America Will Never Be Socialist

Short quiz. Who said this?

This is the time to re-ignite the American imagination. This is the time to search for the tallest summit, and set our sights on the brightest star. This is the time to rekindle the bonds of love and loyalty and memory that link us together as citizens, as neighbors, as patriots.

This is our future—our fate—and our choice to make. I am asking you to choose greatness.

How about this?

We must keep America first in our hearts. We must keep freedom alive in our souls. And we must always keep faith in America's destiny—that one Nation, under God, must be the hope and the promise and the light and the glory among all the nations of the world!

Soaring rhetoric, but it’s pretty good. Ronald Reagan, maybe? JFK? George H. W. Bush?

Nope. That was Donald Trump last Tuesday at the State of the Union. I’ve waited a few days, to see how the words settled. There were actually quite a lot of words that I liked in the speech. Unlike a Facebook friend (who is due again for me to snooze his posts for 30 days) who heard only racism and hatred; I didn’t hear those words. At all. You’d think maybe those being offended are seeking and finding something that isn’t even there.

President Trump at State of the Union
image from Wikipedia

There was a section of the State of the Union Address I particularly appreciated. After mentioning Venezuela, the president said:

Here, in the United States, we are alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country. America was founded on liberty and independence—not government coercion, domination, and control. We are born free, and we will stay free. Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country.

A certain half of the audience failed to stand or even applaud. Hmm.

The unusual thing is that it needed to be said at all. We have a significant portion of the population—and elected officials among them—who think it would be a good idea to “fundamentally transform,” as Obama used to say, the United States of America from a free country to a totalitarian regime.

They don’t call it that; they used to bristle at those of us who called it socialism. Now they proudly call it socialism. But socialism is tyranny. And everywhere it’s been tried, it has been about controlling people’s actions, along with their words and thoughts. That’s total control. Beyond economic meddling or social engineering. It’s totalitarian.

When socialist failures are pointed out, these people say, “But that’s not what we mean. We wouldn’t do it like them; we won’t fail. Because we’re just better people, and we know so much more now.”

Now being ten minutes past Venezuela, not just decades past Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, etc.

How do we know these current “democratic” socialists wouldn’t be any different from their socialist predecessors? Because of what they already do and say.

They believe in killing the innocent—the unborn. And beyond that, Democrats this past week showed they were not even willing to protect the already born, if a mother suddenly decided she didn’t want the child. So—they believe in killing based on their own selfish purposes. That isn’t really different from the past socialists, who killed millions of Jews and others they deemed genetically or mentally inferior (such homosexuals, the disabled, or anyone who protected any of those categories), or who disagreed with them (such as Bonhoeffer or Hubener), or who simply didn’t matter to them (such as the thousands who starved to death in the Soviet Union during WWII).

These new socialists have already shown they will target those who disagree—as they did to Tea Party and patriot groups during the Obama administration. They target bakers and florists and photographers, and nuns and doctors and therapists who don’t go along with their sexually irresponsible agenda.

They work tirelessly to disarm citizens, so that coercion of no-longer-free people will be simplified.

They typically lie about what they want to do, because the people wouldn’t stand for their actual purposes. For example, “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor,” and it will cost less. None of that was true; all of it was a step toward greater coercive control.

Sometimes we do get the truth, though. For example, the Green New Deal proposed this past week by media darling Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who didn’t get the memo about not revealing their nasty plots. She didn’t invent the idea of a Green New Deal; it has been around for several years. Her forte is getting stuff out in today’s media environment. This is all proposal, and not yet legislation. But it’s informative.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez announcing Green New Deal
screenshot from CNN

In the name of saving the world from climate change—which she says will bring on the end of the world within twelve years if we don’t take drastic action—she insists that we in the US, but not the rest of the world, should have our government do the following over the next decade:

·         Get rid of all cars currently on the roads, except electric ones (so, about 99% of all cars, all trucks, all heavy equipment).

·         Get rid of all energy sources except wind, solar, and coal plants. So, no oil, no natural gas, no nuclear—all of which are cleaner than coal. These entire segments of the market would be shut down. But somehow magically we would have plenty of electricity.

·         All buildings would be either razed and rebuilt or stripped and retrofitted to meet some undefined level of energy efficiency. It’s unclear whether the government (i.e., taxpayers) would pay for every home, apartment complex, store, warehouse, office building, church, hospital, school, or cabin—all regardless of architectural value—to be built anew. Details, details. I am wondering, though, how that massive amount of building could go on without trucks or heavy machinery. And how can new wealth be created if this huge undertaking is just to retrofit what we now use.

·         Shut down air travel—the entire industry. But not to worry: there will be high-speed rail everywhere, except of course from the terminal to wherever in a city you may want to go, because…no cars, except for the 1% still allowed. Sorry, Hawaii. And Alaska. Maybe you can still do shipping—except, not fueled by internal combustion engines, or nuclear (as submarines are). Just electrical. Good luck plugging them in in the middle of the ocean.

·         Shut down, or sharply curtail, the cattle industry, because those animals produce gases, you know, in their flatulence. Also, get rid of large production farms in favor of small family farms, which of course won’t need trucks or tractors or anything gas powered.

·         And, since we’re on the subject of saving the planet from climate change, we’ll throw in a totally unrelated living family wage for everyone—even for those unable or unwilling to work. Because, what with shutting down most of the oil and gas and nuclear energy, automobile, air travel, and farming and ranching  sectors of the economy, and having torn down all buildings so that all other production is disrupted—this is a great time to assume we’ll have many many trillions of extra tax revenue dollars to just pay people who don’t want to work.

Seriously, where will the money come from for government to do all these things? Or any of them, really?

Some of the proposals have been walked back—awkwardly, as if walking backward in Gucci heels through the mud. Ocasio-Cortez decided to take down the FAQs she and her staff put up, and blame the confusion on some fake site that had added “recycling urine” onto the list. But no one was talking about that; they were talking about the real things she had put up, like paying people who don’t want to work.

How would we pay for it? By incurring debt at rates heretofore never seen. Or maybe she means grow it on trees, or start using fairy dust. Because real economists would tell you, you can’t take down multiple major industries and infrastructure, and expect the economy to just charge right along.

So, what we have is evidence that the new socialists do not know more than previous socialists.

And the new socialists are not more moral than the previous socialists.

socialists   image from here

But the new socialists are indeed every bit as into acquiring power and using “government coercion, domination, and control” tactics to beat down anyone who might want to stand up to them.

We’ve seen these “new” socialists before. They’re tyrants, just like all their predecessors.

But we are born free. I pray that we have the resolve to stand up to the tyrants so that America will never be a socialist tyranny—with all the misery, slavery, death, poverty, and decay into savagery that inevitably come with that type of government.