Tag: socialism

Socialist LA City Council Member Who Makes $240K Per Year Overseeing Area With Drug Infested Public Park Skips Meeting With Angry Residents

Eunisses Hernandez is a socialist city council member in Los Angeles. She makes almost a quarter of a million dollars a year and one of the public parks at the heart of her district is plagued by open-air drug use and crime.

Angry residents recently showed up at a public meeting, ready to voice their concerns, but Hernandez blew them off and didn’t show up.

If New Yorkers want a preview of their future, this is it. This is what they have to look forward to.

The New York Post reports:

Meet the socialist LA leader making $240K to reign over drug-infested park as it crumbles

Meet Eunisses Hernandez — the progressive, permissive councilwoman raking in far more money than the average Angeleno each year, plus gold-plated benefits — even as MacArthur Park, the historic heart of her district, rots into a fentanyl-soaked nightmare.

The Post spent the last week inside the park, witnessing and reporting on open-air drug use, pipe smoking, hand-to-hand deals and city-funded paraphernalia — needles, crack pipes and food handouts — being distributed in broad daylight. That scene now defines the park.

Hernandez, who makes $240,000 a year, had an opportunity to make nice with her district Thursday at a packed public meeting with the very constituents forced to live with the consequences of her policies … and she was a no-show.

MacArthur Park parents were there. Neighborhood residents were there. Local small business owners were there. But she wasn’t there.

“I need to introduce someone to you,” challenger Maria “Lou” Calanche told the crowd, hoisting a life-size cardboard cutout of Hernandez. “This is our current council member — who’s MIA.” The room erupted in laughter.

This is the elitist left in a nutshell.

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The Bipartisan War on Prices Is Coming for Your Credit Card

In a scene that perfectly captures the strangeness of American politics today, President Donald Trump, a billionaire and self-styled champion of American business (at least the ones he likes) was all smiles during an Oval Office visit from Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist and mayor-elect of New York City.

For months, the two men traded the harshest of insults. Mamdani was a “communist” and “radical left lunatic”; Trump a “fascist” and “despot.” Yet with New York’s mayoral election over and cameras clicking, the insults were on hold. The men praised each other as “rational” and “productive.” Trump even joked that Mamdani might “surprise some conservative people.”

Give them points for collegiality, just don’t be surprised. Trump and Mamdani are only the latest example of the right and the left converging on economic issues. One likes price floors, the other likes rent control. They’re both waging the same “war on prices,” as the Cato Institute’s Ryan Bourne calls it. And this war enjoys rising bipartisan support.

Take legislation introduced earlier this year by what would have once been an unlikely duo: Sens. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) and Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.). Their “10 Percent Credit Card Interest Rate Cap Act“—also reflecting a Trump idea from the 2024 campaign—sounds compassionate. Who enjoys paying 25 percent interest?

In practice, price controls of all sorts are disastrous. Credit card interest rates are high because unsecured consumer lending is very risky. They’re the price for the lender taking a chance on a person. If the government artificially caps rates far below the market rate, banks will stop lending to riskier borrowers. That doesn’t just mean broke shopaholics. It includes the working single parent using a financial last resort before payday.

Just as rent controls can create a housing shortage by reducing the attractiveness of supplying those homes, interest-rate caps can create a credit shortage. They put millions of working-class Americans—the people proposals like these are supposed to protect—at risk of being “debanked.” Stripped of their credit cards, some will turn to payday lenders, loan sharks, and pawn shops, whose charges are far higher.

It gets worse. A cap this low wouldn’t merely shrink credit availability; it would invert it. At 10 percent, banks would only lend to the safest, highest-income borrowers. Credit cards would become a luxury product for the affluent—a financial advantage while everyone else is pushed into the financial shadows.

Then there’s the fact that millions of small businesses rely on credit cards. According to a Federal Reserve survey of small businesses, half of employer firms use them to fund operations. Cards function as unsecured working-capital lines for firms that lack collateral or a long credit history. A 10 percent cap would push them toward far costlier and riskier alternatives.

And forget about travel miles or cash back. Those programs are funded by interest charges, which a 10 percent cap would wipe out. When lenders cannot price risk through market rates, they shift the cost to higher fees, shorter grace periods, and more hidden charges. Consumers don’t necessarily pay less; they just pay differently and more opaquely.

Finally, because credit cards are the primary way tens of millions of Americans build credit histories, a cap would destroy a crucial ladder into the financial mainstream.

