#241451
A lefty correspondent who believes that I have been unfair to Senator Bernie Sanders — specifically, that I have given insufficient attention to the “democratic” part of his so-called democratic socialism — writes: “You should write about those millions of souls trapped in the Canadian, Icelandic, Danish, and other democratic-socialist gulags.” But, of course, there are no Canadian and Danish gulags. Then again, Canada and Denmark are not socialist countries. This is a truth the Left, and some of the Right, insists on refusing to learn. Canada in most meaningful ways enjoys a more free-market economy than does the United States, which is why our friends at the Heritage Foundation rank it several steps higher on their economic-liberty index. Denmark has a very free-market economy, too, though it is ranked one step behind the United States; Iceland is ranked ahead of Japan and enjoys a dramatically more free economy than is the Western European norm, ranked at No. 20 as opposed to No. 75 France and No. 86 Italy. The reasons for these disparities are pretty obvious: The Nordic countries have relatively high taxes and big welfare states, but they also have free trade, relatively liberal regulatory regimes, transparent and effective public institutions, etc. The United States gets dinged for crony capitalism and overly complex regulation. As Nima Sanandaji points out in these pages, four of the five Nordic countries have center-right governments, with the social democrats holding power only in Sweden. But even Sweden has undergone decades of reform in what would be understood in the United States as a generally conservative direction, as indeed did Canada a few decades ago.  Welfare states are welfare states and socialism is socialism, and, in spite of the Bernie Sanders gang and the Right’s talk-radio ranters, they are not the same thing. Welfare states use taxes and transfer payments to enable higher levels of consumption among certain groups, usually vulnerable ones: the poor, the sick, the elderly, children. Welfare states are not synonymous with big government: Singapore, for example, offers surprisingly generous housing and health-care benefits despite having a public sector that is (as measured by spending) about half the size of our own and a little more than a third the size of France’s. Switzerland has a fairly typical portfolio of welfare benefits (including a health-care system that is approximately what Obamacare was intended to look like, if Obamacare hadn’t been written and enacted by fools) with a public sector that is smaller than our own. You can view the data and make your own comparisons here. RELATED: In Venezuela, Socialism Is Killing Venezuelans Socialism, as I have written at some length, is a different beast entirely. Like the welfare state, it involves the public provision of non-public goods, but it achieves this in a different way. Rather than levying taxes and distributing checks or vouchers, the socialist government owns and operates the means of production, or, in the corporatist variant, puts the means of production under political discipline effectively indistinguishable from government ownership of them. The easiest example to illustrate the difference here is in American education: The Right advocates a welfare-state approach, with government funding education costs through taxes which are passed on to families with school-age children in the form of vouchers, which can be used at a variety of different kinds of institutions serving a variety of different kinds of needs; the Left, in contrast, advocates the truly socialist model, with government owning and operating the relevant economic assets (public schools) which function as a monopoly. The fact that you can send your children elsewhere does not make them less of a monopoly: Stop paying your school taxes and they’ll still send men with guns to your house to force the money out of you, to seize your home, or to cage you until you comply. Violence is always at the end of the socialist enterprise, as the poor people of Venezuela are discovering. Our friends on the Left assured us for many years that Boss Hugo and his epigones in the regime of Nicolás Maduro were democratic socialists, not the mean Stalinist type, and the praises of that so-called democratic-socialist regime were sung by everyone from Democratic congressmen such as Chaka Fattah of Philadelphia to progressive celebrities such as Sean Penn. The democratic socialists in Venezuela have just introduced slavery into their workers’ paradise. Violence is always at the end of the socialist enterprise, as the poor people of Venezuela are discovering. The Chávistas, like Hillary Rodham Clinton and Donald Trump, believe that international trade isn’t the open and mutually beneficial exchange of goods and services between people operating in open international markets but a nefarious scheme in which domestic workers are exploited and ripped off by ruthless foreigners who want to . . . sell them useful and desirable goods at low prices. (Never mind that for the moment.) Like the “Buy American!” gang here and the juche-practicing Norks, the Chávistas advocate a form of autarky, a system under which a country produces what it needs and consumes what it produces with minimal international trade, under the theory that such international trade impoverishes people. (They have never heard of Singapore, Hong Kong, or the United Kingdom, apparently.) So the Chávez and Maduro regimes enacted various kinds of controls on foodstuffs and other essential goods that sought to control prices and restrict international trade. Soon, the shelves of the grocery stores were empty, and Venezuelans couldn’t even buy a roll of toilet paper. The food shortage is especially severe right now, so the Maduro government has just passed a decree empowering itself to conscript workers — public-sector or private — into the state’s collectively run farming, food-processing, and food-distribution businesses. The pattern here will be familiar to those familiar with the history of socialism in Russia and China. RELATED: The Facts about Venezuela Faced with the obvious evidence, Jesse Singal of The New Yorker performs a whole Beethoven sonata of whistling past the graveyard: “It would be a bit of an oversimplification to blame the catastrophe only on socialism qua socialism. Rather . . . it’s Maduro’s particular brand of socialism, which fuses bad economic ideas with a distinctive brand of strongman bullying, and which was handed down to him by Venezuela’s deceased former president Hugo Chávez, that is largely to blame.” That’s right: It’s not the socialism, it’s just that socialism has never been done right. #share#Weird thing: That feckless and authoritarian kind of socialism is the only kind of socialism anybody has ever seen or heard of outside of a college dorm room. Either socialism is the unluckiest political idea in the history of political ideas and it just happens to have coincided with government by monsters, caudillos, and incompetents every place it has been tried, or there is in fact something wrong with socialism qua socialism. Why is it that the big-government Danish welfare state, the small-government Swiss welfare state, the frequently illiberal Singaporean welfare state, and the nice-guy Canadian welfare state all seem to work, each in its own way, while socialist experiments — including the so-called democratic-socialist experiments of places such as Venezuela — go speeding down F. A. Hayek’s road to serfdom? If you want to see what so-called democratic socialism looks like, turn your eyes south to Venezuela and its new slave-labor camps. The critical difference is that entrepreneurship and markets are allowed to work in a welfare state — and to work especially well in welfare states characterized by public sectors that, while they may be larger or smaller, are transparent, honest, and effective. The U.S. food-stamp program has its defects, to be sure, but it’s a great deal more effective than was Soviet collective farming and state-run groceries. A dynamic capitalist economy such as Switzerland’s or Singapore’s or Canada’s can carry a lot of welfare state. But it cannot really carry all that much socialism. The great American socialist experiment — the government school monopoly — is a shocking failure. The government’s attempt to operate a socialist pension system is collapsing and will never pay out its promised benefits at their real present value. For years, American farming was hobbled by federal attempts to manage agricultural markets, with tons and tons of so-called surplus grain left to rot in the name of rational economic planning, converting a period of agricultural abundance that would have merited its own religious myth if it had happened 4,000 years ago into a national economic catastrophe. #related#When one of our so-called progressives looks at a Nordic welfare state, what he always says he wants to replicate here is the relatively high taxes and relatively large public sector. It’s never Sweden’s free-trade policies, Denmark’s corporate-tax rate (which is far lower than our own), or Finland’s choice- and accountability-driven education system. When the American Left expresses its envy of Western Europe, it’s never Switzerland’s minimum wage ($0.00) it wants to reproduce, only bigger and more rapacious government. But the relatively large Danish public sector does different things than does the U.S. public sector, and it does them differently. A larger U.S. public sector would be a great deal like the current U.S. public sector — ineffective, captive to politics, corrupt — but bigger. If you want to see what so-called democratic socialism looks like, turn your eyes south to Venezuela and its new slave-labor camps. What’s happening in Canada and Denmark is something else — something that is much more in tune with the approach and priorities of the free-market/free-trade Right, or at least what’s left of it. — Kevin D. Williamson is National Review’s roving correspondent.
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#241452
The knifeman, a 36-year-old taxi driver, stabbed two people to death and injured a third during the attack in Trappes, 20 miles west of Paris, from where at least 50 have travelled to Syria to join ISIS.
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#241453
When apparent hoaxer Empire actor Jussie Smollett’s charges were controversially dropped last year for allegedly faking a hate crime incident, the twitter page for the Empire writers rubbed it in everyone’s faces.
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The CEO of Dominion Voting Systems on Tuesday said the company has never used a platform that experts ...
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#241455
A top infectious disease doctor has raised alarm about COVID-19 vaccine mandates despite top federal officials recommending them ...
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#241456
Voters in two Oregon counties, Morrow and Wheeler, voted in a ballot measure Tuesday to explore ways to leave the state.
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#241457

