators. Grow it, mine it, build it. MAGA!)
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To: PROCON

We are already a Socialist Nation.

FDR started the ball rolling and it’s been speeding down hill ever since.


102 posted on 03/07/2018 9:19:43 AM PST by Kickass Conservative ( An Armed Society is a Polite Society. An Unarmed Society is North Korea.)
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To: PROCON

Yeah - socialism may have failed wherever it has been tried, but we know how to make it work....


103 posted on 03/07/2018 9:20:22 AM PST by trebb (I stopped picking on the mentally ill hypocrites who pose as conservatives...mostly ;-})
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To: Puppage

If there was such a thing as White Privilege (there isn't) ...she'd be the poster child.

104 posted on 03/07/2018 9:21:40 AM PST by BookmanTheJanitor
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To: Voption

That deserves its own thread!


105 posted on 03/07/2018 9:23:00 AM PST by piytar (http://www.truthrevolt.org/videos/bill-whittle-number-one-bullet)
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To: PROCON

It’s been tried over a long period of time in numerous countries. They’re virtually all basket cases.


106 posted on 03/07/2018 9:28:08 AM PST by TBP (Progressives lack compassion and tolerance. Their self-aggrandizement is all that matters.)
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To: PROCON

So Elizabeth Bruenig knows someone who can make socialism work THIS time?

LOL!

5.56mm


107 posted on 03/07/2018 9:31:34 AM PST by M Kehoe
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To: C210N

Thank you !
There’s my buddy !
I love that guy


108 posted on 03/07/2018 9:31:38 AM PST by Truthoverpower (The guvmint you get is the Trump winning express !)
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To: Kid Shelleen
I wonder if the WaPo's billionaire owner approved this message?

It works like this: 1. make billions 2. Promote socialism so any old riff raff won't make billions. Billionaires are among the biggest proponents of socialism, some from genuine guilt about wealth, but most are simply malicious.

109 posted on 03/07/2018 9:32:06 AM PST by palmer (...if we do not have strong families and strong values, then we will be weak and we will not survive)
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To: KC Burke
Absolutely corrosive socialistic vile thought covered up by a young pretty face.

There was a time when an editorial position at the Washington Post, or at many other big city dailies, was a thing of prestige. Seems like those positions are now being filled by hacky advocacy journalists.

110 posted on 03/07/2018 9:42:44 AM PST by Hemingway's Ghost (Spirit of '75)
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To: PROCON

Means she would FORCE people to do so, and if they resisted, kill them.


111 posted on 03/07/2018 9:43:17 AM PST by Alas Babylon! (Keep fighting the Left and their Fake News!)
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To: Maverick68

“Idiots like the author is why we should raise the voting age to 35.” [Maverick68, post 32]

Hate to say this, but it might not help.

I’ve a neighbor, age 75. Retired high school history teacher from Wisconsin. Just before the 2016 general election, he proudly declared he was a socialist - just like his father (First World War combat vet) had been before him.

He told me he’d just voted early, for Hillary Clinton. Halfheartedly. Bernie Sanders had been much more to his liking.

I hadn’t asked after his political opinions, nor had I volunteered any of my own.

Hard on the heels of that first declaration, he regaled me with approving comments about the standard litany of Left/Progressive policies and causes.

No objective material nor factual support; he simply did not “feel” any “mere citizen” ought to be allowed to own modern military small arms (the AR-15 was his principal villain). And he stated flatly that every corporation deserved to be taxed to death.

There was a lot more, but those were two major points. I struggled with a touch of vertigo, contemplating the classrooms full of students he had lectured.


