Much was made of Melania Trump’s borrowed lines during last week’s Republican National Convention, but there has been very little mention of the borrowed ideas at this week’s Democratic Convention. While I don’t defend plagiarism of any kind, I think it’s pretty rich for Democrats to criticize Melania Trump while making no mention of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders channeling Karl Marx on the opening night of the DNC. The ideas the Democrats are championing as new are, in actuality, warmed-up ideas rolled out 150 years ago by Marx in Das Kapital.
The class warfare rhetoric, the absurd double-standards of the liberal elite, and calls for the nationalization of education and industry are right out of the socialist manifesto. Democrats claim to care about the middle-class while, in reality, their policies of wealth redistribution and cronyism favor the powerful and politically well-connected. Because of their reckless spending and money-printing programs, they have devastated savings and retirement accounts, devalued the dollars folks take-home in their paychecks, and undermined full-time work through programs like Obamacare. All the while, they’ve been bailing-out union bosses and driving stock returns to all-time highs through inflation.
Our country is moving rapidly toward oligarchy, under which insiders and power players get rich and live by a different set of rules than regular folks, while liberal politicians claim to be “warriors for the middle class.” The reality is that they are warriors on the middle class. Socialism and communism have proven to fail in every country in which they have ever been tried. Government isn’t the driver of the economy, but it can kill its momentum.
Americans must reject the siren song of socialism if we hope to build a robust middle class and restore American prosperity and promise. Problems caused by too much government and too much debt cannot be fixed by yet more government and yet more deficit spending. Freedom is the theme if we hope to restore the American Dream.
Promoting family values, free-enterprise, and limited government principles is the recipe for national resurgence. If we want to restore our national promise, we must reapply the principles of the American founding, not adopt the principles of the communist revolution. Americans want hope and promise for our future, but we won’t find it at this week’s DNC. Instead, we’ll find ideas from the ash-heap of history repackaged and reheated.
