Ignorance Is Not Bliss

            No matter how we view the results of the mid-term elections, we have to acknowledge a definite movement to the left in the Democratic Party’s natural constituency of minorities.  This move has been fed by the left’s incessant use of identity politics to promote victimhood, academia’s preaching of the anti-capitalist gospel, and the emergence of public figures like Bernie Sanders who worship at the altar of socialism. Indeed, masses of young people are singing the praises of an ideology that in their star-gazing imagination is the ultimate cure for poverty, inequality, and infectious disease. Unfortunately, the one infection it cannot cure is ignorance.

            First, the vast majority of socialism’s infantile cheerleaders don’t even know what socialism is. In a recent Gallup survey, only 17% correctly identified socialism with government ownership or control. The other 83% associated socialism vaguely with equality, enhanced benefits, and such nonsense as being social to people.

            Second, immature swallowers of socialist pap lack the knowledge necessary to recognize the fallacies in descriptions of socialist utopias. Bernie Sanders would have them believe that socialist economies in Scandinavia, for instance, are thriving, when the truth is that Norway, Sweden, and Denmark have high tax rates to support vast social safety nets, but also have thriving market economies dependent on the private sector. Advocates of single-payer health care systems also fail to mention that countries like Great Britain and Canada that have such a system deliver far worse health care than ours.

            Finally, it is an indictment of our educational system that the majority of our young people are totally ignorant of the history of the Soviet Union and China whose authoritarian regimes put socialism and communism into practice and exterminated tens of millions of people in the 20^th century. Our blissfully unsuspecting youngsters aren’t even aware of the misery brought on right now by the same kind of authoritarian regimes in North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela.

            Ignorance may be bliss, but not when it comes to the truth about socialism.