Ignorance abounds across the fruited plain. Pundit after pundit has remarked about the candidacy of Bernie Sanders, claiming he is the “first socialist” to do this, achieve that, blah, blah, blah.
Stop right there.
Sanders is not the first socialist to do or win anything. He’s merely the first one to be honest about his socialism. He differs from Hillary only by degrees (and few of those), not principles. The same applies if you compare him to John McCain, Mitt Romney or any of the Bushes.
Socialism has been gradually strangling the American republic since the 1930s, and the tools to start the snowball (or frog sauna) were put in place before that.
Here are someĀ principles straight from Karl Marx:
- Abolition of private property.
- Confiscation of property.
- Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
- A central bank.
- A progressive income tax.
- Government control of communications and transportation.
- Government ownership of factories and agriculture.*
- Government control of labor.
- Corporate farms, regional planning.
- Government-controlled compulsory education.
*Under communism, government owns the resources outright. Under national socialism or fascism, private ownership is allowed but the government controls it.
For the intelligent person paying attention, it’s quite obvious that nearly half of this has been fully accomplished in the USA. The rest of it is in partial stages of completion–getting closer to absolute all the time.
![The actual left-right paradigm is quite different from what you were probably taught.](http://www.virtualpulp.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/leftCENTERright.png)
Just so you know: public servants in the USA don’t swear to uphold and defend the Communist Manifesto during their oath of office (though they behave as if they did). They swear to uphold and defend something that is antethetical to this.
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