Like a skillful surgeon, Richard Epstein, carefully dissects the nonsensical tripes of the New Socialists, such as Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Corey Robin:
The New Socialists thankfully do not stress the old theme of abolition of private property through the collective ownership of the means of production. So what do they believe? One answer to this question is offered by Professor Corey Robin, a political theorist at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, who recently praised the “New Socialism” in the New York Times. He proudly boasts of a major uptick in support for socialist ideals among the young and then seeks to explain the forces that drive their newfound success. In a single sentence: “The argument against capitalism isn’t that it makes us poor. It is that it makes us unfree.”
Robin reaches that conclusion not by looking at the increasing array of products, and career options made available through the free market. Instead, he invokes the type of dramatic example that Bernie Sanders loves to put forward to explain the need for free public health care. Under the current system, we are told that everyone is beholden to the “boss” at work and to the faceless drones who have the arbitrary power to decide that a particular insurance policy purchased by a mother does not cover her child’s appendectomy. Thus, under capitalism, we all bow and scrape to the almighty boss, knowing, in Robin’s words, that when “my well-being depends on your whim, when basic needs of life compel submission to the market and subjugation at work, we live not in freedom but in domination.”
Listening to Epstein discuss his article with John Batchelor here & here provides blissful common sense to one’s eardrums, something that is all too rare these days.
Sanders et al are just rehashing the old Bolshevik talking points updated to a modern vernacular. Instead of “free land”, it is free health care, free university, and guaranteed jobs for all. Lenin had free jobs for all as well, in the Gulags. Sadly, people believe the lie that there is actually a free lunch just around the corner.
Richard Epstein says it well.
And when Boxer can no longer carry the freight, Napoleon sends him to the knackers quicker than the farmer would have. That is the “freedom” that Bernie Sanders and this slap nuts professor wants for you.
Rest assured, you will never have any of their stuff; their need is greater than yours.
Ahhh, those free people in Venezuela, if only we could have a free country like Venezuela. No need to think about what to buy, what to eat, what to drink, which hospital to take my sick son to, which pub to have a beer at. No, none of these things which enslave us in the US. None of these things to consider, because none of them are available.
Freedom can only come out of the bottom of an empty can…..
As a Christian, I have great compassion for the weak, poor, and needy. I am called to take the actions of Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. And wouldn’t Socialism be THEE most wonderful embodiment of Christ’s words?! Yes! Of course it would be. Except for one little nagging detail … “man”.
“Question: What is the difference between capitalism and socialism? Answer: Under capitalism man exploits man, while under socialism the reverse is true.”
Yes … Socialism FAILS because of “man”. The nature of man will ALWAYS cause Socialism to end in weeping, gnashing of teeth, and death. Socialism pretends to DENY man’s nature. Capitalism USES man’s nature. Man lives by “incentive”. Mankind has not survived and evolved by investing time where the rewards were fixed or worse – falling. The PROFIT motive is built into our DNA. And those PROFITS are what allow us to GIVE to the poor and needy … to live out Christ’s words. As opposed to all of us being made poor … to be “equal” with the poor and needy.
Capitalism is pragmatism … writ LARGE.
Yes, turn the worker into a faceless drone. That’ll release us from the unfreeness of the prosperity of free enterprise.
I eschew the Marxist term of capitalist, alone with the bourgeoisie, and their negative, unrealistic assumptions.
A big part of present political debate is we use the left’s terms, who’s definitions can change at the whim of apparatchiks.
“Unfreeness” = having to wake up on time and make it into the office. Or better still …
“patriarchal unfreeness” = all of the above + making coffee for the boss (even if your boss is a she)
This latest wave of Progressive’s great leap forward by embracing unmasked socialism is likely an outcome of a public (socialist) school system which no longer teaches civics, history, and anything resembling the Austrian or Chicago schools of economics. Their ignorance is appalling but the socialist myths offered up to the intellectually disarmed electorate are appealing. Far too many Americans no longer know anything about how it came about, the genius of the US Constitution, why it led to prosperity, how the progressives have relentlessly tried to undermine it and with much success.
There is *nothing* new about Bernie Sanders.
He’s been a kook for decades.