By Tom Reynolds Treasurer and At-Large Director 

Many of the progressive winners in the election are socialists and socialism always fails. It’s easy to point at Venezuela and Cuba as current examples of socialism’s failures but the last century gave us numerous examples.

If the left understood history, they would know that Nazi stood for National SOCIALIST German Workers Party. So why are the democratic socialists on the left labeling Republicans in general and President Trump in particular as Nazis and Hitler? Shouldn’t self-avowed socialists look in the mirror?

Remember the Soviet Union that President Reagan correctly labeled as an, “Evil empire…destined for the ash heap of history”? The USSR stood for Union of Soviet SOCIALIST Republics.

China is a communist nation and communism is the inevitable result of socialism.

Now, the left is relabeling itself as a different kind of socialism, (democratic socialism) in order to separate themselves from their failed past; they are 0 for the last century. The Red Sox and Cubs had a better century than socialism.

But it’s not just socialism’s monumental economic failures that should scare us. In the last century, socialist dictatorships were responsible for 100 million people being killed. Mao murdered 40 to 50 million Chinese. Stalin killed 30 to 40 million people and Hitler chipped in with 20 to 30 million deaths. Minor tyrants such as Pol Pot and Fidel Castro barely get a mention but they did their best to bring death and destruction wherever they went. 100 million people killed and today’s socialists are saying, “Hey, let’s try it again”!

What are socialism / communism/ fascism? Their technical definitions sound very academic, non -threatening and revolve around the economy. But at their heart, they all involve central government control of the people. The differences revolve around the degree of control but, in reality, they all lead to total government control of all aspects of people’s lives.

Why do socialists hate guns? They want to be in control of society. When socialism fails, again, people will rebel and the left will need to force them to comply. Socialists aren’t interested in a fair fight; they want all the guns so they can keep people in line.

Why does socialism always fail (and a capitalistic / free market society succeed)?

Capitalism entails free choice while socialism necessitates government mandates. Very few like being told what to do, especially by faceless and far away bureaucrats.

Power is centrally held and when a tyrant (or an incompetent) takes control, they are virtually unopposed. Those in power will do whatever is necessary to stay in control and they have all the power. As I mentioned earlier, they are not interested in a fair fight, so they want all the guns.

Under our Constitution, which is the antithesis of socialism, political power is divided between the three branches of government. Power is further diluted among fifty states and each state has separate powers in their own right. Government’s power can also be challenged by the non-government sector where corporations, unions, the media, etc. are capable of opposing government. Of course, when these various government and non-government entities become aligned with the central government we are on the road to another socialist failure.

Under socialism, all power is held by the central government and when it makes a bad decision it affects everyone. The USSR’s failures are well documented. When China was totally communist, it could not feed its own people so it opened up some capitalism and now it is a world class economy. (But to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, a nation will not continue to exist half communist and half free.)

In the USA’s private sector, businesses and individuals are free to succeed or fail without (usually) taking down others. Others learn from those successes and failures and emulate the successes and avoid the failures.

Federalism is supposed to allow the individual states to try new things and if they fail they do not bring down the entire nation. Other states are free to copy – or not – these individual state efforts. But socialist government being what it is, they would rather be socialist than right. For example, gun free zones have been breeding grounds for mass murderers and yet socialist states keep establishing them even though they have a history of failure.

Those that do not learn from history are destined to repeat it.