Socilism's Slippery Slope

"The road toward socialism is paved with social cures of good intention."

Both Mona Charen and Charles Krauthammer beautifully illustrate how the road toward socialism is paved with social cures of good intention and this cure has failed, and failed miserably. We are at a crossroads in our society. Reject big government and return to free markets as a means to spread wealth around OR cradle the crisis as a new moment to address social change and thus utterly destroy wealth and create the USSR II or the United States Socialist Republic

Read Charles Kraughammer's Observation here in the Washington Post.
Read Mona Charen's Observation here in the IBD.

A good summary as well taken from the Prudent Bear Forum:

"As Lincoln Steffans didn't say but should have:
'I have seen the future, and it doesn't work. But we're going to do it anyway.'

Or as Marx himself should have put it, but didn't: 'History repeats itself; first as tragedy then as greater tragedy.'

(Steffans, by the way, penned his famous line in a Swedish railway car, heading for the Soviet border; he hadn't yet arrived in the Utopian Paradise he was "reporting" on.)

I'm increasingly convinced that there will be no place to draw a line in the sand to halt the ongoing piecemeal nationalization of the U.S. economy: any remaining bits of the financial/banking indistry, car makers, airlines, farmers and truckers and whatever else ya got.

And after $8.5T (and counting) of Bush administration money shovelled to its Wall Street constituency, do you think the new Obama people are not going to reward their own Main Street constituency with at least an equal amount?

And once that sort of Nationwide Helicopter Drop is underway, is there any sane reason for denying government so-called "money" (you should excuse the expression) to ANY entity of any sort? What reasonable-sounding rationale for saying no would you devise?

In brief, comrades, start getting your heads around the idea of "Life In the Soviet Paradise, Part II." The taxes (overt ones plus the hidden one of inflation) needed to meet interest payments on the indebitedness of the U.S. will lower standards of living to Soviet levels. And the inevitable inefficiency of government Central Planning, necessary in an economy where the government owns everything of any significance, will further depress GDP growth. (Though only, of course, "temporarilly" -- only for "the duration of the emergency.")

Krauthammer takes the optimistic view that eventually -- perhaps after a quarter-century -- some U.S. Margaret Thatcher might get us out of our coming socialist economic stagnation.

Maybe; maybe not. In the shorter run, as well as the longer, I think we're a lot more likely to see the results urged by Moscow in a 1940's directive to their British comrades that the lower organs of the Party must make even greater efforts to penetrate the backward parts of the proletariat .