On the same day that Venezuela’s “democratically” elected socialist president Nicolas Maduro, whose once-wealthy nation now has citizens foraging for food, announced he was chopping five zeros off the country’s currency to create a “stable financial and monetary system,” “The View’s” Meghan McCain was the target of her cohost, and Internet-wide condemnation, for stating some obvious truths about collectivism.
On the same week we learned that democratic socialist Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua had massacred hundreds of protesters whose economic futures have been decimated by his economic policies, Soledad O’Brien, and writers at outlets ranging from GQ and BuzzFeed to the Daily Beast, were telling McCain to cool her jets.
In truth, she was being far too calm. Socialism has been one, if not the, leading man-made cause of death and misery in human existence. Whether it’s implemented by a mob of people or by a single strongman, collectivism is a poverty generator, an attack on human dignity, and destroyer of individual rights.
It’s also true that not all socialism ends in the tyranny of Leninism or Stalinism or Moaism or Castroism or Ba’athism or the Khmer Rouge or Chávezism — only most do. And no, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t intend to set up gulags in Alaska. Most “democratic Socialists” — the qualifier affixed to denote that they live in a democratic system and have no choice but ask for votes— aren’t consciously or explicitly endorsing violence or tyranny. But when they adopt the term “socialism,” and the ideas associated with it, they deserve to be treated with the kind of contempt and derision that all authoritarian philosophies deserve.
But look: Norway!
If you bring up socialism — “democratic” or otherwise — you will inevitably be browbeat into ignoring the giant list of nations that have tried and miserably failed at coercing economic fairness. Socialism is perhaps the only ideology that Americans are asked to judge solely based on its piddling “successes.”
By David Harsanyi
