Why Socialism?

The Answer is so Easy

The move toward electing socialists, even avowed communists, in the United States of America, the biggest free market nation in the world makes complete sense for a few very big reasons.

First, since the creation of the rust belt the share of wealth in our country has been just consumed by the wealthy. In 1968 estimates were that the wealthy controlled between 20 and 25% of the asset value in the US. Today that share has risen to 32%.

The rich are reducing the share of wealth held by the everyday American. Leading the everyday American into a despair for their financial situation, the share of wealth consumed by those with extreme wealth feels as if it is accelerating.

And the second reason for the average American turning toward socialism is that our school system has just marinated three generations in some idea that socialism is a better system, that redistributes wealth, and provides for their needs to a greater degree than our capitalist system.

Our school system was taken over by liberals from the 1960’s who never met a progressive idea they didn’t want to embrace. From the lie that it is people destroying our planet, through the lie of man-made climate change, through legalization of drugs, and an entire mindset that no individual is responsible for themselves, whatever malady afflicts them is either a “disease” they suffer from that isn’t their fault, or that the “system” is rigged against them and they cannot succeed absent the assistance of Mother Government, their protector, benefactor, and savior.

Were we all to attend a class, and to “whiteboard” the prevailing curriculum since the late 1960’s in our public schools, and even endorsed by our institutions and government itself, we would all have to conclude that the Far Left and their attitudes and beliefs have not only prevailed, but become doctrine. And those tenets are all Far Left and Socialist.

It doesn’t help that government over-reach and regulation has strangled our supply chains and delivery systems in costs that are creating inflation that runs prices to the ridiculous.

I have to laugh and provide you with a comical anecdotal example. I’ve embraced the idea of a Guinness sparingly, in particular these days during a World Cup game. Now please realize that I am temporarily housed in a tourist resort town, where the local merchants love to gouge the weekend warriors and new weekly tenants, but still, I purchased an eight pack of Guiness cans and the price came to $ 32. For eight beverages. Four dollars a beer for a product that I serve myself at home. I’m 68 years of age, sorry if I find that to be just ridiculous, considering that when I began consuming alcohol you could purchase a regular six pack for sixty-nine cents, and a premium six-pack for ninety-nine cents if you pallet was accustomed to Michelob.

I don’t think I paid four dollars a pint in Ireland last year at a bar where they actually served me the drink and had payroll and overhead.

Our younger generations are entering a competitive job market where salaries don’t stretch to provide an affordable living, at the same time housing costs, automobile costs, insurance costs, energy costs, all costs appear to have spiraled out-of-reach for the masses. They feel as if no matter how hard they work, or no matter how up the ladder they rise, they cannot accumulate enough wealth to cover the downpayment and mortgage on a home of their own. They watch as car prices for the SUV they need to ferry around a family has a monthly cost that runs over a grand. At every turn they are burdened with a cost that easily eats their combined monthly income.

Worse, they’ve calculated the earnings for the position they want and desire, two rungs up the ladder from where they are, and have realized that even earning at that salary rate will not provide the income required to live the lifestyle they desire.

And perhaps that is the biggest problem facing us all.

If you’ve lost hope in your own future, if even after advancement up the ladder you realize a world of struggle and toil, one gains a strong desire to step off the merry-go-round, and to pursue a more socialistic approach that levels the playing field for you a bit.

Think about this, because it is a truly salient point.

The wealthy have accrued to themselves so much money that costs no longer matter. An eight hundred dollar night out at the baseball or pro hockey game in town is not a burden, but an expected expense and hurdle easily cleared.

But for our shrinking middle class the idea of taking the family of four to a ballgame night out, where the costs add to six to eight hundred dollars, for a single night’s entertainment, that seemingly minor decision has a big impact on the family budget.

And worse, they look below themselves and see an entire lower class that doesn’t work, has their lifestyle provided by our government for free, and whose stress level doesn’t appear to be worse than their own.

The poor right now are provided free housing, free healthcare, free food, and a monthly cash stipend that can add up to seventy thousand dollars. To earn that much spendable cash after taxes a middle class family would have to earn near a hundred thousand dollars combined income.

Our middle class youth look toward their two divergent paths, work hard to get rich, where they don’t see any path at all, and they look downward toward our socialistic treatment of the lower class who are wards of the state, and have decided that socialism might work best to suit their needs. They’d like to exit the grocery store after handing over a SNAP card and not see their own bank account shrink dramatically.

We have socialism for an entire class here in America, our lower class. Our new immigrants. They all live in a socialistic system, not a capitalist system.

Economic headwinds of the day are forcing the middle class to view socialism not as a true ill, but as a very real and attractive alternative.

This explains Mandami. This explains “The Squad”, this explains “AOC”, and the siren’s song of Bernie, preaching a redistribution of wealth over forty years in government while becoming rich enough to own three homes and become a millionaire many times over. Preaching socialism in our capitalistic society has rewarded Bernie very well.

When you beat down the middle class to the extent they cannot survive, and the middle class can view the largesse showered on the lower class absent any requirements, you can fully understand the appeal of socialism.

They pay no attention to cries from the Right to view the standard of living in a society truly dedicated to socialistic principles and values, and the actual practice of communism in Cuba, they see socialism working just fine right here in America for the lower classes. Even to the extent of receiving free phones, and free daycare.

The closer the middle class gets to dropping out the bottom, the greater the appeal of going onto the government dole.

One sitting on the sidelines would begin to believe that this is all by design. That forces within our economic system are manipulating costs, and controlling the flow and quantity of dollars allocated, to create a small, upper class of the wealthy, while everyone else is lower class and on the dole, even if partially. That there is indeed a move afoot to eliminate our middle class.

