After the star turn of the three uber-progressives (in the sense that a Three Stooges movie is a “star turn” for Larry, Curly and Moe), Senate Democrats Patty Murray, Fauxcahontas Warren and Comrade Bernie “I’m a socialist but have three houses” Sanders, there has been a bit of teeth gnashing from the partisans on the left about how the GOP is about to starve old folks and children, poison the air and the water, Citizens United will be used to put people in the camps and Trump will ignore climate change until the entire planet is a bare, lifeless, smoldering clump of rock orbiting the sun (which has absolutely nothing to do with our climate by the way).

Out of this pot-banging din comes yet another elevation of something called “democratic socialism.”

Heh. History has proven that “democratic” socialism is nothing but socialism and in Marx’s theoretical political and economic continuum, socialism is the bridge between capitalism and communism. It is the gateway drug to authoritarianism and dictatorship.

Democracy (in the sense that there are elections and everybody gets a vote) is a “feature” of every marketing campaign for communism. There are those who think American elections are a sham but if they are, the elections in communist countries are complete illusions (once again, that is not my opinion, that is history speaking).

As a reminder, F.A. Hayek documented in real time the catastrophic errors of the socialists in the UK and Europe before, during and after WWII. Hayek wrote in his 1944 “The Road to Serfdom”:

“…democratic socialism, the great utopia of the last few generations, is not only unachievable but that to strive for it produces something utterly different – the very destruction of freedom itself. As has been aptly said: ‘What has always made the state a hell on earth has been precisely that man has tried to make it his heaven.

There will be a stronger and stronger demand that some board or some single individual should be given power to act on their own responsibility. The cry for an economic dictator is a characteristic stage in the movement toward planning. Thus the legislative body will be reduced to choosing the persons who are to have practically absolute power. The whole system will tend toward that kind of dictatorship in which the head of the government is position by popular vote, but where he has all the powers at his command to make certain that the vote will go in the direction he desires. Planning leads to dictatorship because dictatorship is the most effective instrument of coercion and, as such, essential if central planning on a large scale is to be possible.”

Somehow, there are people out there who “just know” things. These are the people Reagan referred to when he said, “It isn’t so much that liberals are ignorant. It’s just that they know so many things that aren’t so.”

What these individuals “just know” is that individuals are flawed and cannot make proper decisions for themselves – but a group made up of those same flawed individuals can (once they are blessed with the magical wisdom and power of simply joining something called “government”).

Newsflash – if people are generally dumb, concentrating the dumb only makes for more dumbassery. Incompetent individuals don’t somehow magically become competent through aggregation.

People who continue to march though the desert of reality toward the mirage of “democratic socialism” will counter with their idea of purported successes of socialism by asking, “What about Canada? The UK? All those Utopian countries in Scandinavia?” To which I respond that the only reason that these countries haven’t followed the path of socialist paradises like the USSR, Cuba and Venezuela is that they either 1) retain a significant amount of capitalism in their economic systems (and the socialist state operates like a leech on the soft underbelly of the country) or 2) the countries are relatively small in population and largely homogeneous in ideology, religion and social mores.

Somehow the discussion of the complete failure of the socialist “revolution” in Venezuela and its slide toward dictatorship never seems to be a valid example of the fatal conceits of socialism.

The full realization of the socialist program is indistinguishable from communism, it means the destruction of freedom. There is an inversely proportional relationship between any form of collectivism and freedom, more of one means less of the other.

End of story.