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Zohran Mamdani and Donald Trump Prove That There Are Two Paths Toward Socialism

About five years ago, the comedian Ryan Long posted a video in which a woke progressive and an old-fashioned racist meet and, much to their astonishment, discover that rather than being bitterly opposed, they agree on pretty much everything.

There was a strong echo of that convergence in last week’s White House tete-a-tete between Republican President Donald Trump and New York’s new socialist Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. Anticipated to be a grudge match, it instead turned into something of a lovefest. Well, of course it did. As fans of horseshoe theory accurately point out, control freaks from the political extremes might differ on details, but they have more in common with each other than they do with people who respect each other’s liberty.

Trump and Mamdani in ‘a Place of Shared Admiration and Love’

In reporting on the meeting, The Hill noted, “Trump and Mamdani answered questions from reporters, both striking a remarkably cordial tone, with the president indicating he agreed with many of the mayor-elect’s ideas.”

According to Mamdani, “It was a productive meeting focused on a place of shared admiration and love.”

Trump added that Mamdani would be “hopefully a really great mayor.” He also commented, “There’s no difference in party. There’s no difference in anything.”

So, how did two politicians who entered the meeting slinging epithets at each other like “communist” and “fascist” exit with the makings of a mutual admiration society? There’s a hint in a question a BBC reporter posed to the new mayor at the White House when he commented “you’re both populist” and asked, “to what extent the president’s campaign…inspired any part of your campaign?”

Mamdani eagerly brought up cost-of-living and economic concerns while Trump nodded and then chimed in with agreement about concerns over the price of energy.

That’s the key to this meeting of the minds. Trump and Mamdani are strongly focused on economic issues. They also share a taste for addressing those concerns with government direction.

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Young People Yearning for Socialism and AI Governance Is a Dangerous Proposition

Socialism has failed every time it has been tried because it is impossible for a group of people to implement a centralized governing apparatus capable of effectively organizing society. 

Heretofore, most people have resented and rejected the yoke of socialism, sometimes after long struggles, because collectivism is also antithetical to individual autonomy, free will, human nature, and the pursuit of happiness.

This is not the case in the United States. Today, more than 30 years after the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, young Americans want socialism. 

According to new polling conducted by Rasmussen Reports and The Heartland Institute, which included 1,496 likely voters aged 18 to 39, more than half of young Americans want a democratic socialist to win the White House in 2028.

Likewise, more than half of those polled have a favorable impression of New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, and nearly 60 percent support socialist policies like a nationwide rent freeze and government-run grocery stores in every town.

There are many reasons why socialism appeals to young Americans. 

First and foremost, young people are not being taught about the dark history of socialism. Second, they are misled into believing that socialism is superior to free-market capitalism. Third, they are brainwashed into believing that collectivism is more righteous, fair, and just than personal freedom. Fourth, they feel that the American dream is dead and socialism is the solution to the cost-of-living crisis they face.

Nearly three-in-four young likely voters think the cost of housing is at a crisis level, and only 22 percent think they will be better off than their parents. 

At this point in time, given the economic headwinds they face, coupled with their ignorance of socialism, it makes sense that an alarming portion of young Americans want socialism.

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Socialism Is A Political Doctrine, Not An Economic One

The doctrines of socialism have been with us for more than 150 years, but no one had really tried it in a total way until the advent of the Soviet Union from the 1920s to the early 1990s. During that period, a number of communist/socialist revolutions occurred in Asia, Cuba, and Africa, all of which provided a laboratory to observe how these socialist economies would perform.

The socialist economies failed spectacularly, as Ludwig von Mises had predicted. His works on socialism published in 1920 and in 1923 show that, as an economic system, it was doomed before it ever was implemented because it had no practical system of economic calculation. Despite the propaganda beamed at people both from socialist governments and the western media that socialist economies were lifting vast numbers of people from poverty, the reality of socialism was what Mises had predicted.

By 1989, even die-hard socialists like Robert Heilbroner had to admit that socialism had been a huge failure. Indeed, by the mid-1990s, the only countries attempting to continue with the socialist experiment were Cuba and North Korea, and neither economy was one to be envied. Heilbroner wrote in The New Yorker:

The Soviet Union, China & Eastern Europe have given us the clearest possible proof that capitalism organizes the material affairs of humankind more satisfactorily than socialism: that however inequitably or irresponsibly the marketplace may distribute goods, it does so better than the queues of a planned economy…. the great question now seems how rapid will be the transformation of socialism into capitalism, & not the other way around, as things looked only half a century ago.

