From a sidebar...

Conversation we’ve been having in a little discussion group about Socialists/Communists...

Anyone who has studied Russian or Chinese history knows this...

And Seattle went the same way NYC did... They now have a socialist mayor, Katie Wilson, who has NO experience. Her speech is HERE, and if you go six minutes in, she starts talking about her ‘agenda’. And it’s truly scary...

Redistribution of ‘wealth’, food for all, housing for all, progressive tax options, new taxes on businesses making over $7M a year, etc. But some of the specifics echo what Mandami has said, like control of grocery stores (90 days notice to close one and ‘preventing’ closure of ones that are poor performers), among other things.

I’m just glad I’m not living out there...

I want to share what EL said in our chat about the differences between capitalism and socialism...

What these effete, moronic savants fail to understand is that wealth is a collective figment of human imagination driven by our innate avarice. Scarcity does not make something valuable; desire, however, makes something scarce expensive. Our collective desire makes something easily produced common and relatively inexpensive while also making the producers wealthy. People say they will kill for a morning cup of coffee, but it’s only $3.95 at Starbucks (medium roast Pike Place). The Starbucks market capitalization is $98.23 billion.

What is ironic is that the atheistic Marxist has a Biblical view of wealth: they believe the total amount of wealth in the world is fixed, and that the evil wealthy stole it. But the fixed wealth proposition is an easily exposed lie: at its peak around 150 AD, the approximately 70 million people in the Roman Empire were worth about $43.4 billion dollars (2008 analysis by economists Walter Scheidel and Steven J. Friese). Yet according to the renown scholar, Google, the 450.4 million people in the European Union, roughly the same land as the Roman Empire, are worth $80 trillion. And the Romans didn’t have coffee.

Because wealth is a figment of the imagination, it cannot be redistributed; but it can be destroyed by crushing dreams and aspirations. What can be distributed, however, is knowledge: the knowledge of how to recognize opportunities, of how to develop and manufacture products; and of building businesses to market and distribute products. But the Marxist decree capitalism to be inhumane and reject learning and teaching its principles, means, and methods. Then, in their utopian dreams and worldly ignorance, they propose seizing the means of production and placing it under state control. Bureaucrats, however, get paid whether something is produced and put on the shelf or not, and the dream-denied populace, reduced to state controlled serfdom with worthless ration cards, starve in dark, cold, dingy state provided cells called apartments.

Capitalism exploits human desires, dreams, inventiveness, and energy to create a robust economy. It’s potential excesses are tempered by another human, innate trait: altruism.
Marxism, with what amounts to the economic paradigm of ant or bee colonies, rejects and crushes human instinct, with predictable and inevitable results. Forcing an oversize square peg into a round hole leaves neither a square peg nor a round hole; both are irreparably damaged.

This in a nutshell is pretty much the genesis of the quote, you can vote yourself into socialism, but you have to shoot your way out of it.

What happens next in both places is yet to be seen...