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Parents of college-age children are finally catching on
to the cultural Marxist PC scam. Cries of “insensitivity” every time a
conservative or libertarian speaker appears anywhere near a college campus;
“safe rooms” equipped with play dough, soft music, and videos of frolicking
puppies; the endless accusations of “racist/sexist/homophobe” aimed at all
non-leftists on campus; and widely-publicized episodes of vulgar, ignorant,
x-rated, “students” screaming their heads off at conservative campus speakers
have exposed the real purpose of political correctness: censorship of
any and all non-Marxist ideas. It’s not about fighting racism, sexism, etc.;
it’s about censoring the ideas of freedom.
Today’s college students have been –and are being –
trained to be intolerant, totalitarian-minded, communist thugs. All for
a mere 50 grand a year at even mediocre institutions of “higher education.”
This all began after the worldwide collapse of socialism
in the late 1980s. Socialists never give up on their dream of ordering their
fellow human beings around, plundering them with taxes, and enriching
themselves in the process. Very few of the twentieth-century socialist
ideologues ever admitted that they were disastrously wrong, or apologized for
providing aid and comfort to the likes of Stalin, Mao, and Castro.
Instead, they and their intellectual descendants have worked tirelessly to
invent a virtual socialist reality – at least in the minds of
America’s youth – while censoring all dissenting opinions. Socialism’s
dirty secrets must never be revealed to America’s youth, lest they revolt
against the giant lying machine known as “higher education.” (There are
a few exceptions, of course, but most of academe is now dominated by the
totalitarian, cultural Marxist Left).
What are socialism’s dirty secrets that must be kept from
America’s youth? Let’s examine a few of them:
- Socialism has always and everywhere
been an economic disaster, and every honest scholar knows this. After
seventy years of socialism, the Soviet economy was barely 5% of the U.S.
economy, despite the false assertions of pro-socialist economists like
Paul Samuelson, who wrote in the 1988 edition of his famous textbook that
the Soviet economy would exceed the U.S. economy by the year 2000.
- You cannot fix socialism with smarter
government planners or plans. Socialism cannot work because the rational
economic calculation is impossible without private property, free-market
prices, the profit-and-loss market feedback mechanism, and economic
freedom in general.
- The ostensible goal of socialism –
egalitarianism – is at war with human nature because all human beings
are unique in thousands of different ways. The only kind of “equality”
that socialism has ever created is equality of misery and poverty.
- Socialism generates far more societal
inequality than economic freedom does. In all socialist societies the
politically-connected elite live lives of luxury while nearly everyone
else is equally impoverished. In democratic socialist Venezuela
today the economy has been ruined by socialism while the daughter of the
late Hugo Chavez, the father of Venezuelan socialism, is reportedly
worth $4.5 billion.
- The worst kind of people – the most immoral,
corrupt, cynical, uncaring, and brutal – rise to the top under socialism
because socialism is all about forcing people to abandon their own plans
for their own lives and complying with mandatory government plans
instead. It is no accident, in other words, that socialism is associate
with such violent thugs as Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and Mao.
- Fascism was just another variety of
socialism. The word “Nazi” was an acronym for national socialism. The
German socialists distinguished themselves from the Russian socialists
by calling their variety of socialism “national” as opposed to
“international.”
- It is a myth that Scandinavian
socialism has been successful. Swedish capitalism was extremely
successful in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The Swedes began living off of the fruits of capitalist prosperity by
adopting a version of democratic socialism in the 1950s. As a
result, there was not a single net new job created there from 1955 to
1995.
- Nineteenth-century socialism was “government
ownership of the means of production,” but it now includes the welfare
state progressive income taxation and the strangulation of capitalism
with regulation and taxation. The welfare state has destroyed the work
ethic of millions; destroyed millions of families; caused a 400%
increase in out-of-wedlock births in America since 1960; and transformed
millions into lifelong beggars and wards of the state.
- Government-run healthcare systems –
medical care socialism – is like all other government enterprises in
that it operates with all the efficiency of the Post Office or
Department of Motor Vehicles and all the compassion of the IRS. Anything
as important as medical care should never be put in the hands
of politicians and bureaucrats.
- The worse pollution problems on the
planet for the past century or more have been in the socialist
countries, as documented by books with titles like Ecocide in the
USSR. After the collapse of socialism the world learned that,
in addition to being economic basket cases, socialist countries were
also ecological cesspools.
These are but a few of the well-documented truths about
socialism that are rarely, if ever, mentioned on college campuses. They
are among the main reasons why the cultural Marxists have erected so many
instruments of ironclad censorship on college campuses. They are why
institutions like the Mises Institute – and all the scholars associated with
it — are so reviled by them, for they provide their students – and anyone
else – with a source of alternative economic education, an education based on
sound economics and based in reality. Mises wrote in Human Action of how the
socialists of his day were at war with economics, for economic common sense
threatened their totalitarian plans. Today’s socialists hope to never
even have to respond to sound economic arguments and facts at all by simply
censoring them out of existence.
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