By Jim Whitt Contributing Editor
The Russians are Coming; The Russians are Coming was a comedy released in theatres in 1966. The plot involved a Soviet submarine that was accidentally grounded on a sandbar off the coast of Nantucket. The crew makes their way to shore, searching for a motorboat to tow them back to deep water so they can slip away without further incident. They unfortunately encounter local townspeople who mistakenly believe they are being invaded by the Soviet Navy.
The film poked fun at the Cold War, which had steadily escalated since the end of World War II. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, but the cancer of communism has never been eradicated. The real threat of communism to our country comes not from a military invasion but from a group of so-called progressive politicians who appeal to a psychological flaw of human nature – wanting something for nothing.
Casinos market to this flaw. Their commercials feature beautiful people wining and dining and winning piles of cash. They never show the poor souls mindlessly mesmerized by the bells and lights of gaming machines who play until they’ve lost their last nickel. They want something for nothing, but they leave with nothing.
Social Security and Medicare are government entitlement programs. Congress is required to fund them with taxes mandated by the Federal Insurance Contributions Act. Slice it any way you want but these entitlements are a form of socialism.
Socialism sounds less threating than communism. And if you combine socialism with democracy, it sounds even better. Which brings us to Zohran Kwame Mamdani, the leading candidate for mayor of New York City. He is a member of both the Democratic Party and the Democratic Socialists of America. What is the stated goal of the Democratic Socialists of America? To abolish capitalism and replace it with socialism. Mamdani and many other politicians are able to openly embrace and promote Marxist policies today because we have become enslaved to entitlement programs and desensitized to their ever-burgeoning bloat that requires more of our tax dollars.
If we abolished capitalism and replaced it with socialism, would it abolish poverty? That formula has not only been proven to fail economically but it also destroys the human spirit. Anne Bradley explains why in an article for The Daily Economy entitled “From Gleaning to Growth: Ancient Lessons for Reducing Poverty.”
“Thomas Aquinas saw that our telos, purpose, is to understand and contemplate God, and that we achieve happiness when we fulfill our God-given purpose. That includes our work in the world. Only God can create ex nihilo (something out of nothing) but we are commanded to create something out of something.”
Contrast that with wanting something for nothing. Ms. Bradley then presents the best case for not replacing capitalism with socialism: “Welfare and charity are a necessary but insufficient condition for permanently escaping poverty. If someone is hungry, homeless or in need of medical care, we can and should help them. Yet, the only long-term solution to poverty is economic growth fostered by capitalism, the most productive and extraordinary poverty elimination program the world has ever seen.”
There’s an interesting thing about these politicians who want to abolish capitalism. They are socialists with everyone else’s money but their own. They have become wealthy precisely because they live in the greatest bastion of capitalism in the world. And yet they not only bite the hand that feeds them but want to cut off the hand that feeds them.
I recently sat next to a woman on a flight who told me she came to this country from Venezuela when she was 18 years old. She said the people in our country who want to replace capitalism with socialism have never experienced the poverty of living in a socialist country. Her 86-year-old mother receives a $10-per-month pension from the Venezuelan government. She sends money home to her mother and other relatives in Venezuela because they are so poor they cannot afford to buy food. She is able to help them because she now lives in a capitalist country.
If the Socialist Democrats achieve their goal of replacing capitalism with socialism, then the United States will soon look like Venezuela.
