Don’t be a sucker for the new old socialism

It is a common misconception that socialism is about helping poor people. Actually, what socialism does is create poor people, and keep them poor.

Under capitalism, rich people become powerful. Under socialism, powerful people become rich. In Venezuela, the rulers are fabulously wealthy even as the ordinary citizenry deals with empty supermarket shelves and electricity rationing. In Cuba, Fidel Castro reportedly has lived like a king, even as his subjects dwelt in poverty. In the old Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, as Hedrick Smith reported in his The Rus

sians, the communist big shots had lavish country houses and apartments in town stocked with hand-polished fresh fruit, even as the common people stood in line for hours at state-run stores in the hopes of getting staples.

There’s always a lot of talk about free health care, but it’s generally substandard for the masses and fancy for the elite.

Soviet dissident Milovan Djilas referred to the “New Class.” Where socialist equality was supposed to eliminate the distinction between workers and peasants and their capitalist exploiters, it instead produced a new distinction, between exploited workers and peasants and their “New Class” socialist oppressors.

George Orwell explained the phenomenon in his Animal Farm decades ago, but people keep falling for it: Socialism is an evergreen form of fraud, egged on by suckers eager to believe the lies hucksters tell them.

Which brings me to Bernie Sanders. The Washington Post re- cently ran a piece that noted his “health care plan would benefit affluent households more than it would poorer ones.” Likewise, a paper from the left-leaning Brookings Institution had this to say about his free-college proposal: “Families from the top half of the income distribution would receive 24% more in dollar value from eliminating tuition than students from the lower half of the income distribution.”

America’s New Class isn’t the super rich; it’s the upper-middleclass employees of non-profits, universities and government agencies. They benefit twice from the kinds of programs that Sanders supports: Often, they’re employed to administer them, or they receive funds for providing services (think college administrators), and then they also receive the benefits because their children are more likely to go to college.

Higher up the political scale, the powerful really do become rich: Bill and Hillary Clinton are likely worth about $45 million, paid a lot for boring speeches given to people who are really just buying influence. But at least in America, becoming powerful isn’t the only way to become rich.

Under socialism, you’re either powerful, or you’re poor.

As the Rainmakers sang back in the 1980s, “They’ll turn us all into beggars ’ cause they’re easier to please.”

That’s socialism in a nutshell. The “equality” talk? That’s just for the suckers.

Don’t be a sucker.