Yet, Heilbroner—echoing Joseph Schumpeter’s belief that capitalism could not survive in the modern age—was not convinced that a capitalist economy would do well under the cultural and political assaults coming from academic, social, and government elites that would always demand more from it than it could produce. Heilbroner admitted that Mises was right, that a socialist economy lacked the necessary economic calculation to flourish, but he could never get himself to endorse the capitalist system itself.

Today, when we see poverty, prices of goods increasing, housing shortages in New York City, or high food prices, the usual suspects blame capitalism, and they blame what has become the overriding symbol of capitalism—the billionaire. It does not matter that the housing problems are caused by rent control and other supply-restricting government interventions, that inflation is a government-caused phenomenon, and that Federal Reserve policies of creating financial bubbles have created a lot of on-paper billionaires, as the critics will blame free markets no matter what. Their arguments do not need to be coherent or logical to have an effect. As I recently wrote, many of the most economically-illiterate people in our midst have become wealthy by making public statements on economics. In our modern media age, even the most ignorant sage is considered an “expert” if one has the “correct” politics.

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Republican Socialism Goes Nuclear: Trump Bets $80 Billion on Government-Backed Energy

Since President Donald Trump’s return to the Oval Office, the federal government has trademarked its own version of Republican socialism by nationalizing steel production and taking equity stakes in chip manufacturers and mining projects. Now, it’s getting involved in the nuclear power sector. 

On Tuesday, Westinghouse Electric Company announced that it had entered “into a strategic partnership” with the federal government, Brookfield Asset Management, and uranium fuel supplier Cameco Corporation to build “at least” $80 billion worth of Westinghouse’s AP1000 nuclear reactors across the country. The agreement was made “in accordance” with Trump’s May executive order, which called for the deployment of 10 new large nuclear reactors in the U.S. by 2030, according to Westinghouse. 

The details of the agreement are still a bit murky, but the federal government will underwrite at least some of these projects, while others might be financed by Japan. On Tuesday, Japan’s trade ministry pledged to invest $550 billion into American projects, in exchange for lower tariff rates from the Trump administration. Included in this package was an “artificial intelligence and a nuclear reactor construction initiative that was expected to be worth up to $100 billion and involve Mitsubishi Heavy [Industries] and Toshiba,” reports The New York Times. 

The deal might also allow the federal government to take an equity stake in America’s largest nuclear power company. Bloomberg‘s Liam Denning writes that as long as the U.S. government follows through on its financial commitment, “it would then get a 20% share in any dividends paid out by Westinghouse above a $17.5 billion threshold.” If these projects are up and running within the next “three years or so” and “Westinghouse is deemed at that point to be worth at least $30 billion, the company may then be required to do an initial public offering with the government getting warrants that may convert into an equity stake,” according to Denning. 

Nuclear power is clean, reliable, and safe, but forcing taxpayers to bet on its future success is risky. After thriving throughout the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, the industry has been plagued by P.R. disasters and project failures that have hampered nuclear power for much of the last 30 years. 

Recent efforts to revive the industry have not done much to build public confidence. A failed nuclear power plant project in South Carolina, which featured two AP1000 reactors, left ratepayers on the hook for millions of dollars, although Brookfield Management is considering reviving the project, according to the Associated Press.

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The GOP’s ‘Capitalism’ is Central Planning with MAGA Branding

When House Speaker Mike Johnson (R–La.) lashed out at last weekend’s “No Kings” rallies soon to arrive on Washington’s National Mall, he reached for an old conservative refrain: “They hate capitalism. They hate our free enterprise system.”

I am sure he’s correct about some of the protesters. But the message rings hollow coming from a party leader that stands by as President Donald Trump does precisely what Johnson rightly decries: substituting political control for market choice and ruling by executive order.

Indeed, what began as a populist revolt against so-called elites has become a program of state ownership, price fixing and top-down industrial control. Take a look.

Recently, the Trump administration quietly converted CHIPS Act subsidies into an $8.9 billion equity purchase in Intel, making Washington a 10 percent owner of one of America’s largest technology companies. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick insists “this is not socialism.” That’s semantics.

Socialism is government control of the means of production. When the government becomes your largest shareholder, that’s a strong first step.

The Intel case offends two basic economic truths. First, no group of officials can ever know enough to guide a complex industry better than millions of private investors, engineers, and consumers spending their own money. Second, the power to “partner” with business is the power to control it.

The more political capital the government invests, the more it demands in return. It’s only a matter of time until politically favored locations, suppliers, or hiring quotas shape Intel’s decisions. That isn’t capitalism.

