Democratic Socialism
Bernie Sanders admits he’s a socialist, although he pivoted away from answering Savannah Guthrie during the first Democrat debate when asked, “What is your response to those who say nominating a socialist would reelect Donald Trump?” Bernie also resorted to name-calling. One might think admitting he’s a socialist makes him seem more honest, but he isn’t. He tries to distinguish his brand of socialism from the one that killed hundreds of millions in the last century by calling it “democratic socialism.” Bernie leads his deluded supporters to believe there were not elections in the Soviet Union, China under Mao, Cambodia under Pol Pot, or any of the other socialist nightmares of the twentieth century. There were. That was the whole problem.
Democracy in and of itself is no guarantee of freedom or justice. That’s why our founders didn’t construct “a democracy.” They gave us a republic whose Constitution includes democratic and antidemocratic elements. You heard that right. Our Constitution has antidemocratic elements. Why do you suppose there is a veto power? So, the president can protect us from laws passed by the democratically elected Congress. Why are there two houses of Congress? So, the more deliberative Senate—originally elected by state legislatures to represent the state governments—can protect us from unwise legislation passed by the democratically elected House.
The entire Bill of Rights is composed of amendments to the Constitution designed to make it even more antidemocratic. Just think about the very first words of the very first amendment: “Congress shall make no law…”
Which Congress? The democratically elected Congress.
The founders understood that, left free to pursue their own individual happiness, the common people were capable of virtue and greatness, but were also capable of being just as tyrannical as a monarchy, if what Madison called, “the passions of the multitude,” or “mob rule” were left unchecked. So, they built a system within which representatives were democratically elected, but the power those leaders had was carefully limited.
This is why I lose it every time I hear many Republicans referring to the United States as a “democracy.” It’s not. It’s a republic. You’d think members of the Republican Party of all people would emphasize that! If nothing else, it would be good branding.
Let me be clear. Belief in the principle of democracy or recognizing the Deep State Russia collusion delusion, or the Resistance in general, as a threat to democratic elections is not the same thing as referring to the United States of America as “a democracy.” Democracy is a component of our system, but there are other components, most of which exist to check it.
All socialism is “democratic.” Socialism represents the worst aspect of democracy: the propensity for the majority to vote themselves the property of the minority. When Bernie promises “free college” or “free health care,” every thinking person knows it won’t really be free. He admitted as much on his Fox News town hall: “So, if you’re asking me—if your question is a fair question—are people going to pay more in taxes? Yes,” Sanders finally admitted when pressed.10
So, if it’s not going to be free, who is going to pay for it? Bernie’s first answer is always “the rich.” Without suggesting I agree with taxing one person for the express purpose of providing material benefits to another, Bernie is lying about this, too. The so-called rich, the one percent or whatever name you want to give to this demonized group, don’t have enough money to pay for everything the Left says it will give you for free.
The truthful answer is you’re going to pay for it, just like you pay for all the social programs the Left sold you in the past. Most Americans don’t know this, but the income tax was originally sold to the public as a tax mostly on the very wealthy. Under the Revenue Act of 1913, which established the first income tax after the Sixteenth Amendment was ratified, incomes up to the equivalent of over $77,000 today weren’t taxed at all and, after that, average Americans only paid one percent until they got to the equivalent of $500,000 per year. The top rate of seven percent wouldn’t apply until one had earnings that would equate to over $7.5 million today.11
So, they got the income tax established by telling the public only the rich would pay it, and even they would pay very little. Then, they pulled the old bait and switch and, today, middle-class families pay a lot more than one percent. Why anyone would believe it’s going to be different this time around is beyond me.
Whenever Bernie is confronted with the horrors socialism produced in the former Soviet Union, communist China, or modern Venezuela, he says he doesn’t want a system like they had.12 He wants something like what they have in Scandinavia. But first, it’s important to realize Bernie is lying about this, too.
He says now that he doesn’t want the Soviet or Venezuelan form of socialism because they’ve already failed. But he sure sang a different tune before they failed. Back in the 1980s, after visiting the Soviet Union, Sanders had nothing but praise for the communist country. He extolled its public transportation system, its “palaces of culture,” and even its breadlines, which Sanders said were a good thing!
“You know, sometimes American journalists talk about how bad a country is because people are lining up for food. That’s a good thing. In other countries, people don’t line up for food. The rich get the food and the poor starve to death,” said Comrade Bernie at the time.13 Bernie, are you stoopid?
Can you believe that? I wouldn’t have believed it myself if I didn’t watch video of Sanders speaking those words. This was in the 1980s, after tens of millions had already starved in the Soviet Union and communist China.14 Meanwhile, the poor in the United States face a much different problem—obesity!15
Bernie is lying about Venezuela, too. Today, he says the Venezuelan version of socialism isn’t the one he’s promoting, but that’s not what he said in 2011. An op-ed Sanders posted on his official US Senate website, said, “These days, the American dream is more apt to be realized in South America, in places such as Ecuador, Venezuela and Argentina, where incomes are actually more equal today than they are in the land of Horatio Alger. Who’s the banana republic now?”16
As of this writing, that op-ed is still available on Bernie’s official US Senate website, although when I followed the link to the Valley News article, it appears that newspaper has since had the good sense to take it down. But to answer the question it posed, Venezuela is the banana republic now, a previously rich country led into chaos by two democratically elected socialists just like Bernie, making all the same false promises Bernie is making today.
