Post by rmarks1 on Feb 9, 2020 10:00:14 GMT -5
"Democratic" Socialism has already been tried in Great Britain in the 1970's. Here's how it worked out:
And there are still people who say Socialism is a wonderful system! Are they crazy?
Bob
Iain Murray grew up reading and writing by candlelight, not because he lived in premodern times but because he lived under democratic socialism.
Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and other contemporary American advocates of democratic socialism lean heavily on the democratic part, which is at least in part a matter of marketing. To take their talk of democratic principle seriously requires forgetfulness and credulousness: During the last great uprising of democratic socialism in the English-speaking world — in the United Kingdom in the 1970s, where young Iain Murray, now a fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, was doing his homework by the light of coals and candles...
But the socialism that reduced the United Kingdom from world power to intermittently pre-industrial backwater in the post-war era was thoroughly democratic. The policies that turned the lights out in London were not imposed on the British people by a repressive junta. And that is part of the problem with democratic socialism even as notionally presented by Sanders et al.: It is both of those things...
The United Kingdom, having a parliamentary form of government, does not enjoy such formal protections. A British government with an electoral mandate can run wild, as it did under the democratic-socialist governments of the post-war era, climaxing in the “Winter of Discontent” in 1978–79.
“I grew up in the north of England,” Murray says. “It gets dark very early in the winters there.” A series of strikes by government unions left the United Kingdom without trash collectors, and garbage piled up in the streets; there were shortages of food and fuel as strikes crippled the transportation system; medical workers in the country’s monopoly national health-care system went on strike, with nurses, orderlies, and hospital staff abandoning their posts and leaving sick Britons with nowhere to turn for medical attention; the bodies of those who died piled up for months, because the gravediggers’ union was on strike, too; eventually, the interruptions of fuel and labor caused the electrical system to fail. Hence the candles.
This wasn’t the first time: In 1970, a similar labor action had forced Britain’s hospitals to operate by candlelight. Think about that: A year after Americans had landed on the moon, Englishmen were undergoing medical procedures under neo-medieval conditions, in a medical world lit only by fire...
The problems of socialism are problems of socialism — problems related to the absence of markets, innovation, and free enterprise and, principally, problems related to the epistemic impossibility of the socialist promise: rational central planning of economic activity. The problems of socialism are not the problems of authoritarianism and will not be cured by democracy. Socialism and authoritarianism often go hand in hand (almost always, in fact), but socialism on its own, even when it is the result of democratic elections and genuinely democratic processes, is a bottomless well of misery.
www.nationalreview.com/2020/02/democratic-socialism-problem-it-is-both/
Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and other contemporary American advocates of democratic socialism lean heavily on the democratic part, which is at least in part a matter of marketing. To take their talk of democratic principle seriously requires forgetfulness and credulousness: During the last great uprising of democratic socialism in the English-speaking world — in the United Kingdom in the 1970s, where young Iain Murray, now a fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, was doing his homework by the light of coals and candles...
But the socialism that reduced the United Kingdom from world power to intermittently pre-industrial backwater in the post-war era was thoroughly democratic. The policies that turned the lights out in London were not imposed on the British people by a repressive junta. And that is part of the problem with democratic socialism even as notionally presented by Sanders et al.: It is both of those things...
The United Kingdom, having a parliamentary form of government, does not enjoy such formal protections. A British government with an electoral mandate can run wild, as it did under the democratic-socialist governments of the post-war era, climaxing in the “Winter of Discontent” in 1978–79.
“I grew up in the north of England,” Murray says. “It gets dark very early in the winters there.” A series of strikes by government unions left the United Kingdom without trash collectors, and garbage piled up in the streets; there were shortages of food and fuel as strikes crippled the transportation system; medical workers in the country’s monopoly national health-care system went on strike, with nurses, orderlies, and hospital staff abandoning their posts and leaving sick Britons with nowhere to turn for medical attention; the bodies of those who died piled up for months, because the gravediggers’ union was on strike, too; eventually, the interruptions of fuel and labor caused the electrical system to fail. Hence the candles.
This wasn’t the first time: In 1970, a similar labor action had forced Britain’s hospitals to operate by candlelight. Think about that: A year after Americans had landed on the moon, Englishmen were undergoing medical procedures under neo-medieval conditions, in a medical world lit only by fire...
The problems of socialism are problems of socialism — problems related to the absence of markets, innovation, and free enterprise and, principally, problems related to the epistemic impossibility of the socialist promise: rational central planning of economic activity. The problems of socialism are not the problems of authoritarianism and will not be cured by democracy. Socialism and authoritarianism often go hand in hand (almost always, in fact), but socialism on its own, even when it is the result of democratic elections and genuinely democratic processes, is a bottomless well of misery.
www.nationalreview.com/2020/02/democratic-socialism-problem-it-is-both/
And there are still people who say Socialism is a wonderful system! Are they crazy?
Bob
