Dakota Beacon

Yesterday I talked about rent control, one of Bernie Sanders’ favorite ideas.  (My first encounter with this dumb idea was in Winnipeg. My husband and I were trying to find an apartment to rent for the summer one year and it seemed weird to me that apartments were so scarce and prices for houses for sale were low.  I asked someone about this. I learned that it was all of the regulation, including rent control, which was depressing the market for houses while at the same time creating a significant shortage in rental housing. This, of course, makes sense. Once the controls kicked in, landlords got out.  Hence the shortage, also hence the rotten condition most of them were in. Who would bother to maintain something they could not profit from?)

So, now to move on to some of the other reasons not to support Bernie Sanders, I ran across this article in Front Page  Now, of course, when it is flung in his face, Bernie will deny.  He sort of did at the last “debate”, where he claimed that “99.99 puhcent” of his team were good guys and he wanted rid of the rest of them.  Trouble is, it seems that there are a lot of these “.01 puhcent”, they are in leadership positions within the campaign, have been warned not to talk frankly about their views and their views are pretty shocking to most of us - the saner ones of us, anyway.  

Project Veritas did some investigative interviews back in January.  Here is a young worker for the Sanders campaign, a leader, if you will. His name is Mason Baird.  His ideas scare the hell out of me, but we can take heart that he really doesn’t want to have to kill us.  You can tell a lot about a person by the kinds of people he attracts around him. If you don’t know who the Kulaks were, by the way, you need to.  Here’s one factoid: Stalin murdered between 30,000 and 50,000 of them and stole their farmland between 1929 and 1933.  Those who survived the killing spree were sent to the gulags for “re-education”. This spawned another wave of genocide because the Kulaks provided food - they were the country’s most successful farmers.  Stalin’s genocide killed an unknown number of Ukranians, from 3.5 million to 12 million men, women and children between 1932 and 1933. That’s a lot of killing in a year.

There are a lot of parallels between Sanders and Lenin.  One of the most obvious is a hatred of landlords. The abolishment of landlords was immediate in 1917.  Landowning Kulaks were naturally going to come in for grief. Marxism begins with socialism unless you have a Czar to shoot.  If you have a functioning political system it becomes necessary to take the “enemy classes” out in smaller steps. The end destination is the same - Marxism, state seizure of the means of production.  In effect, you can do this gradually, a step at a time, merely by making it unprofitable to pursue capitalism. This is what we buy into with Bernie Sanders.  

Like Lenin, Sanders is a “writer and speaker” with absolutely zero experience in any kind of real work.  Like Lenin, he has never held a job outside of politics and political activism and has no idea of how things work in the real world and not enough imagination to figure it out. Anywhere, ever. His first job. One thing we can say about Sanders is that he has been very consistent.  Since he was Mayor of Burlington, VT, he has praised some of the worst Communist dictators and dictatorships. He has always admired the Communists in Cuba and even now he can’t be induced to criticize Nicolas Maduro, the man who has destroyed Venezuela - once the 4th highest income nation in the world.  Today no dog is safe from the stewpot in Caracas. Women sell their hair in order to feed their kids. Anyone who questions this regime disappears. But criticize Maduro?  Not Bernie.  

Bernie admired the appearance of trains running on time in Russia.  One person who also bragged of this particular accomplishment was Benito Mussolini.  He was not, it turns out, beloved by those who lived under his regime in Italy. He ended up hanged, upside-down and shot multiple times for his efficiency.   So that didn’t go so well in Italy.

We might not mind all of this, however, because if we are to believe the people at the hub of Bernie’s organization, they have a plan for that.  It’s called “re-education camps”. The people who experienced these in our master example, the Soviet Union, called them “gulags”. They were not “camps” as in “summer camp”.  Now, I’m not saying Sanders thinks he can accomplish all he wants in a term as President, but I am saying this is exactly what his lieutenants have in mind. And it might be a great plan.  But we don’t need it in the United States. It is already up and running in several other places and those who want to live in such a system could much more easily go there than attempt to impose it here.  I would suggest China, North Korea, maybe Yemen, Cuba, Venezuela, for starters. I think everyone should live is a system that suits him. Mason Baird should go and intern in North Korea. I would have no objection and, in fact, would wish him well there.  

One thing that many have said, including Ted Cruz’s father, who also experienced the Cuban regime of Castro, is that the Cubans have been far more fortunate than we would be under a similar system.  They had at least the hope that they could cobble together a raft and if God so ordained, they would make it to the coast of Florida, a mere 90 miles from the island. We have no Florida coast awaiting us and no hope of a raft.  These are some things to think about as your college kids come home for Spring Break, brimming over with excitement for the Bern. This is why it is so tragic that no one is learning history in school anymore. We can learn a lot by observing rather than experiencing first-hand.  We can either notice that someone suffers acutely by putting his hand on the burner or we can do it ourselves just to see how it works out. I think we should encourage the former method of learning. We can apply this to communism. If only we know about the experiences of “uhthuhs”.

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