By JIM N. TAYLOR, Special to the Star
Between years 2000 and 2012, “the rate of absolute poverty fell by 50% … the poor in the world are getting rich at a rate that is absolutely unparalleled in human history” (Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson).
The greatest advances came in African and Asian countries that limited rather than expanded the role of government(s).
More than 100 countries with emerging economies showed marked advances in economic growth and individual prosperity.
This is the real news; not the bloody reporting of a few school shootings and street riots here and there.
The actual rates of violent crime in the USA and most of the world have plummeted to all time lows in the last 50 years.
The USA is now safer than it has been since the early 1960s, while the reporting of violent crime has increased in an effort of the mainstream (fake news?) media in pursuit of ratings and revenue have highlighted only the dark side of society.
The real story is the truth about capitalism and the better life it has brought to billions of people with the diversity and freedom it celebrates and accommodates, the individual responsibility it encourages while rejecting government planning that always leads to dictatorship.
Those such as B. Sanders and A. O-Cortez (socialist-communists) carefully omit mention of the principles of Marxism such as the elimination of private property and the loss of control of production and decision making to the state.
They promise a classless society but impose their control through prison camps; production fails while they depend on the underground economy to partially supply demand.
Socialism has never succeeded anywhere: Not for the Nazis of Germany, not for Marx or Lenin of the Soviet Union, not for Mao of China, not for Castro of Cuba, and not for Chavez-Maduro of Venezuela. Certainly it has never approached Marx’s ideal of a classless society.
All the predictions Marx made were wrong. Nationstates do not wither away,
capitalism did not break down as a result of the industrial revolution, workers have not become revolutionaries but capitalists, the middle class hasn’t disappeared around the world but expanded, and Hegel was never able to create a ‘scientific socialism’.
Socialists and progressive liberals deny the existence of human nature’s constancy or permanence, believing it to be malleable; they are infuriated to hear of our permanent ‘God-given’ nature.
The socialist state established by Lenin tried for seven decades to create an entirely new human – Soviet Man: In December 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev gave up trying and dissolved the world’s most spectacular failure in human engineering.
Socialism is not founded in the will of the people but depends upon the dictatorship of the Party to remain in power (established and maintained by force).
Read “The God That Failed” wherein six famous Western intellectuals describe their journey into socialism and their exitwhen they encountered the gigantic gap between their previous vision of a socialist utopia and the totalitarian reality of the socialist state.
The duration of socialism in the Soviet Union and China have provided literature by recognized authors in regard to the horrors socialism produces in enslavement.
Every Party member and citizen becomes a spy for the enforcement of state policy in every little facet of socialist life.
Youth must see their life in the world as they envision it, not as it will prove to be, because they have not had time to experience reality.
They romanticize their utopia as they wish it to be; not what is actually possible.
We must not let them wait until their bills come due to inform them of what reality will be under socialism.
Socialism is a false religion that can only serve long enough to fail, but the destruction it brings can be irreparable.
Jim N. Taylor is a Harlingen resident who regularly is published in the Valley Morning Star.
