(My new American Thinker post)
Let's give Senator Sanders credit. He is drawing large crowds and getting votes.
At the same time, we hear that the crowds love Bernie because he is genuine and believes what he talks about. Senator Sanders is the opposite of Mrs Clinton: He speaks from the heart, she calculates every word hoping to pander to everyone.
Beyond the charm, Senator Sanders' message is lethal -- just try buying toilet paper in Venezuela or talk to anyone who left Cuba's Workers Paradise.
Over the years, I've tried to understand the fascination with socialism. I think that Glenn Harlan Reynolds explained it best:
There’s always a lot of talk about free health care, but it’s generally substandard for the masses and fancy for the elite. (The average Cuban or Venezuelan peasant — or Soviet-era Russian — doesn’t get the kind of health care that people at the top get.)
In the old Soviet Union, the new communist nobility, whose positions and influence seemed to run in families somehow, were called the Nomenklatura (from the Latin word for a list of names).
Despite all the talk about equality, etc., they generally did a lot better than people who didn’t have the right connections. Dissident Milovan Djilas referred to these managers and apparatchiks (another Soviet-era word) as the “New Class.” Where socialist equality was supposed to eliminate the distinction between exploited workers and peasants and their capitalist exploiters, it instead produced a new distinction, between exploited workers and peasants and their “New Class” socialist oppressors.
Well, this is old news: George Orwell explained the phenomenon in his Animal Farm many decades ago. But people keep falling for it:
Like Ponzi schemes, socialism is an evergreen form of fraud, egged on by suckers eager to believe the lies hucksters tell them.
And there is Senator Sanders promising what he can't deliver, what the U.S. cannot afford or a president could not pass even if he has 60 votes in the U.S. Senate.
While there is always a new group willing up to sign up for the latest Ponzi scheme, especially when the messenger is a nice old man.
There are marches in Venezuela daily. They are young protesters demanding change. Unlike Sanders' supporters, who are basically prosperous and well fed, the young people in Venezuela are rejecting socialism and hoping that their mothers can find anything on the shelves for dinner tonight.
So here is an idea: Let's send Sanders' supporters to Venezuela (or Cuba). Give them a true sample of what Sanders is peddling. My guess is that they will come back and burn every one of Sanders' placards.
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