112 posted on 03/07/2018 9:49:20 AM PST by schurmann
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To: PROCON
Although our modern socialists' promise of greater freedom is genuine and sincere, in recent years observer after observer has been impressed by the unforeseen consequences of socialism, the extraordinary similarity in many respects of the conditions under 'communism' and 'fascism'. As the writer Peter Drucker expressed it in 1939,
'the complete collapse of the belief in the attainability of freedom and equality through Marxism has forced Russia to travel the same road toward a totalitarian society of unfreedom and inequality which Germany has been following. Not that communism and fascism are essentially the same. Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion, and it has proved as much an illusion in Russia as in pre-Hitler Germany.’
No less significant is the intellectual outlook of the rank and file in the communist and fascist movements in Germany before 1933. The relative ease with which a young communist could be converted into a Nazi or vice versa was well known, best of all to the propagandists of the two parties. The communists and Nazis clashed more frequently with each other than with other parties simply because they competed for the same type of mind and reserved for each other the hatred of the heretic. Their practice showed how closely they are related. To both, the real enemy, the man with whom they had nothing in common, was the liberal of the old type. While to the Nazi the communist and to the communist the Nazi, and to both the socialist, are potential recruits made of the right timber, they both know that there can be no compromise between them and those who really believe in individual freedom.

What is promised to us as the Road to Freedom is in fact the Highroad to Servitude. For it is not difficult to see what must be the consequences when democracy embarks upon a course of planning. The goal of the planning will be described by some such vague term as 'the general welfare'. There will be no real agreement as to the ends to be attained, and the effect of the people's agreeing that there must be central planning, without agreeing on the ends, will be rather as if a group of people were to commit themselves to take a journey together without agreeing where they want to go: with the result that they may all have to make a journey which most of them do not want at all.
____________— F A Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (May, 1945 Reader’s Digest Condensed Version)


113 posted on 03/07/2018 9:55:18 AM PST by conservatism_IS_compassion (Presses can be 'associated,' or presses can be independent. Demand independent presses.)
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To: PROCON

This means that no one should earn any more than anyone else. The rocket scientist makes as much as the janitor. It’s only fair, comrade! Down with the capitalist pigs!


114 posted on 03/07/2018 9:57:44 AM PST by vpintheak (Freedom is not equality; and equality is not freedom!)
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To: HotHunt

Isn’t that on the cover of the democrat hang book?.


115 posted on 03/07/2018 10:15:56 AM PST by Vaduz (women and children to be impacIQ of chimpsted the most.)
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To: PROCON
I don't believe anything original has been written about socialism and its airy promises for at least a hundred years now. What changes is the people bleating the same old song, apparently blissfully unaware that we've heard it all before.

She hasn't a clue how capitalism works. Neither did Marx. And frankly neither of them has or had a clue about how socialism works, either. Nobody ends up "equal". The state does not "wither away". Freedom does.

116 posted on 03/07/2018 10:15:57 AM PST by Billthedrill
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To: PROCON
Brain in a blender. Wonder if she's ever had a real job in her long life of (I'm guessing) 22 years?

I'm also guessing it would be wise to get her to sign a notarized consent form before having drinks and sex with her.


117 posted on 03/07/2018 10:22:37 AM PST by ChildOfThe60s (If you can remember the 60's....You weren't really there)
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To: PROCON

democrat presidents since roosevelt have been trying. Socialism is a failure. Anyone who proposes it is proposing poverty, misery, and famine.


118 posted on 03/07/2018 10:25:38 AM PST by I want the USA back (My preferred personal pronoun is "Your Majesty.")
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To: Pollster1

Agree. No one who loves freedom would want to live under socialism.

And as another brilliant freeper pointed out, there is no “try” socialism on to see how it “feeeeeeels.” A lot of our loved ones have to DIE to get us back out. No touchy feely minimum wage and happy happy joy joy for the drug addicted homeless is worth the hundreds of thousands of American patriots who would die trying to get our freedom back.

If there were a death penalty for stupid, this bitch would be eating her last supper about now.


119 posted on 03/07/2018 10:28:44 AM PST by Yaelle
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To: PROCON
WTF does this even mean?

Flying unicorns, galloping on rainbows across the sky, while pooping free skittles for all the people.

Obviously, the author is a committed, dyed-in-the-wool leftist, who can't be bothered to note that every economic indicator in the country is on the upswing. She wants to 'improve' a system that isn't broken because....fairness. Or something.

120 posted on 03/07/2018 11:18:31 AM PST by Windflier (Pitchforks and torches ripen on the vine. Left too long, they become black rifles.)
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