ForDebating.com

Submitted 6 years ago by ActRight Community

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#241458
The “new, improved party of blacks” is a recipe for some serious self-immolation, a flashy suicide befitting today’s Budd Dwyers in Dinesh D’Souza brownface.
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#241459
Sky News host James Morrow has predicted that Joe Biden is "going to be a one-year president". "This time next year, as we go into Christmas, we're going to be talking about what president Kamala Harris is going to say at her inauguration speech," Mr Morrow said. "I say Biden's going to be a one year president."
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#241460
The majority of U.S.-employed Yemeni security personnel taken hostage in the capital San’a earlier this week have been freed, U.S. officials said.
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#241462
In a bizarre interview with a Chicago NBC affiliate, Cardinal Blaise Cupich, head of the Archdiocese of Chicago, suggested recent claims made by a former apostolic nuncio — the Vati
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#241463
If you want to see the collapse of western civilization summarized in 30 seconds, you can’t do better than this viral video. It shows the action at a recent drag brunch, which is an event where white liberals go to drink mimosas and watch cross dressing men dance badly to pop music. But at least […]
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A new study finds Washington state's Department of Health is inflating its COVID-19 death totals "by potentially hundreds of deaths."
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The growing food industry and the elevating demand for ready-to-eat foods on account of hectic consumer lifestyles are driving the pasta sauce market.
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Tim Pool, the on-the-ground journalist who runs TimCast, was in fact on the ground last night in Milwaukee during the riots. Today he records a video saying that he is now leaving for fear of his o…
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#241467
A metaphor for John McCain's political life
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Now that the DNC has cleared out the riffraff — Kirsten Gillibrand, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Andrew Yang, and all the other pretenders to the Oval — the most recent Democrat presidential debate offered an opportunity to get a clearer...
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#241469
Army leaders distanced the U.S. military from the American election process Friday as several prominent allies of President Trump proposed he declare martial law in light of losing his race for reelection.
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#241470
Last week, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) outlined precisely how President Biden's policies—from poor energy decisions to paying people more to stay at home than work, to name just two examples—have
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#241471
by Jack McEvoy Former President Donald Trump’s Treasury Secretary criticized the Biden administration and the Group of Seven Nations (G7) plan to place a
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#241472
The U.S. is seeking cooperation with Latin America to combat an increase in illegal immigration from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.
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#241473
This just in.
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Sunday, Fox News Channel's "Life, Liberty & Levin" host Mark Levin voiced his displeasure with the Supreme Court of the United States throwing out the President Donald Trump campaign's lawsuits that attempted to overturn the 2020 presidential election results over allegations of voter fraud. | Clips
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Tesla and SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk had challenged the UN WFP to explain how donating $6 billion would help eliminate the problem of hunger in the world.
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