Scandinavian “Socialism”
When invited to observe the real-time results of so-called democratic socialism in Venezuela, Bernie and his fellow socialists in the Democrat Party respond with yet another lie. This one has two parts. Part one is that Venezuela is, of course, “not real socialism” or at least not real democratic socialism, despite both the late president Hugo Chávez and current president Nicolás Maduro having been elected in landslides—although Maduro’s reelection in 2018 has been disputed.17
When the economic results are disastrous, the Left claims it wasn’t “real” socialism and when the election looks rigged, even by the DNC’s standards, they say it isn’t “real” democracy. It never occurs to them that perhaps poverty, authoritarianism, and rigged elections are the hallmarks of socialist countries, rather than coincidental misfortunes.
Part two of the big lie is that, while socialism has been a disaster in every country that comes to mind when you think of socialism—Venezuela, the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, Vietnam, North Korea, Cuba, a dozen countries in Africa, etcetera—it has worked in the supposedly idyllic utopias of Scandinavia. There, so the Left’s fairy tale goes, democratic socialism works, the rich pay their “fair share,” health care and college are free, and every child gallops through meadows chasing rainbows on his or her own pony.
Okay, that last part was an exaggeration. But only slightly.
Like everything else the Left tells you, the trut
h about Scandinavia is almost completely the opposite. First and foremost, Scandinavia is not socialist. We know this because they’ve said so, sometimes rather emphatically. When Comrade Bernie was on the campaign trail peddling his nonsense about Scandinavian socialism in 2015, Danish Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen offered a sharp rebuke:
I know that some people in the US associate the Nordic model with some sort of socialism. Therefore, I would like to make one thing clear. Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy. The Nordic model is an expanded welfare state, which provides a high level of security to its citizens, but it is also a successful market economy with much freedom to pursue your dreams and live your life as you wish.18
Now, one might say the prime minister is as deluded or dishonest as the Democrats who say they’re capitalists but support some version of all of Bernie’s giveaways. Not true. There is real substance to Prime Minister Rasmussen’s statement about Denmark having a market economy. In fact, outside of the more generous welfare programs, it has in many ways a much freer market than the United States.
For example, here’s one thing you didn’t hear from overtly socialist Bernie or any of his closet socialist comrades: Denmark has no national minimum wage. That’s right, the American Left is trying to double the national minimum wage to fifteen dollars an hour, but supposedly socialist Denmark gets along just fine without one at all. And you’ll never guess what other countries don’t have national minimum wage laws: Sweden, Iceland, Norway, and Switzerland.19
That seems like a rather important detail our Democrat politicians are leaving out, doesn’t it?
It doesn’t end there. The Heritage Foundation publishes an annual report called the “Index of Economic Freedom,” which I’m sure the Left would have you believe shows the United States at the top of the list. Hardly. Even with all the work President Trump has done in signing individual and corporate tax cuts and reducing the regulatory burden on American businesses, the United States still only ranks number twelve on the list.20
Now, it’s true the Scandinavian countries are scored lower overall than the United States because of their low scores in the Government Spending and Tax Burden categories. However, they score higher than the United States in several other key categories:
United States
Property Rights: 79.3
Business Freedom: 83.8
Investment Freedom: 85.0
Denmark
Property Rights: 86.2
Business Freedom: 90.7
Investment Freedom: 90.0
Sweden
Property Rights: 89.5
Business Freedom: 88.0
Investment Freedom: 85.0
Norway
Property Rights: 86.1
Business Freedom: 89.4
Investment Freedom: 75.0
So, one reason Scandinavia can support more generous welfare states is that they have much freer markets in other respects, especially in the regulatory and property rights areas, allowing their economies to be more productive and efficient. That means they produce more stuff per capita and spend less money complying with regulations.
Even after Donald Trump supposedly “gutted” the American regulatory structure, we’re still far more regulated than Denmark, Sweden, or Norway, as the Business Freedom scores clearly show. Studies put the cost of regulation on the U.S. economy at almost $2 trillion per year. President Trump actually cut the annual cost of regulations by $23 billion during his first two years, where Obama raised them $245 billion during the same period.21 But, contrary to what the hysterical Left would have you believe, we need far more deregulation, not a return to no-growth Obama policies.