The administration has taken shares in companies before, and it likely will again. In July, the Pentagon became the largest shareholder in MP Materials, considered the only fully operating rare-earth mine of scale in the U.S. The deal guarantees a 10-year price floor for MP output at nearly double the current market rate. MP competitors were rightly shocked.

Yet Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently told CNBC that Washington will continue to “set price floors” and “forward-buy” commodities “across a range of industries” to encourage more investments into U.S. production and away from China.

While this may encourage more U.S. investments in the short term, guaranteeing an unfair advantage over competitors by setting a minimum price reduces American companies’ long-run incentives to innovate and produce better output. Economists have understood for more than a century what happens when the government fixes prices above their market level: Buyers purchase less, sellers produce more, surpluses pile up and waste follows. It’s the logic of failed farm-price support in the 1930s.

There are far better options than schemes like these. As for those rare-earth minerals, the U.S. sits on billions of dollars’ worth, yet MP is almost alone in extracting them. That’s in part because excessive regulation keeps the potential locked underground, deterring investment in innovative mining solutions, processing plants, magnet factories, and the skilled workforce needed to turn our geological abundance into economic value. Deregulation is the free-market way. Mimicking the Chinese model isn’t.

If that’s not enough, the administration has nationalized all but in name the company called U.S. Steel. To approve its market-driven purchase by Nippon Steel, Trump required a “golden share,” giving him veto power over plant closures, production levels, investments, even pricing. The White House effectively dictates how U.S. Steel can operate inside the United States.

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The Russian Mathematician Who Exposed the Cannibalistic Nature of Socialism

Igor Rostislavovich Shafarevich is not exactly a household name, but the man richly deserves to be remembered, a century after his birth and six years since his death. In 1923, he was born on this date—June 3—in Zhytomyr, Ukraine, about a hundred miles west of Kyiv. He died in 2017 at the age of 93, leaving behind remarkable contributions to mathematics and, of far greater interest to me, a powerful indictment of the ancient calamity known as socialism.

Shafarevich ranks high in the pantheon of 20th Century mathematicians. His name is attached to numerous pioneering theorems and formulas I can’t begin to understand, but which are celebrated as genius among the numerical cognoscenti. In 1981, he was even inducted into the prestigious Royal Society of London as one of the brightest foreign scientists ever to grace its membership.

Growing up in Ukraine under Soviet-imposed socialism, Shafarevich harbored misgivings about the system from an early age. In his 30s, he began to run afoul of it because of his outspoken support of the Eastern Orthodox faith in an officially atheist empire. He eventually morphed into a full-blown, anti-Marxist dissident and an ally of Andrei Sakharov, the physicist famous for defending human rights against the regime’s assaults. Despite his world-class credentials in mathematics, Shafarevich was fired from Moscow University because of his collaboration with Sakharov.

When the great Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (author of The Gulag Archipelago and other seminal works) delivered his famous address at Harvard University in 1978, he cited a book by Igor Shafarevich that had appeared three years before. Solzhenitsyn, in fact, wrote the Foreword to the book’s English translation. 

Titled The Socialist Phenomenon, it is Shafarevich’s most significant and memorable foray outside mathematics and should rank as a classic in the voluminous, definitive critiques of socialism. My copy, purchased in 1981, is full of marks and notations where I found insights I did not want to forget.

The first 200 pages of the book surveys socialist ideas and experiments in history, from Plato and Greece to Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China to the Inca civilization in South America. You can read a good rendition of the book’s chapter on the Incas here. The Incan nation was short-lived (it couldn’t defend itself against a few hundred Spanish) but it may well be the most thoroughly regimented and centrally planned society the world has ever known.

In the final third of the book, or about a hundred pages, Shafarevich offers his analysis of socialism. He argues persuasively that “at least three components of the socialist ideal—the abolition of private property, the abolition of the family and socialist equality—may be deduced from a single principle: the suppression of individuality.”

Socialism presents itself in multiple flavors, of course, but the unadulterated version promises “the greatest possible equality.” This is the height of hypocrisy and delusion, Shafarevich argues, because at the same time, socialism offers up “a strict regimentation of all of life, which would be impossible without absolute control and an all-powerful bureaucracy which would engender an incomparably greater inequality.”

Individuals participate in life as thinking, acting individuals, not as indistinguishable portions of a collectivist blob. “Cultural creativity, particularly artistic creativity, is an example,” the author points out. Renaissance Italians didn’t paint The Last Supper. Leonardo da Vinci did. “And in periods when socialist movements are on the increase, the call for the destruction of culture is heard ever more distinctly,” Shafarevich explains. 

