Tag: socialism

Do Not Under Any Circumstances Nationalize Greyhound

America has an extensive network of private, for-profit (and profitable) intercity bus services primarily serving lower-income people. It’s a great example of how the free market can provide an essential service without public subsidies.

Naturally, the socialists want to shut it all down.

In response to recent news reports about Greyhound closing bus stations (in favor of curbside pick up) and shutting down service to some midsized cities entirely, Jacobin columnist and Rutgers philosophy professor Ben Burgis advocates for nationalizing the company and running its buses on dedicated interstate lanes.

“A publicly owned intercity bus service with dedicated highway lanes could do for travelers what the US Postal Service does for letters and packages,” writes Burgis.

Travelers, like Postal Service packages, would “criss-cross the country cheaply and quickly,” says Burgis. This new government-run bus company would extend service to everywhere, he writes, and “like the USPS,” this government-run bus company would be “financially self-sufficient.”

That the Postal Service is “financially self-sufficient” would be news to USPS, which reported a $6.5 billion net loss this past fiscal year. Indeed, the Postal Service is currently shuttering facilities and raising prices as part of a 10-year restructuring plan meant to get it out of the red.

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The Pilgrims Dreamed of Socialism. Then Socialism Almost Killed Them.

Thursday, if you eat a nice meal, thank the Pilgrims. They made Thanksgiving possible.

They left the Old World to escape religious persecution. They imagined a new society where everyone worked together and shared everything.

In other words, they dreamed of socialism. Socialism then almost killed them.

As I explain in my weekly video, the Pilgrims attempted collective farming. The whole community decided when and how much to plant, when to harvest, and who would do the work.

Gov. William Bradford wrote in his diary that he thought that taking away property and bringing it into a commonwealth would make the Pilgrims “happy and flourishing.”

It didn’t. Soon, there wasn’t enough food. “No supply was heard of,” wrote Bradford, “neither knew they when they might expect any.”

The problem, Bradford realized, was that no one wanted to work. Everyone relied on others to do the work. Some people pretended to be injured. Others stole food.

The communal system, Bradford wrote, “was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment.”

Young men complained they had to “spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children without any recompense.”

Strong men thought it was an “injustice” they had to do more than weaker men without more compensation.

Older men thought that working as much as young men was “indignity and disrespect.”

Women who cooked and cleaned “deemed it a kind of slavery.”

The Pilgrims had run into the “tragedy of the commons.” No individual Pilgrim owned crops they grew, so no individual had much incentive to work.

Bradford’s solution: private property.

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CBS’s Latest Socialism Sales Pitch: ‘Maybe You Can Be Too Rich’

On CBS Sunday Morning, the broadcast network made a new push to sell socialism by arguing that billionaires shouldn’t be allowed to exist and that their wealth should be seized by the government and spent on left-wing priorities like climate change. The segment featured radical guests demanding wealth redistribution and advocating the notion that “maybe you can be too rich.”

“A recent report reveals the world’s nearly 3,000 billionaires increased their wealth by $5 trillion last year….Which prompts Mark Whitaker to ask: When is more than enough, enough?,” host Jane Pauley announced at the top of the segment. Whitaker went on to warn viewers: “The wealth gap has reached stratospheric levels. The richest one percent of Americans now has almost 13 times the wealth of the bottom 50 percent. It’s led some to consider: Maybe you can be too rich.”

He turned to a far-left, European philosophy professor to explain her socialist ideology of seizing wealth by giving it a new name: “Professor Ingrid Robeyns teaches philosophy and ethics at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. She’s been promoting a concept called limitarianism. Define limitarianism.”

Robeyns lectured: “So limitarianism is just the word for the thought that there should be a moral limit to how much wealth you can accumulate. So it’s the idea that it’s fine to be well off, but at some point one has too much.”

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Noam Chomsky Goes Off The Deep End – Proving That All Socialism Leads To Tyranny

I was recently watching a new interview with 92-year-old Noam Chomsky, a figure of general worship among leftist academics, and I began reminiscing about the first time I read the book ‘Manufacturing Consent’. Though I have never agreed with Chomsky’s politics I have always appreciated his analysis on the methods the establishment uses to control mass psychology and silence popular discourse. I have long felt that this was an area where the political left and conservatives might intersect in our views and find common ground. This is why I felt an extra dose of disappointment when I witnessed Chomsky go off the deep end this week and suggest that people who refuse to comply with vaccine mandates need to be ostracized from society.

Chomsky compared people who don’t comply with the vaccines to people who don’t comply with traffic lights, suggesting we pose an imminent danger to others and that we should be removed. When asked how unvaxxed people forced out of the economy could be fed (how would they survive), he asserted “that is their problem.” Chomsky does not explicitly say that force should be used to eliminate the unvaxxed from social participation, he merely insinuates that “actions” might be required to get the desired effect.

I was around 20 years of age back in 2001 when I first read Manufacturing Consent. I was young and not fully aware at the time of a basic function of the political left and socialism that is vital to understand: Many people claim there is a “spectrum” of political beliefs on the left and that there are those that support socialism or centralization while also supporting freedom, but this is simply not so. At the core of their ideology freedom has no home, and when pressed on where they truly stand every socialist WILL eventually support tyranny as a means to achieve their Utopian vision of society.

Chomsky has long claimed himself to be a “libertarian socialist.” In the past I have found that a classic misdirection of covertly authoritarian people is to tack the “libertarian” label onto whatever they believe in. Con-men like Chomsky figure that most normies don’t actually know what libertarianism is, but they’ll assume it means that you “support liberty.” It’s a calculated abuse of the ideology designed to mask the collectivist’s true intentions

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