What about the corporate tax cuts, supposedly a “giveaway to the rich,” according to virtually every Democrat alive? Surely, Scandinavia must tax their corporations at a higher rate so the rich will pay their “fair share” of all this welfare, right? Wrong. When President Trump signed his historic tax cuts in 2017, it merely brought the United States in line with the Scandinavian countries, whose corporate tax rates are all between 20 percent and 22 percent.22
At no time in this century have Scandinavian corporate tax rates been anywhere near the 39 percent corporate tax rate imposed by Obama and the Democrats, which was the third highest in the world in 2015.23
Are you beginning to feel like you’ve been lied to by the Democrats? God forbid. But wait until you hear the punch line.
Every far-Left Democrat pushing Medicare for All, free college, and other giveaways has told you they will tax the rich to pay for the programs, hoping Americans will completely abandon their common sense and start believing there really is a free lunch. But, of course, there isn’t; not here in America and not in Scandinavia, either. The truth is the United States already has the most progressive income tax system in the world, with the top 10 percent of income earners paying over 45 percent of all income taxes. In Sweden, the top 10 percent pay only 26.6 percent.24
So, if Scandinavian corporations don’t pay more and the top 10 percent of income earners in Scandinavian countries are paying a lower share of the tax burden, who is paying the additional taxes needed for these generous welfare benefits?
Answer: the Scandinavian middle class pays for it, just as the American middle class will if Comrade Bernie or anyone of his ilk gets their way. This isn’t a theory; it’s a fact. In Denmark, you must only earn $77,730 per year to be liable for the top tax rate of 55.8 percent, while you don’t pay the top rate of 37 percent in this country until you’re making over $500,000 per year. That’s not to mention Denmark and most European countries having a value added tax (VAT) on top of their income tax to collect enough revenue to pay for all that welfare.25
The VAT paid by Europeans, including Scandinavians, is one of the more convenient things American liberals forget to tell you about. The VAT raises the price of every good and service it’s levied on, raising the prices of those products by 21.3 percent on average across Europe. Sweden, Norway, and Denmark have 25 percent VAT rates, second only to Hungary as the highest in Europe.26
These taxes are not just paid by the rich and middle class; they’re paid by everyone, including the poorest Scandinavians, who can afford it the least. Talk about breaking your leg and handing you a crutch. They raise the price of everything their poor people need to survive and then promise them free stuff to make up for it. Wouldn’t any sane person prefer freedom?
The welfare state doesn’t just compromise the freedom of Scandinavians; it makes them materially poorer than they would be without being required to pay the taxes that support it. And I’m not just talking about the rich. As I’ve just shown, everyone pays substantially higher taxes than they would without these government benefits. That means they give the government money they could otherwise spend on something else.
That’s fine for those who value the security they believe the programs give them in return. For those who don’t? Too bad, they must pay regardless. And that’s what we’re really talking about when we talk about making health care or education “free.” It means forcing people to buy the government’s program whether they want to or not. It means not having the choice to buy any of the things you might have spent that money on instead.
The economist Thomas Sowell once wrote, “The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.”27 Never was this truer than it is today, where far-Left American Democrats are ignoring the costs of Scandinavian welfare and the trade-offs that go with it.
It would be one thing if they were seeking an honest conversation with American voters, asking if Americans were willing to trade some freedom of choice for security, but they’re not. They’re lying to Americans, telling them they can deliver all these wonderful benefits without Americans giving up anything to get them.
Neither are the Democrats ready to take the economy in a direct
ion in any way resembling the relatively freer markets of Scandinavia. Have you heard a Democrat calling for an abolition of the minimum wage or radical deregulation of the business environment? No, they’re calling for precisely the opposite, even though those are two reasons Scandinavia has been productive enough to have such a large welfare state in the first place.
How Capitalism Saved Scandinavia—Twice
Even representing the Scandinavian countries as some sort of successful balance of capitalism and socialism—as if the large welfare states contribute to their prosperity—is misleading. Scandinavia prospers to the extent it does despite, rather than because of, its welfare state. In fact, the trend in the Nordic countries over the past several decades has been to move away from the more socialist model they adopted briefly in the 1970s and toward the more capitalist model they have now.
In the late nineteenth century, Sweden was a relatively poor country. But by 1968, it was the third richest country in the world.28 This was not the result of its large welfare state, which it hadn’t yet constructed. Rather, Sweden became rich with low taxes, free markets, and a relatively small welfare state. It was not until the 1970s and 1980s that Sweden adopted the kind of economy Bernie Sanders and the rest are suggesting for America.
It was a disaster. In less than two decades, Sweden went from being the third richest to the seventeenth richest country in the world, culminating in a financial and real estate crisis in 1991.29 Since that crisis, Sweden has actually been reforming its economy to be more capitalist and its welfare state to be less generous. Sweden’s economic disaster was caused by implementing the kinds of taxes the Democrats are selling today. Their taxes30 and government spending have decreased substantially since their peak in 1993.31 They’re still higher than in the United States, but the trend in Sweden is downward, while in the United States it has been upward. The story in Denmark is basically the same.32
Radicals, Resistance, and Revenge: The Left’s Plot to Remake America Page 19
