Monday 22 February 2016

Quote of the Day: A message for Bernie Sanders supporters

Capture
Pic from news article: ‘'Venezuela Takes Dramatic Step Towards Food Rationing'

 

“The alleged goals of socialism were: the abolition of poverty,
the achievement of general prosperity, progress, peace and
human brotherhood. The results have been a terrifying failure
—terrifying, that is, if one’s motive is men’s welfare.
    “Instead of prosperity, socialism has brought economic
paralysis and/or collapse to every country that tried it. The
degree of socialisation has been the degree of disaster. The
consequences have varied accordingly.
    “In more fully socialised countries, famine was the start, the
insignia announcing socialist rule—as in Soviet Russia, as
in Red China, as in Cuba. In those countries, socialism
reduced the people to the unspeakable poverty of the pre-
industrial ages, to literal starvation, and has kept them on
a stagnant level of misery….”
    “No man of authentic benevolence could evade or ignore so great a horror on so vast a scale.”

     ~ Ayn Rand, from her 1962 article ‘The Monument Builders’

RELATED POSTS:

  • “New voters are flocking to old-school anti-capitalists. But do they really know what they’re being asked to imbibe?”
    So, what’s socialism, Bernie? Part 1 – NOT PC
  • "Yeltsin asked customers about what they were buying and how much it cost, later asking the store manager if one needed a special education to manage a store. In the Chronicle photos, you can see him marveling at the produce section, the fresh fish market, and the checkout counter. He looked especially excited about frozen pudding pops. ...
        "In Yeltsin’s own autobiography, he wrote about the experience at Randall’s, which shattered his view of communism, according to pundits. Two years later, he left the Communist Party and began making reforms to turn the economic tide in Russia. You can blame those frozen Jell-O Pudding pops."
    When Boris Yeltsin went grocery shopping in Clear Lake – BLOG.CHRON.COM
  • “…  It means, at least given my preferences, I am today materially richer than was John D. Rockefeller in 1916.  And if, as I think is true, my preferences here are not unusual, then nearly every middle-class American today is richer than was America’s richest man a mere 100 years ago.”
    Most Ordinary Americans in 2016 Are Richer Than Was John D. Rockefeller in 1916 – Don Boudreaux, CAFE HAYEK
  • “[Bernie Sanders] is upset with a political and economic system that is often rigged to help the privileged few at the expense of everyone else, particularly the least advantaged. He believes that we have a two-tiered society that increasingly dooms millions of our fellow citizens to lives of poverty and hopelessness. He thinks many corporations seek and benefit from corporate welfare while ordinary citizens are denied opportunities and a level playing field.
    I agree with him [says Sanders’s bete noire Charles Koch]. …
        “At this point you may be asking yourself, ‘Is Charles Koch feeling the Bern?’
        “Hardly.
        “I applaud the senator for giving a voice to many Americans struggling to get ahead in a system too often stacked in favor of the haves, but I disagree with his desire to expand the federal government’s control over people’s lives. This is what built so [so much cronyism and so] many barriers to opportunity in the first place.”
    Charles Koch: This is the one issue where Bernie Sanders is right – Charles Koch, WASHINGTON POST
  • “Perhaps people can be forgiven for having come to the belief that capitalism is synonymous with Wall Street shenanigans or bank bailouts. That’s what politicians, academics, and the media have pounded into us for years. …
        “After all, if one looks at the long course of human history, our existence was pretty much hand to mouth for most of it. All that began to change in the 1700s with the development of modern — that is, [mostly pro-]capitalist — economics.
        “But one doesn’t have to go back 300 years to see the advantages of free-market capitalism. Consider that in the last 25 years, a period during which much of the world has embraced free markets, a billion people have been lifted out of poverty, and the global poverty rate has been slashed from more than 37 percent to less than 10 percent.
        “It’s not just the decline in poverty that tracks with the adoption of free markets and capitalism. Literacy rates increase and infant mortality declines as countries adopt market-based economies. Life expectancy rises, and people’s health improves. Even the environment gets cleaner.
        “And opportunities open up for women and minorities. Indeed, nothing challenges entrenched elites like the ‘creative destruction’ of free-market capitalism.”
    Is Socialism Making a Comeback? – Michael Tanner, NOT PC

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Great article about Yeltsin grocery-shopping in the US!

Russians seem to hate Yeltsin but I really *liked* him. You can easily imagine having a beer with him at the local pub and sharing a few stories. He was very down-to-earth - a "blokish" type of guy. Very easy to relate to. I feel much the same about Gorbachev. He too was down-to-earth and easy to relate to.

In contrast, Putin is *ice cold*. Very aloof, very menacing. The complete opposite of Yeltsin.

Don Walker said...

Socialism is a symbiotic relationship between voters that are looking to gov't to get something for nothing and politicians that want to retain their positions of power.

David said...

And yet, Democratic Socialism works so well in Scandinavia, and their economies and so c iety leave Rands USA trailing in the dirt. Liberarianism has never succeeded anywhere and never can, because naked self interest is incapable of building.

Unknown said...

OMG this quotes is nice " It means, at least given my preferences, I am today materially richer than was John D. Rockefeller in 1916. And if, as I think is true, my preferences here are not unusual, then nearly every middle-class American today is richer than was America’s richest man a mere 100 years ago."

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