Democrat Socialism explained

By Ron Wisner
Posted Mar 9, 2019 at 4:00 PMUpdated Mar 10, 2019 at 11:55 AM

Here is a simple question: If slavery is a 100 percent tax on one’s labor, what is a 70 percent tax? Such is the level of taxation envisioned by a young and idealistic freshman congresswoman, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez.
How does this person and her fellow travelers arrive at this number? How does Elizabeth Warren justify her “wealth tax?” Because wealth is “immoral.” No reason is given for this conclusion. It is simply a standard assertion of the left without basis. If extreme wealth is immoral, how about moderate wealth? By extension, does this mean that the middle class is more immoral than those of low income?
We accept that the social contract provides for some limited form of taxation in exchange for an orderly society, and it was affirmed early on when the Whiskey Tax Rebellion was put down by George Washington. But any valid contract must be a fair contract. An unequal contract, one which does not benefit both parties fairly, one in which both parties have not entered in to freely and without duress, as any first-year law student can tell you, is unenforceable and void.
The very calculations of what is an appropriate level of confiscatory taxation in a society relies on the false assumption that such taxation is the right of government and ignores the fact that our labor and the money that comes from it is our personal property. Private property is a cornerstone of a free society, right along with free speech and freedom of association. Without protection from seizure of property by the state, there is no freedom.
We all know that the moral authority of confiscatory taxation put forth by the Left is based on their notion of social justice. Their definition of said justice is that we are all supposed to be equal. “Income inequality” offends them. This shows a lack of understanding of our Constitution and its guarantees. In a free society, under our Constitution, we are equal under law and thus are entitled to equal opportunity under the law. We are not, however, guaranteed equal outcome. To guarantee equal outcome is to infringe on every other citizen’s liberty.
The party of the Left, the party in favor of socialism, likes to paint their motives as altruistic. “We care more about the little people.” “Therefore,” they argue, as though it follows logically, “the Right is selfish.” Yet socialism entitles them to others’ labor and property. In the real world the Left has become the party of those who demand that their fellow citizens work to support them. How is this altruistic? How is this different from slavery?
Ms. Cortez and her generation are filled with youthful notions of social engineering but have no clue what social engineering does to a society. They don’t seem to know that it’s been tried, and that it has failed spectacularly, catastrophically, every time. The degree to which a society is “planned” can be directly correlated to its degree of failure. (see Mises Institute, “Planned Chaos&rdquo
The “Green New Deal” is a shocking display of such wishful thinking. Even debating such ideas is a challenge if your opponent lacks a common knowledge of history and economics. The cloistered leftist academia has produced an entire generation hoodwinked by Keynesian and collectivist fantasies, including Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, who is said to have graduated cum laude with a degree in economics, who replaces laws of supply and demand with preposterous notions of need and unlimited sovereign debt.
Socialism controls, by degrees, the means of production and interferes with the market economy. The more socialist, the more interference in the markets. Every program administered by government is a market disruption and a loss of efficiency. Interfering with the market economy causes greater and greater inefficiencies which inevitably results in market failures, thus shortages, which in turn lead to lower standards of living. And thus, the old Margaret Thatcher adage that the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money is exacerbated by the fact that in the inexorable destruction of the market economy there’s less and less money to confiscate and the death spiral accelerates. Force must be used to manage all of this decline and confiscation and the inevitable dissent. The state must therefore ultimately own everything, control everything and restrict freedom, since no one willingly gives up freedom or property. In extreme cases this can lead to fascism. Why go down this road, even part way, if we can avoid it?
In order to achieve the kind of social engineering they espouse, Socialists attempt to limit speech. We can see it all around us in the crushing political correctness of the left. Words have become banned from polite conversation and new words have been invented.
In one recent such example of speech control, in a direct contradiction of the First Amendment and a representative democracy, according to her recent tweets, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez (together with Speaker Pelosi) have felt entitled to deny congressional districts of their constitutional right of representation by demanding that their representatives vote as a block, rather than according to their consciences and their constituents wishes. This young radical with three million Twitter followers has threatened her fellow congressmen and women with coercion, bullying and public shaming. And they are scared to death. It puts one in mind of the sorcerer’s apprentice. She has the magic of the social media and is willing to wreak absolute havoc with it.
Ocasio-Cortez and her fellow leftists are a danger to our liberal democracy. This millennial of millennials has hoodwinked an entire political class and has dragged the “mainstream left,” if there is such a thing anymore, along with her, for fear of being judged “not leftist enough.” If the Democratic Party knows what’s good for them, they will “primary” this dangerous woman.
The public debate has come down to a choice between capitalism and socialism. But these terms are not even true opposites. Socialism is not an economic theory, and when we say capitalism, we really mean free enterprise. Indeed, free enterprise produces profit and it is only profit that provides the very excess that makes possible the welfare state. Kill free enterprise, and you kill the “golden goose” of a benevolent society’s ability to take care of its own.
When conservatives want to illustrate the failure of socialism they point to what’s happening to Venezuela in real time. Liberals will always counter with the Nordic countries. Yet the Nordic countries have all abandoned socialism because they realized, none too soon, that they were in fact killing the golden goose. When socialism was seen to be failing in the ’70s and ’80s a rapid turnabout was made in all three Nordic countries, and they divested public industry in favor of a strong market economy.
The essence of the argument between conservatives and liberals, between socialists and capitalists, is about freedom. It is about a choice between slavery to the state, what Fredrich Hayek called the “road to serfdom,” or freedom from the state. Please, millennials, read your history.
Ron Wisner lives in Marion.