A recent survey by the Centre for Independent Studies indicated that 58 per cent of those born between 1980 and 1996 thought socialism was a damn fine idea whose time had come.
Apparently 63 per cent of university graduates share this view whilst a further 59 per cent considered that capitalism had failed society.
These numbers are all the more curious given that only 26 per cent of the respondents had any knowledge of Lenin and 34 per cent of Stalin.
Perhaps this what Stalin meant when he referred to “the useful idiots”
How is it possible to arrive at an ideological destination and not be aware of these two characters?
I mean, it’s a bit like believing Nazism is a good idea but no being aware of Hitler. Or Christianity and being unaware of Jesus.
On the back of this recent CIS poll, almost running parallel, the Democrats in the US preselected a 28 year old self-declared socialist in prime position on the ticket for congress overthrowing a warhorse, an old white guy who was thought to be a shoe-in as the next leader.
And what are the policies of the newby 28 year old?
Well, her policies include: abolishing ICE, (the Immigration and Customs Enforcement service) whose job it is to round up and deprt illegals, abolishing prisons, abolishing profit, and abolishing borders. Interesting too that since mentioning the abolition of ICE it’s become pretty much a mainstream position on the left.
As if, now that she’s mentioned it, its ok to come out of the closet as it were and mention the unmentionable, Say the unsayable.
While all this was going on, here in Australia we had the recent introduction to the mainstream media courtesy of Sky News, of Lilly Campbell. Lilly Campbell is Sydney University, SRC Education Officer and she too is an aficionado of open borders.
Call me an old fashioned, dinosaur white male BUT Borders and control of them are fundamental to the existence of the nation state and have been around since man first clawed his way out of the swamp, but in Ms Campbell’s 20 year estimation, borders are a “..Fake construction that don’t do anything for the people..” and “…they are an ideological construct..”
Sortakinda like socialism I suppose.
Ok, so these two swallows, Campbell and Cortez, don’t make a summer perhaps, but it is a sign, an indication, that things are warming up and a summer of more socialist swallows are on the way.
Now, it would be tempting easy and convenient to just whistle past the cemetery and laugh this stuff off, but I think we do so at our peril.
It was philosopher George Santayana who made the observation that ‘Those that don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it’ And it’s quite apparent that these two, these 20 and 28 year olds haven’t so much learnt from history as never been taught in the first place. If they had they’d know better. As things stand it appears that they’re buying the sizzle and not the sausage.
In an age when information is right there at your fingertips just a few key strokes away you would at least think they would research their political predilections before buying into the entire ideology and myth of the sunny uplands of socialism.
And it’s not about to improve either because as we’ve seen in recent times, it’s not even about history being learnt or taught anymore, but as in the case of a course on Western Civilisation being proposed for the ANU, it’s about history being totally ignored and denied.
That is, if you aren’t taught and don’t know, it didn’t happen or it can’t be very important. And so the dumbing down continues.
Its education dumbing down and bias by omission.
But, back to the millennials and their headlong rush into and embrace of socialism as the better way to order society.
The results are in on this. The results are back from the lab and have been for some while.
We know the results because we can observe them for ourselves, in real time or as they say we’ve seen this movie before.
Again and again and again straight from the petre dish of humanity with the respective control groups of capitalism, democracy and free markets in one petre dish and socialism in the other.
These experiment and control groups are literally side by side in some cases with both the resources and geography being a constant.
Think, South Korea (the control group) and North Korea (the experiment group). See the difference? What about East Germany and West Germany before Gorbachev ‘tore down that wall.’
What about Venezuela then and Venezuela now, with its 40,000% inflation rate. Then there’s Rhodesia then, Zimbabwe now and I’m sure there are many other examples.
Of course the other obvious litmus test is the clamour for the exits from socialist countries and others with repressive regimes. Those people clamouring for the exits voting with their feet trying to break into the free market, capitalist democracies of the West.
There’s a thing in economics called the Laffer curve which basically illustrates that the more you tax something, such as production, the less of it is generated.
It’s the same with the human spirit. If you punitively tax it as it were, or in other ways neuter, hobble or disincentive-ise it, you eventually get less output from it too.
You get less human endeavour, as a result because without a reason to get out of bed in the morning, you get less effort, less care, less inspiration, less enthusiasm, less drive, less ingenuity and less creativity. Could you imagine for example, the iPhone or Microsoft being created and developed in such a closed, cloistered, uninspiring and repressive environment?
The stifling compliance and the straight jacket of conformity of socialism is a handbrake on the human spirit and an individual’s own dreams and aspirations.
It’s hard wired, it’s in our DNA that the Individual will always ask, “What’s in it for me” and it’s free, fair and open markets and capitalism with people making their own decisions that have always provided the answer, incentivised much of the human race and uplifted us out of the primordial swamp.
Socialism and it’s hybrids on the other hand, as has been proven time and time again and most recently in Venezuela, can only take us back there.