By Selwyn Duke
“Libertarians and conservatives talk a lot about freedom,” writes Jacobin magazine, “but the most important kind of freedom is freedom from domination — and if you take that seriously, you should oppose capitalism.” This article, running Friday and titled “Socialism Is All About Expanding Freedom,” might hardly warrant mention, except that MSN.com saw fit to publicize it on its homepage.
The “freedom” bit is all about a rebranding. One might think that 200 years of abject failure, punctuated with 100 million dead bodies in socialism’s wake, would be enough to bury the misbegotten ideology. Not at all. In fact, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is helping lead its latest reincarnation, with a new book titled It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism.
According to historian and sociologist Rainer Zitelmann, Sanders’ new effort reads like Marx and Engels, except that they actually had some positive words about “capitalism” — the senator has not a one.
Sanders “calls for a political revolution in which working people come together,” which, of course, is just a rephrasing of Marx’s “Workers of the world, unite!” He also, Zitelmann informs, demonizes the rich, stoking envy by infusing his book with numerous tales of the wealthy’s opulent lifestyles. Yet he doesn’t mention that they generally made their money by, as late economist Dr. Walter Williams would put it, “serving their fellow man” through the market system.
Read the rest here.
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