THE HORROR... (via Tom Corcoran):

Pinkos Getting Nuttier (Ralph R. Reiland, 12/28/2004, American Spectator)

You'd think today's socialists would be a little more cautious when it comes to preaching about the merits of centralized planning, a bit more wary about putting the state in charge of every nook and cranny of daily life, given the way things have turned out over the past century.

It wasn't just the bad economics, the sight of people queuing up in the Soviet Union each morning to stand in line for hours for bread before the shelves went bare, or the decade-long waits for drab apartments. Worse was the price of pounding every doubter and straggler into line, the slaughter by the bodyguards of collectivism of the millions who failed to proclaim the nonexistent virtue of a failed system, the elimination of millions who failed to buy the idea that a man's mind was nothing compared to the collective wisdom of the state.

The final tally, the grand total of those killed in the Marxist-Leninist war of class genocide against private property, individuality, profit and the market, is variously estimated at between 80 million and 110 million, with as many as 65 million in China, 25 million in the former Soviet Union, 1.7 million in Cambodia, and on and on.

It was the world's most full-scale totalitarianism, an ideology that had come to rule a third of mankind, a revolutionary vision of egalitarianism and virtue that turned into, in the words of Martin Malia, professor of history emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, who died last month, the "most colossal case of political carnage in history." [...]

Such, however, is not the case, as evidenced by the call for grandiose state intrusion in the most private of matters in the November-December 2004 issue of the Internationalist Socialist Review. The crisis described in America is that of an escalating "class attack" by the bourgeoisie in which "more and more responsibility for children's welfare has been placed on individual families."

Start leaving child welfare to families and there's no telling where your society could end up...

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 28, 2004 6:41 PM