From Reason:
Socialism is now cool in some circles. Newly elected Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez praises “Democratic Socialism” and told comedian Stephen Colbert, “in a modern, moral and wealthy society, no person in America should be too poor to live.”
Colbert ate it up. “Seems pretty simple!” he replied, to cheers from his audience.
But socialism shouldn’t be cool, Gloria Alvarez reported recently, noting that it wrecks economies. In this video she points out that it also leads to government using force against its own citizens.
Regimes that call themselves socialist have killed millions of people. Tens of millions were killed in the USSR. Same in China. Millions also died in Cambodia and North Korea, which claimed to follow socialist ideals.
Today’s socialists say that those countries didn’t practice “real” socialism. They promise that their experiment will be different, and better. “Democratic socialists” like Sen. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez certainly promise to avoid anything like the horrors of previous self-described socialist governments.
But Alvarez says that socialism, whatever the variant, tends to turn out the same way. Right now, people die in Latin American countries that fell for socialism’s promises…