Saturday, March 07, 2020

Comrade Bernie is 50 years behind

“Europeans, then, having learned that socialism does not work, are trying to narrow our gap with the United States with various reforms—just as Bernie Sanders, 50 years too late, seeks to emulate Europe. Doesn’t Sanders know that his program has been applied in Europe, and failed? He must: and this would mean that his true ambition is not free health care or free college, but a deeper transformation of the United States. Perhaps he hates the free-market society and wants to replace it with a socialist, egalitarian one, overseen by the “tyranny of the benevolent,” which Tocqueville warned against.

Why would so many American voters find Sanders’s socialism attractive? For the same reasons that socialism was once popular in Europe: the love for equality over individual freedom; the illusion of a safe life, guaranteed by a benevolent state; the allure of transferring personal responsibility to a public nurse. Then as now, these offers exert a strong psychological appeal; the answer to them is reality. Socialism does not work—but perhaps one needs to live through it to be convinced.”

https://www.city-journal.org/bernie-sanders-socialist-vision

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