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If Socialists Actually Understood Socialism…

In light of recent developments in New York City, specifically on the recent primary elections and the emergence of self-described democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani as a potential mayoral candidate, as well as the increasingly aggressive public engagement of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in their tour around the United States, and the fact that AOC’s chances of becoming the 2028 Democratic presidential nominee have doubled within one week, it has become clear to me that socialist rhetoric is gaining momentum in American political discourse.

This trend is further reflected in survey data from the Pew Research Center, which shows that approximately 36 percent of U.S. adults aged 18 to 29 now view socialism positively. In response to these developments, it is imperative to contribute to the proper education and clarification of what these socialists are actually advocating for, or even what true socialism truly advocates for.

Friedrich von Hayek, Nobel laureate and one of the most influential economists and political philosophers of the 20th century, once remarked, “If socialists understood economics, they wouldn’t be socialists.”

Building on his erudition, I would add: If socialists understood socialism, they wouldn’t be socialists.

The true definition of socialism is a social and economic doctrine that advocates for public, rather than private, ownership or control of property and natural resources—the means of production. It is both a political and economic system in which the means of production are owned and controlled collectively by the community or the state, rather than by private individuals. In other words, in practice, the means of production are controlled by a minority political elite.

Now, no matter whether an economic system is capitalist, socialist, or any other, it is important to note that the system itself is not a utopia or an end in and of itself, but a means to an end. Economic systems ration scarce resources, goods, and services, and each one does this through either a private or a social decision-making process, but only individuals can truly make decisions. Modern money economies operate on prices which reflect the value assigned by either individuals or groups, as well as supply and demand. However, who gets to decide what is supplied and what is demanded differs across these systems. Socialism claims that shared ownership will foster broader participation, leading to everyone sharing in the benefits. Although this is impossible, it remains the foundational argument.

Many socialists have bypassed the foundational principle of collective ownership of production and have instead jumped straight to demands for ownership or redistribution of the output of production. Production is seemingly taken for granted. This conceptual shortcut makes socialism seem like a dream economic system by avoiding what socialism really is.

Therefore, although many public and political arguments are made in the name of socialism, what is often advocated for is not true socialism. In reality, the debate has rarely centered on collective ownership of the means of production—such as the factories, tools, land, and capital that make production possible—but instead on ownership or control of the outputs of production (goods and services).

Simply put, many self-identified socialists are less interested in owning the means of production and more interested in claiming entitlement to what is currently being produced or the production that someone else already owns.

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‘Socialist Rifle Association’ attempts to hide names of leaders after members linked to string of violent attacks

A group called the Socialist Rifle Association, made up of over 10,000 members has been conducting training for socialist and transgender extremists, and the group has now been linked to four major crimes, according to an investigation from the Daily Wire. As the report has been published, the leadership on their website appear to have attempted to hide their names.

As the report from the outlet was released this week, the leadership link on their website has been redirected to the music video for Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up, in a move commonly known as a Rick Roll. However, archives of the website as of August 14 this year still display the names and contact information of the leadership officers in the organization.

The president goes by the first name of “Hope” and identifies with “she/they” pronouns. Many others on the leadership list use “they/them pronouns, indicating those in leadership of the socialist organization identify as transgender or nonbinary. The rest of the leadership only goes by their first names as well. 

According to the investigation from the Daily Wie, members of the Socialist Rifle Association get membership cards with the quote, “Any attempt to disarm workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary,” with a picture of Karl Marx. They stock up on rifles and other gear. A common logo used by the group is the transgender flag with the phrase “defend equality.” However, the videos presented by the group do not look like they are training for self-defense, but for combat.

The crimes that were linked to the group include the shooting of correctional officer in Texas on July 4, when a group of militants opened fire on DHS officers near an ICE facility in Alvarado, Texas. Benjamin Hanil Song, who was charged with shooting an officer in the neck, is part of the Socialist Rifle Association’s Dallas-Fort Worth chapter.

Paul Hyon Kim, the suspect charged with setting fire to and shooting up five Teslas in Las Vegas, also appears to be a member of the organization. Court documents said, “Kim has an Instagram page where he follows the Socialist Rifle Association’s page. In a post from October 2018, on the Reno Socialist Rifle Association’s Instagram page, is a picture of a subject that appears to be Paul Kim training with firearms.”

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