Politics tend to be a game for the old. However, it’s usually the more youthful candidates that create most of the buzz, and right now, there is only one up-and-comer getting a huge amount of attention. With relatively good looks and politics that the press-corps can get behind, only one candidate is being touted as the fresh-face of her party and perhaps American governance: 28-year-old U.S. House candidate from New York, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. That candidate is a socialist.
The New Face of Socialism
Whether you know her as Red Cortez, Eyes Wide-WIDE, or whatever, I’m sure you’ve seen images of the young progressive plastered all over national media, which was quite a reception for only a U.S. House primary win, decided by a few thousand votes. Despite this, Cortez’s upset victory over the Nancy Pelosi acolyte and New York 14th congressional district representative, Joseph Crowley (D), was greeted with elation throughout the press. New York Magazine’s Daily Intelligencer raved about her win, declaring a new epoch free from Democratic machine-politics, saying “… this isn’t the machine age, it’s the Instagram era, and it’s not clear that old-school party apparatuses are worth much anymore.”
Additionally, Cortez was treated to a whole host of soft-ball interviews by the gushing media, where virtually none of her assertions were challenged. Even President Trump praised Cortez, saying she “’had a lot of energy.’” However, very few were willing to talk about what the policies she supports will actually mean in America.
Socialism: Equality in Negative Outcomes
Certainly, socialism, even euphemistic democratic socialism, while getting kudos for its stated intentions, tends to be too expensive and destructive to human freedom and dignity to maintain in a society. In its purest forms so far (i.e. the Soviet Union or Venezuela), such systems succumb to economic realities, collapsing after only a few decades. This is because you can only nationalize private property once. Additionally, the government apparatchiks that end-up running such stolen assets aren’t necessarily the most knowledgeable on the companies they now operate nor properly motivated enough to keep them going. If the incompetence of government is not checked, usually by reintroducing some capitalism (like in the China model), these companies fail along with the state economy.
Also, the other side of socialism is its phasing-out of the freedom of its citizens, an effect congenital to the system. If you vote for central planning, that’s what you get, and each year, government promising to provide even more commodities as rights invariably leads to government having more of a say in how its citizens live. Government can guarantee you a job, healthcare, etc., but then they will make the call on what that means, what’s good for you. Your own wishes aren’t important. If daddy brings home the bacon, daddy makes the rules. And to enforce the exponentially expanding will of government, the police-state necessarily grows, choking Liberty and filling the prisons. In the oppressive climate, one is left to wonder if the only equality to be realized is found in the chains around one’s ankles.
While capitalism is far from perfect, it’s sustainable and is directly responsible for the meteoric rise of the quality of life of most everyone in the West. Not so with Socialism, which seems only capable of managing the declines of formerly wealthy nations and hammering down the gifted in order to level the playing-field. U.K. PM Margaret Thatcher purportedly said, “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money,” and fewer statements have better summed-up the economic problem with this errant philosophy. And when the money is gone, socialism has nothing to encourage rebuilding its economy, having dis-incentivized entrepreneurism through its seizures of business and high-taxation/regulation. Socialism makes it possible for an oil-rich country like Venezuela, formerly a gem of South America, to be reduced to a violent, impoverished hell-hole where the average citizen is starving.
And while self-proclaimed American socialists of all stripes will deflect with the no-true-Scotsman fallacy, claiming that Venezuela or the U.S.S.R. wasn’t real socialism, they have little else to point to but the declining social-democracies of Europe/Scandinavia, many who’ve ultimately had to curtail their welfare-state in the face of massive government debt, while still suffering from huge personal debt largely owing to the confiscatory taxes needed to prop-up government spending.
Soft-Socialism: the Welfare State in the U.S.
The U.S. isn’t that far behind Europe in its socialism problem, and in some ways we’re worse off. For decades, the federal government has had a flirtation with soft-socialism, and such resulting policies have been a chief contributor to our looming and likely fatal debt-crisis. Social spending in the U.S., from initiatives such as theGreat Society, account for $22 trillion in spending since the 1960’s, surpassing our current level of the national debt. That’s a drop in the bucket compared to promised future social-spending, as unfunded liabilities carry a price-tag of over $87 trillion! That’s simply a bill we can’t pay, but people are depending on long-promised government resources, and your guess is as good as mine as to whether the politicians (owing their offices to the continuance of government programs) will welch on their constituents or illegally seize private assets to keep that gravy-train going just a little longer; either way looks like a good recipe for massive social chaos.
Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez support new spending schemes like Medicare-for-all (carrying a $32.6 trillion price over just 10 years) and a new huge expansion in the federal minimum wage, all on top of the other bills we can’t pay, despite the havoc they cause for smaller establishments who can’t keep up with the artificial rising cost of doing business. On that point, The Daily Wire recently reported on how New York’s own hikes on the minimum wage and rising rent have just closed the door on the coffee shop where Cortez used to work, killed by the very same policies she would like to force on the rest of us. Oblivious to the situation, Cortez tried to cheer the soon to be ex-employees, saying that they too could be as successful as she (meaning an ignorant want-to-be politician who causes such closures), but I think they’d rather be employed.
Hard-Socialism: Coming to America
I wish I had some good news. I wish I could say that the U.S. wasn’t increasingly enamored of open socialists as leaders. I wish I could say that the policies of Cortez and her allies were just wild-eyed fevered dreams from the fringes, never to be implemented. Furthermore, I wish I could say that Trump was turning this debt thing around… However, I honestly can’t. When both parties (even on Trump’s watch) run-up relatively the same deficits, when Bernie Sanders places second in his party’s presidential primary, when both parties adjust their rhetoric to accommodate radicals, and when the Universities (at tax-payers expense) churn-out more good Marxists than seminaries churn-out good pastors, it is illogical to assume that Socialism and the resulting economic collapse are not the future of the Union.
Certainly, the trajectory of U.S. history supports the inevitability of socialism, from the early progressivism of Wilson and Roosevelt to the expansion and further codification of those ideals by Johnson and Obama. The U.S. has embraced the concept of government being all things and rejected the brilliance of Liberty under limited government. While this socialistic progression has been slowed at times, it has never been reversed and there’s no reason to believe it ever will be. Washington has a rendezvous with economic and societal collapse. We’ll burnout slower than Venezuela, but we’ll burnout all the same.
The Way Out
The only hope to escape the societal disintegration caused by socialism is to escape the United States. The path Washington has set for itself is very clear, and for it to leave that path would take a something akin to a great-awakening, and there’s no indication that will ever happen. However, if states like Texas were to utilize their right to resign a Union that is dedicated to such destructive propositions, personally dealing with the crises left ignored and exacerbated by Washington, then Texas and like-minded states could probably escape most of the fallout of the impending U.S. economic collapse. If we don’t, however, if we keep a fool’s hope of making America great again, or if we resolve that socialism will work fine despite all available evidence to the contrary, then it doesn’t matter if Washington wears the face of Cortez or Trump. Ultimately, we’d still be chained to a federal government that, to one degree or another, simply cannot/will not stop spending more money than it has, a sinking ship of state that would rather listen to the band one more time than man the lifeboats.
