Opinion: The irony of socialists teaching us about authoritarianism

The Democratic Socialists of America are coming to Batavia on Friday to teach us about fascism. 

Oh, the irony.

From the Constitution of DSA:

We are socialists because we reject an economic order based on private profit ... We are socialists because we share a vision of a humane social order based on popular control of resources and production, economic planning, equitable distribution, ...

In other words, authoritarianism -- just like the fascists -- dressed up in the pretty language of egalitarianism.  

The attack on private profit should scare all of us. It means the wages you earn -- what Edmund Burke called the "fruits of labor" -- shouldn't belong to you. Your profits, the money you earn from your labor, should belong to the state. The state should decide how best to spend what you earn in order to better distribute the resources.

In socialism, there would be no private property, no locally owned small businesses, and nobody working on trying to create wealth for themselves and their families. It would all be share-and-share alike.

We saw already how well that worked in the Soviet Union. 

DSA members I've debated with over the years like to say that they just want to bring a European kind of socialism to the United States. This is supposedly a kinder, gentler kind of socialism. The major problem with their position is that the countries they point to -- Denmark, Norway, Sweden, etc. -- are not socialist. They are solidly capitalist, free market economies. Their spending priorities are perhaps different, but there is no prohibition against private enterprise, against individuals and shareholders owning companies, and even growing fabulously wealthy, even becoming billionaires. There are in fact, 12 billionaires in Norway and 30 in Denmark.

You know who is socialist: Cuba and North Korea -- failed, dictatorial regimes, and China, wealthy, but one of the most repressive governments on the planet.

It's hard not to despair for the future of America sometimes. We are beset by right-wing blowhards on one side who think they should control the levers of power and tell the rest of us what to think and how to live, and a growing socialist movement on the left who want to destroy the very thing that made America prosperous -- the free market. 

Now, these two conflicting ideologies are converging on Batavia while those of us in the middle, who simply want to go to work and take care of our families and be left alone to live in peace, can only standby and gape in disbelief. 

Suggested reading:

• The Conservative Sensibility, George F. Will
• Enlightenment Now, Steven Pinker
• The Radicalism of the American Revolution, Gordon S. Wood