Why are so many young people attracted to Bernie Sanders? Do they know anything about him? Why does socialism sound so attractive to college students?
Before Bernie Sanders became a U.S. senator, he was nothing but an angry radical agitator who has never held a private-sector job.
Despite having a degree from the University of Chicago, Sanders didn’t secure a steady paycheck for 40 years. As a teenager, he read Karl Marx, and in college he organized sit-ins and protests.
With college degree in hand, Bernie worked for the government registering people for food stamps.
After a failed attempt at carpentry, and fathering a child out of wedlock, Bernie collected unemployment.
Bernie’s next attempt at earning a living was in freelance writing on subjects like masturbation and rape. His friends described him as a slob who kept a messy apartment where the electricity was often turned off.
In the 1970s, Sanders became chairman of the Liberty Union Party, a group that called for a reduction of the U.S. military in favor of using local citizen militias and the Coast Guard as our nation’s protection.
In the 1980s, Bernie joined the Socialist Workers Party, founded on the principles of Leon Trotsky.
According to the New York Times, during the middle of the Iran hostage crisis that party called for abolishing the military budget and for solidarity with the revolutionary regimes in Iran, Nicaragua, Grenada, and Cuba.
After several failed attempts at winning public office in Vermont, and a failed bid for the U.S. Senate in 1971, Sanders finally slithered his way into the Senate in 2006.
Campaigning as a democratic socialist, Sanders is taking advantage of the ignorance of young people by selling them the insane idea that socialism is the best form of government.
Does having a democratic socialist in the running for president mean we get to elect our next dictator?
It’s no wonder today’s college students have no idea that Bernie Sanders is selling them a bill of rotten goods.
You’ve seen the interviews on TV: An interviewer asks a college student, “Who won the Civil War?”
The baffled student stands there searching the clouds for the answer, then laughs in embarrassment at his/her own ignorance of such a basic question.
Any attempt by the interviewer to find out who America fought in its war for independence is futile when the students think we were once ruled by China.
According to the Department of Education’s National Assessment of Educational Progress, only 20 percent of fourth-graders, 17 percent of eighth-graders and 12 percent of 12th-graders have a grade-level proficiency in American history.
Bernie Sanders likes to frame socialism as simply being a generous social safety net, similar to the safety nets in Sweden and Denmark.
These countries are actually not socialist. Norway funds its generous social programs through the sale of oil, something a democratic socialist would never support.
According to TheFederalist.com:
“to accommodate their massive social welfare spending, these countries opened their economies to free-market forces in the 1990s, sold off state-owned companies, eased restrictions on business start-ups, reduced barriers to trade and business regulation, and introduced more competition into health care and public services.”
In fact, according to the Heritage Economic Freedom Index, these countries outrank the United States on business freedom, investment freedom, and property rights.
Have we ever heard a democrat or a socialist championing these freedoms?
Portraying the government as a benevolent caretaker that pays for everyone’s needs is not an accurate depiction of socialism.
The definition of socialism is government ownership of the means of production, which means that the government runs all businesses.
If you were to ask millennials if the government should run companies like Amazon, Google, Apple, or Facebook, they would immediately object.
Baby boomers are old enough to remember the Soviet socialist system. In the attempt to achieve equality of outcomes, the government controlled the economy and every aspect of peoples’ lives.
This resulted in millions being forced into labor camps, political repression, food shortages, long lines, rationing, low-quality goods and services, a low standard of living, and no individual freedoms.
Today’s young people are frighteningly illiterate in American history, government, and economics, and have little or no understanding of socialism and the destructive role it has played in our world’s history.
While they enjoy the benefits of capitalism like no other time in history, young people are buying into Bernie’s cries for socialism.
They can’t have it both ways.
Photo credit DonkeyHotey
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