With the dramatic transfer of wealth seen now toward the upper class, the one percent, where they have created a housing market with costs into the tens of millions for the choicest properties, one could suspect that a world where gaming the system so that the peasants can’t revolt against the hand that feeds them, that would allow this current rate of corruption and thievery to go on forever, is one that has been created purposefully. That this rate of inflation is no accident but part of the plan.

Those sitting just “aghast” that a larger segment of the population than ever before is endorsing socialism should read this column and rethink their understanding of where we all stand right now.

We are all living with the dangers of selling freedom and liberty for some measure of security. Suddenly someone else has control over the automobile you are actually trying to drive, someone else has control of your thermostat, someone else has authority over your bank account and finances.

There is no “free” given out by government, the cost is in dependence. The cost is in the atrophy of talent and self-reliance. to the extent that after time you are but a ward of the state, incapable of self support.

Years, and years ago, when George Bush was running for President, a pony-tailed middle aged man stood and asked a question during the debate about what intent George Bush might have to “take care of the people”, framing government as “big daddy”, as the provider, as the Patriarch.

The Right scoffed at this man, as some outlier, seeing government as some security blanket meant to protect him at all times, from any and all potential harm. The Right saw him as weak and feeble, what they failed to see was that he had become ubiquitous. He’d become the majority. An individual who saw big, all encompassing government as some solution to his life’s problems. As a buffer to worry, concern, and fear of the future.

I’ve lived a long time, a long time, and to witness how government, and in particular the Democrat Party, has weaponized fear amongst the electorate is both incredible and instructive. They’ve used fear of the future and our unstable world as a means of convincing the majority of Americans that government is the answer to solve their fears and trepidations. As if they aren’t the very cause of the problems.

So one can easily understand the college educated liberal woman. In debt, lacking the promised achievement her expensive degree promised, and seeing that her mapped career path provides no solution to her long term material demands, succumbing to the lies of the benefits of a socialistic society. Why struggle when you can combine a less demanding career path mixed with a bevy of entitlements, where the stress level is reduced tremendously. The fact your future ceiling has also been reduced dramatically and that “you’ll never have Paris”, is somehow lost in the translation.

If you aren’t “of age” as I am, but still a grown adult, I’d ask you to juxtapose our current lack of hope in the middle class with the poster of our former “Black God”, Barack Obama, with the word “Hope” at the bottom.

He promised “Hope and Change”, and you all bought it. Swallowed it past the tonsils, made him our two term President. Years later we sit and all hope appears to be completely lost in the middle class, and the change has been anything but beneficial to that same middle class.

Although that “Hope and Change” was very good for one Barack Obama. He is now worth upwards of four hundred million dollars, has a home on Martha’s Vineyard, and one in Hawaii. Both “compounds”, not just houses, land and home spreads for the wealthy few, not for community organizers in Chicago.

Don’t you find it strange that we were all sold “Hope” by Obama, and here we are in the aftermath of his two terms and hope is on the wane? As if we were all “snookered”, and fooled? As if we were being mocked, and baited, fed the exact opposite narrative of their actual intent.

I find it just incredible that we were all sold Hope on an attractive poster that resonated across the land and just worshipped by liberals, particularly white women who swooned over the man, and yet after his reign Hope itself is in short supply, disappearing from so many lives altogether. In the lives of those who swallowed his promises so deep. Fascinating. Interesting. A real case study in the politics of our day.

We live in an era of the 180 degree lie. As in “Joe Biden is the strongest, most thoughtful and involved President of our lifetime”. When in fact he was an addled old Alzheimer’s laden fool, hidden in the basement from us all, while a cabal including Obama ran the country in secret.

Where the “Hope” sold becomes a mirage, and the “Change” is beneficial only to the few. What? You thought the “Change” meant that your own life would change for the better? Hell no. The intent of the Change was so that you’d have to become government dependent, and fall down from the middle class to the lower class.

All of Liberal middle class America stood in front of the elevators convinced that the promised Change was an elevator up. They all got on gleefully and saw the elevator go down and were shocked.

Sorry, but I sit and view that, laugh and say, “what a bunch of assholes”! You see, I never bought the story of Obama, whenever your hear things like a close friend and pastor say “God Damn America”, or hear the wife say, “For the first time ever I’ve been proud to be an American”, when this is an individual living with the greatest opportunities our land can provide, you become skeptical about the people, and begin to ignore the messaging. Then, once in office, you hear him say “you didn’t build that” and realize, what he really means is we need to redistribute all the wealth, from the whites to the underclass, because the whites didn’t earn any of that, “they didn’t build that”, and therefore they are undeserving.

If you don’t deserve what you have, it’s easy to say you should be stripped of it all.

So don’t blame me, I never bought into the “Hope and Change”, I was the fool on the other side thinking that the Republican nominee wasn’t some Neo Con warmonger in service to Israel first and foremost, and owned and compromised by a foreign power in good old Mitt. A worthless horses ass if there ever was one.

I was a fool, just not as big a fool as the Democrat voter who became weepy over “Hope and Change”.

And now we have Mandami. His change is toward socialism, where we will somehow all be “better off”, we can all have “free” and there will be no negative repercussions. Pay not attention to all those billionaires moving south to Florida. Pay no attention to the budget that is out-of-control.

Destroy hope and the Siren’s call of socialism enters stage right.

Don’t look now, but socialism hasn’t just entered stage right, but is becoming the star of the play.