socialist

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.

One needs only to observe the aggressive pursuit of “diversity” in admissions and hiring, the abandonment of the traditional curriculum in favor of highly politicized “studies” based on group identity, the mandatory workshops on sensitivity training, and so on to fully comprehend the stranglehold the Left has managed to secure today within our schools, especially at the university level where instructors need not be as concerned with parental interference, but instead have a captive audience in which to indoctrinate our children to their Marxist philosophies

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.

Due to this weekend’s torrential winter downpour, we are currently in the midst of a federal government shutdown. Uh oh. We’ve been told so often by so many that a government shutdown will shake the Earth from its orbital path and send us careening into the Sun. So far, thankfully, that has not occurred.

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.

Democrat Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-CA) just penned an editorial for the San Francisco Chronicle. That has the patchouli whiff of her writing while sitting at the corner of Haight and Ashbury – in August 1968. It is warmed-over Hippie-Dippie, Flower Power, Socialist nonsense.

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.

A little more than seventy years ago, on March 10, 1944, there appeared in Great Britain one of the most amazing and influential political books of the twentieth century, The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich A. Hayek, which forewarned of socialist trends in Britain and America that ran the danger of leading to tyranny if taken to their logical conclusions.

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.

The president of the United States has publicly declared that he knows the minimum wage any worker in the United States should earn as an hourly salary: $10.10. Why not $11.11 or $9.99 has been left a mystery. But what the president is sure of is that businessmen clearly are stonehearted money grabbers exploiting some of their workers by not paying them the real value of what their labor is worth.

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…