socialist

America, despite AOC’s radical rhetoric, is an exceptional nation that offers ample opportunity and freedom

Donny Kendal and John Nothdurft are joined by Justin Haskins in episode #170 of the In The Tank Podcast. Today’s episode features work from the Tax Foundation, the Illinois Policy Institute, and the Texas Public Policy Foundation.

There is one thing that supporters and detractors of Bernie Sanders might agree on: he seems to be honest about his convictions. He is an avowed socialist, instead of pretending to believe in a role for private insurance. Unlike Barack Obama, his answer to the question “Do you get to keep your insurance plan?” is plainly No. There won’t be any more insurance plans. Everyone will be on Medicare.

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has often talked about his desire for the United States to emulate the socialist welfare states of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden by providing free college and health care and expanding Social Security. Sanders also wants to ban oil, natural gas, and coal production on lands owned by the federal government, and he has called for a ban on hydraulic fracturing, which has dramatically increased production of oil and natural gas in the United States.

Wherever we turn we are confronted with politicians, political pundits, television talking heads, and editorial page commentators, all of whom offer an array of plans, programs, and projects that will solve the problems of the world – if only government is given the power and authority to remake society in the design proposed.

Hillary Clinton is going to be the Democrat presidential nominee. (Sorry, Bernie Sanders fans. You too, Martin O’Malley fans – both of you.) Unless – and likely even if – she is indicted for her latest foray into self-defined ethics. She has in her past more than a quarter century of…questionable statements, decisions and actions – so it would appear nothing else in this vein will matter to the Democrat rank and file.

The Barack Obama Administration is – even more than any of its predecessors – the Crony Socialism Administration. No prior presidency has used and abused government to do more for its friends – and more to its friends’ competitors – than has this one.

Many Social Democrats believed that democracy was both compatible with and an essential complement to a humane socialism, a socialism that did not reduce humanity to obedient cogs in a giant collectivist wheel directed by a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” They wanted socialism with traditional civil liberties, personal freedom and democratic politics.

Forty years ago, on October 9, 1974, the Nobel Prize committee announced that the co-recipient of that year’s award for economics was the Austrian economist, Friedrich A. Hayek. Never was there a more deserving recognition for one of the truly great free market thinkers of modern times.

Co-author Elizabeth Clarke remembers attending a speech in Waukegan, IL with her late husband in the summer of 1967, at which Senator Everett Dirksen (Senator Dirksen represented Illinois in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1933 – 1939 and the U.S. Senate from 1951 until his death in 1969.) spoke passionately against the then-pending Supreme Court case of Keyishian et al v Board of Regents that ruled against loyalty oaths.

Forgotten or at least certainly downplayed in the international remembrance of Mandela’s nearly three decades of imprisonment and his historical role in becoming the first black president of post-Apartheid South Africa is the fact that through most of the years of his active resistance leading up to his arrest and incarceration he accepted the Marxist interpretation that racism and racial discrimination were part and parcel of the capitalist system.

The  last check and balance on President Obama is the Republican majority in the  House of Representatives.  He has made clear that he intends to remove that  check on his…