"The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism, but under the name of liberalism they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program until one day America will be a socialist nation without ever knowing how it happened." - Norman Thomas, American socialist
With the initiatives being proposed by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in the 2008 presidential campaign, it appears Norman Thomas was right all along. Americans will, indeed, embrace every fragment of the socialist program in the name of liberalism. Both of the leading Democrats call for nationalized health care - for a power grab by Washington in which the federal government will seize full control of another one-seventh of the U.S. economy. This would, of course, be the most dramatic and irreversible step toward U.S. socialism in the nation's history.
Even today, however, the architects of these plans conceal from the public the centralized, command-and-control nature of the new system they devise. They are not asked by the press to show the American people even one successful program government has run. Yet the American people seem ready to put the lives of their children and grandchildren in the hands of Washington bureaucrats.
Now comes an even grander proposal by Barack Obama. It's called the Global Poverty Act, that would, in the next decade, transfer at least $845 billion of U.S. taxpayer money overseas. Think of Johnson's failed war on poverty going international - directed not by Americans but by the United Nations.
How we could even be debating ideas like this in the 21st century, after all of the climactic failures of socialism around the world, is amazing to me. But we're not really debating them. It seems we're not even capable as a people of debating them, reasoning over them, using our brains to consider them. Americans may simply be too far gone spiritually, morally and intellectually to reject the temptations of socialism.
Socialism is antithetical to human nature, yet it has great appeal to the human mind. It's one of the great lies of all time - similar to the one told by the deceiver in the Garden of Eden. You can be like God! You can have it all right here on Earth. You can live in utopia, and you don't have to obey the laws of the universe to achieve it. That's the essence of socialism. And it is finally seducing America as it has seduced much of the rest of the world over the last century.
Unfortunately, Americans don't even have a party representing clear, unequivocal opposition to socialism. The Republicans dare not even speak its name. John McCain admits publicly he doesn't know much or care much about economics. And so, Americans don't even have a reason or a mechanism to say no to the socialism that is coming to their country under the guise of liberalism - just the way Norman Thomas predicted it would come.
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And it will be the Fascist form of socialism -- the most insidious because it has a lot of popular support and retains some semblance of "life as before".
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Like all forms of socialism, Fascism is economically incompetent
As Fascist Russia proves yet again
At least he made the trains run on time. That was said of Benito Mussolini, Italy's fascist dictator from 1922 to 1943. Much the same is now said of Vladimir Putin, Russia's authoritarian president. He may have crushed the fragile shoots of democracy, but he has at least restored the economy, the state and his country's place in the world.
This view is shared by Mr Putin himself. He stated only last week that: "We have worked to restore the country after the chaos, economic ruin and breakdown of the old system that we saw in the 1990s." But it suffers from a drawback: it is false, as Michael McFaul and Kathryn Stoner-Weiss of Stanford University argue in a powerful article.
True, between 1999, the year before Mr Putin became president, and 2007, the Russian economy expanded by 69 per cent. But the economies of 11 of the 15 former republics of the Soviet Union expanded by more than Russia's. Indeed, only Kyrgyzstan did markedly worse. A number of the former Soviet republics did, it is true, benefit from an oil and gas bonanza. But so, too, did Russia: its oil and gas exports jumped from $76bn in 1999 to $350bn last year. Even so, the Russian economy expanded by less than Ukraine's.
Like all post-communist countries, Russia's economy suffered a steep initial decline, which reached its trough in 1998. Countries that reformed more decisively, such as Poland, bottomed out more quickly and are now far ahead. Again, Russia's recovery is in no way exceptional: tiny Estonia has done far better. Maybe this is why the Kremlin hates the Baltic state so much.
It is simply wrong to assign credit for the upswing to Mr Putin. Not only did it begin with the devaluation of 1998, but nearly all the reforms that underlay the improvement were initiated, if not brought to fruition, under Boris Yeltsin's despised rule. Under Mr Putin little progress has been made on structural reforms.
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Posted by John Ray. For a daily survey of Australian politics, see AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and for a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM
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