It is hard to make a case for it when you have a number approaching 1/3 of this country's population NOT working and on some sort of government entitlement or other.
Democrats have been working for over half a century to economically shackle as many people in this country to entitlements so they could control them. If you get over half everywhere, you have the entire country in your hands.
This ENTIRE government now is concentrated on a ONE WAY equalization plan that spans the gamut of social, judicial, and financial realms from the HAVES to the HAVE NOTS.
>> Socialism states that you owe me something simply because I exist.
Yup.
At the founding of the land that would become the U.S., the people held freedom of religion so dear that they actually believed in and practiced religion, holding it sacred and keeping it above the quotidian realm of government. In many of the colonies, there was an official religion of the commonwealth, and some colonial governors compelled church attendance. This did not violate the First Amendment, because the First Amendment applied to the U.S. Congress, not the states. The states were a federation, not a centralized dictatorship.
In other words, [Yergin and Stanislaw] wrote, while Spanish communists would die with the word “Stalin” on their lips, “few people would die with the words ‘free markets’ on their lips.”
Ridiculous. The word so very many have died for is "freedom." Obviously, freedom includes trade.
The have-not society will forever look for ways to exploit those that have. This is the root of Socialist/Communist/Marxist-Leninist ideology. It is a natural problem for which there is no solution.
Pleading with the most ignorant segment of the population to understand free-market capitalism and standing on their own two legs is like pleading with a carjacker, as he is pointing his gun at your head, that theft is wrong.
Socialism always results in state sponsored mass murder because to survive enemies must created and destroyed.
It’s because socialism is simple and earnest whereas capitalism is complex and shot through with irony. It’s easy to wrap moral language around socialsim but harder to do with capitalism.
I think corporate cronyism is to blame. Seriously, the liberals think giving 80 billion dollars a month to the stock market and bankers is ok. I don’t get it. I also don’t get why republicans and libertarians are not plastering this on every superbowl ad slot. 80 billion dollars... to banks and wall street, while everyone else is being extorted by taxation to give it to them. Think of all the companies in bed with the government.. Verizon, AT&T, GE, IBM, the list is endless.
The world is a cruel and unfair place. Socialism is what happens when you think you can fix it. All you actually do is become the instrument of the cruelty and unfairness.
The left uses every economic downturn, every crisis to convince the people that private enterprise is the problem, and to put more and more restrictions on it, with the ultimate goal of totally controlling it as under communism.
bump
The Rolling Stone should make their magazine available for FREE to everyone for the good of mankind.
It’s interesting that the children, including my own, who were taught the values of self reliance embrace capitalism and its principles. They are our future, despite govt schools.
To the defeatists and the let it crash folks your missing one important point about the 50% getting freebees. They are LAZY! Yes every election a percent will go out and vote especially the government class that depends on getting their cut of redistribution. If they weren’t lazy the Democrats wouldn’t have to encourage them to vote, sometimes even bussing them. The Democrats wouldn’t be looking for new voters via “immigration reform”. Look at the numbers from Obama’s reelection, less than the first. Had Republicans gotten out the vote Romney would be president. ( I not saying that’s great just better than Obama). As every election draws near Democrats have a name for it GOTV. Get out the vote. They hound voters till they vote. The gimmie class and their masters can be defeated it just takes work. Every Freeper and conservative should be working towards the goal of getting everyone you know out to vote.
Socialism is on the march in Western Europe and the United States not the former Soviet Union, and it is the rise of the central banks, the creation of the Euro and EU expansion that spurs it on.
“The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.” Margaret Thatcher
When there’s no incentive to work, people won’t work, and the system collapses. We see a microcosm of it in the Obamacare exchanges. Young people are looking out for #1 and have little interest in subsidizing health insurance for older ones.
“Atlas Shrugged” relates the cycle.
It is effective to look at socialism for what it is, a pseudo-religion, weirdly enough, based on Christianity.
That is, if you take The Bible, remove God, and substitute man in His place as the creator and ruler of all things, the end result is socialism. The parallels with the Book of Genesis to the major doctrines of socialism are striking.
For example, the environmentalist movement has as its impulse returning to the state of nature found in the Garden of Eden. That is, to foreswear civilization and return to living in small, disconnected communal villages bereft of anything modern.
That 90% or more of mankind would have to die for this accomplishment is unimportant to them.
They also believe that the cause of the expulsion of mankind from the Garden of Eden, eating of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, must be reversed. And the way to achieve this is through moral relativity, to destroy the idea that good and evil exist.
These ideas crop up again and again in socialist, and even pre-socialist writings, not through any direct connection other than the King James Version Bible.
At the same time, you see other elements of socialism in their feudal state of mind. They embrace the idea of an elite which rules over everyone else, the peasantry. Combined, the two represent God to them.
For this reason, it is easy for them to imagine that mankind can use a tiny fraction of a trace gas to manipulate the immense atmosphere of Earth. People can do this, because, well, they are God. It’s magic.
It gets downright perverse at times, because socialists can really imagine themselves as being faithful to their Judeo-Christian traditions. Nancy Pelosi truly imagines herself as a “good Catholic socialist”, but is utterly disconnected from a belief in God, muddling the two together terribly.
With a straight face, she insists that ‘God’ would approve of abortion, homosexual marriage, euthanasia, you name it, because she imagines herself as a vital part of the leadership, the brain, of mankind as God.
The deeper you delve into this idea, the more filth and cobwebs you will find. No serious person of faith should have anything to do with socialists or socialism.
“communists would die with the word “Stalin” on their lips”
There’s the problem - not enough communists died. Like it or not, we need to set up a 2nd Nuremberg tribunal that judges and punishes communists. The 1st Nuremberg tribunal established a loathing toward Nazism. The 2nd tribunal can accomplish a hatred toward communism.
Why you axin me? I jus want mah free stuff.