"BeamMeUpScotty" wrote in message news:aEYfE.918$sl7...@fx26.iad...
>
> To that end we might have to invade California and jail all the Democrats
> and Socialists in the States Government. They are probably guilty of
> depriving the people of the States of California their RIGHT to live in a
> Republic. The Socialist laws they pass are a crime against the
> Constitution and the people of the United States.
Socialism sounds SO good, that is, until it's put into practice:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqEf2FSbrdY
When 10% of the population disappears, hopefully they'll be mostly
Californicators and Left-Coasters...
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Socialism for the Uninformed
By Dr. Thomas Sowell
Socialism sounds great. It has always sounded great. And it will probably
always continue to sound great. It is only when you go beyond rhetoric, and
start looking at hard facts, that socialism turns out to be a big
disappointment, if not a disaster.
While throngs of young people are cheering loudly for avowed socialist
Bernie Sanders, socialism has turned oil-rich Venezuela into a place where
there are shortages of everything from toilet paper to beer, where
electricity keeps shutting down, and where there are long lines of people
hoping to get food, people complaining that they cannot feed their families.
With national income going down, and prices going up under triple-digit
inflation in Venezuela, these complaints are by no means frivolous. But it
is doubtful if the young people cheering for Bernie Sanders have even heard
of such things, whether in Venezuela or in other countries around the world
that have turned their economies over to politicians and bureaucrats to run.
The anti-capitalist policies in Venezuela have worked so well that the
number of companies in Venezuela is now a fraction of what it once was. That
should certainly reduce capitalist "exploitation," shouldn't it?
But people who attribute income inequality to capitalists exploiting
workers, as Karl Marx claimed, never seem to get around to testing that
belief against facts — such as the fact that none of the Marxist regimes
around the world has ever had as high a standard of living for working
people as there is in many capitalist countries.
Facts are seldom allowed to contaminate the beautiful vision of the left.
What matters to the true believers are the ringing slogans, endlessly
repeated.
When Senator Sanders cries, "The system is rigged!" no one asks, "Just what
specifically does that mean?" or "What facts do you have to back that up?"
In 2015, the 400 richest people in the world had net losses of $19 billion.
If they had rigged the system, surely they could have rigged it better than
that.
But the very idea of subjecting their pet notions to the test of hard facts
will probably not even occur to those who are cheering for socialism and for
other bright ideas of the political left.
How many of the people who are demanding an increase in the minimum wage
have ever bothered to check what actually happens when higher minimum wages
are imposed? More often they just assume what is assumed by like-minded
peers — sometimes known as "everybody," with their assumptions being what
"everybody knows."
Back in 1948, when inflation had rendered meaningless the minimum wage
established a decade earlier, the unemployment rate among 16-17-year-old
black males was under 10 percent. But after the minimum wage was raised
repeatedly to keep up with inflation, the unemployment rate for black males
that age was never under 30 percent for more than 20 consecutive years, from
1971 through 1994. In many of those years, the unemployment rate for black
youngsters that age exceeded 40 percent and, for a couple of years, it
exceeded 50 percent.
The damage is even greater than these statistics might suggest. Most
low-wage jobs are entry-level jobs that young people move up out of, after
acquiring work experience and a track record that makes them eligible for
better jobs. But you can't move up the ladder if you don't get on the
ladder.
The great promise of socialism is something for nothing. It is one of the
signs of today's dumbed-down education that so many college students seem to
think that the cost of their education should — and will — be paid by
raising taxes on "the rich."
Here again, just a little check of the facts would reveal that higher tax
rates on upper-income earners do not automatically translate into more tax
revenue coming in to the government. Often high tax rates have led to less
revenue than lower tax rates.
In a globalized economy, high tax rates may just lead investors to invest in
other countries with lower tax rates. That means that jobs created by those
investments will be overseas.
None of this is rocket science. But you do have to stop and think — and that
is what too many of our schools and colleges are failing to teach their
students to do.
https://tinyurl.com/jrk7jmh