In Tuesday's Pennsylvania primary election four socialist candidates running on the Democratic ticket won their party's nomination for Congress, and two of them are guaranteed to win in November since they'll be running unopposed.
It's remarkable that the Democratic party continues to move leftward despite the fact that socialist policies have such a problematic historical track record. Almost every economic basket case in the world is a socialist economy. Venezuela was a rich nation until it embraced socialism and now many of its people who were formerly middle class are starving and/or fleeing to other countries in South and Central America.
Socialists want a guaranteed income, a guaranteed job, and have both free health care and free education. It sounds very appealing on the surface, but these allurements all need to be paid for, and the only way to do that is by raising taxes and imposing mandates and regulations on businesses. This crushes an economy, especially an economy which has to maintain a strong military.
High taxes and regulations stifle business innovation and job creation, raise unemployment, and actually reduce the amount of money the government takes in since fewer people have jobs and pay taxes. When the government runs health care the patient sacrifices the freedom to choose the care they want, wait times for tests increase, and the quality of care erodes just as we saw happen in our government-run veterans' hospitals.
On the other hand, we've recently seen a vivid lesson on how lowering tax rates and reducing regulations produces more benefits for more people. Tax revenues to the federal government have been at record highs since tax reform passed last year and President Trump relaxed many Obama era regulations on business. Moreover, minority unemployment is at record lows, over a million people have left the welfare rolls, personal income has risen, and the economy has boomed.
So why would anyone want to undo and reverse all this? Perhaps it's because socialism sounds compassionate to those who'd rather feel than think. Feeling is easy, thinking is hard. Thinking requires us to examine evidence and set aside prejudices.
Here are a couple of videos which show what socialism has accomplished in two South American countries, Venezuela and Brazil, both of which were prospering until they elected socialist governments:
Despite the chaos and destruction wreaked upon these countries by socialist governments many Democrats in the U.S. still vote for it. Why?
