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The news that Ford Motor will lose $3 billion on its electric vehicles (EVs) business underscores the astonishing foolishness of the Biden Administrations relentless push to undermine traditional free enterprise in America and replace it with a government-dominated economy.

This segment of Whats Ahead lays out how whats happening with autos is a prime example of modern socialism, whereby socialists obtain their goals not by nationalization of companies but through regulation. In this case, auto manufacturers must go all-out for EVs, even though theres no credible evidence that getting rid of fossil fuels will save the planet.

Moreover, most buyers dont want EVs. Modern socialists, nonetheless, are ready to force this unwanted, expensive transformation on them.

Automakers are not alone in this lethal coupling of commerce and big government, as chipmakers, banks and others are discovering.

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"Welcome To The Unsustainable Folly Of Modern Socialism": Steve Forbes Torches Biden's EV Push - Forbes

In the 1930s, Minnesota had two main parties: Republicans and Farmer-Laborers.

Founded toward the end of World War I, the Farmer-Labor Party was an outgrowth of the progressive Nonpartisan League, which took power in North Dakota using the Republican ballot line and had set up a national headquarters in Saint Paul. The FLP united not just its namesake agrarians and urban proletariat, but, in the spirit of the Popular Front, social democratic reformists with revolutionary Marxists.

In 1930, the Farmer-Labor Party won the governorship with the legendary Floyd Olson, a left-wing Hennepin County Attorney who had caused a stir by forcefully defending a group of Minneapolis workers accused of dynamiting an anti-union contractor's home. Olson permitted communists and socialists to participate in the Farmer-Labor Party, often to the chagrin of populist liberals, but he also jettisoned controversial planks from the FLP platform like recognition of the USSR, public ownership of key industries, and (odder in retrospect) unemployment insurance and a 40-hour work week. A useful reminder that things seem a lot less radical when you already have them.

Olson is remembered for his shrewdness and keen sense of the Farmer-Labor projects constantly fluctuating constraints. As governor, he enacted progressive taxation, a moratorium on farm foreclosures and built the FLP into a very powerful political force, at least within Minnesotas borders. In 1932, third-party advocates urged Olson to take the Farmer-Labor Party nationwide and run for president as its nominee. Acutely aware of the dearth of third-party organization in just about every state except Minnesota, Olson demurred and instead cut a deal endorsing the Democratic nominee, progressive New York Gov. Franklin Roosevelt.

Olson went on to play a decisive role in the 1934 Minneapolis Trucker Strike, though on whose behalf he acted depends on who you talk to. To Trotskyists, whose fellow travelers masterfully organized the strike, Gov. Olsons decision to bring in the Minnesota National Guard was a betrayal that resulted in the arrest of labor leaders, and allowed trucks to move. But to Farmer-Labor devotees, the National Guards real objective was to protect the striking Teamsters from the violent, business funded Citizens Alliance; a maneuver which allowed Olson to broker a resolution that achieved formal union recognition. Lest his left-wing critics doubt Olsons bonafides, at that years FLP convention, the governor tested the bounds of his popularity by allowing a stridently socialist platform and proclaiming, Now I am frank to say I am not a liberal I am what I want to beI am a radical.

Floyd Olson was in the midst of a campaign for U.S Senate when he died unexpectedly from stomach cancer in the summer of 1936. He was just 44. The Farmer-Labor Party was never quite the same. A nasty power struggle broke out between his successors, Hjalmar Petersen and Elmer Benson, who managed to hold the Governors Mansion for all of two years until moderate Republican Harold Stassen took over in 1938. As war with the Axis powers neared, Minnesotas isolationist undercurrents came to the fore and brought anti-Roosevelt Republicans to power.

By 1940, the FLP had lost every seat they once held in Minnesotas Congressional delegation and their lone U.S Senator, Henrik Shipstead, had become a Republican to bolster the GOPs anti-war wing. Meanwhile, the American Federation of Labor, a onetime ally of the FLP, had split, confusing the party even further; and with the Democratic-led New Deal at its zenith, the need for corresponding farmer-labor parties around the country felt all the less urgent. Just as Soviet Russia had been seriously tested by Stalins pursuit of socialism in one country, the FLP was learning the hard limits of third-partyism in one state.

As Minnesotans are usually reluctant to admit, our Land of 10,000 Lakes figure may or may not include some exaggerations. In the early 1940s, if the Farmer-Labor Party was a pond, then the Minnesota Democratic Party was a puddle. Since the 1860s, Minnesota Democrats had struggled to shake their party's association with the Confederacy, which took the lives of nearly 3,000 Minnesotans in the Civil War. Democrats hadnt won a statewide race since 1914, after which they were buried by the FLP as the main opposition to Minnesota Republicans, their support base confined to the Irish ghettos of St. Paul and Minneapolis. But now, as the Farmer-Labor Party faded fast, Minnesota Democrats gained new relevance. With Republicans in control of the Governors Mansion and both U.S. Senate seats, it was increasingly clear that Minnesota wasnt quite big enough for two left of center parties.

In 1944, FDR, gearing up to campaign for an unprecedented fourth term, insisted that Minnesotas Democrats and Farmer-Laborers merge. FLP stalwarts like Susie Williamson Stageberg vehemently opposed a fusion party but was outnumbered by her peers. Elmer Benson, to this day Minnesotas most radical governor, was now out of office and represented the Farmer-Labor Party in negotiations with the Democrats. In April 1944, the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party was born.

The next year, the new partys prime spokesman came through in the profile of Hubert H. Humphrey, who was decisively elected mayor of Minneapolis. Humphrey was an effective leader who made no secret that he was a partisan of the DFLs Democratic wing. Being the most prominent elected DFL official in Minnesota at the time, he showed up to give a keynote address at the 1946 party convention in St. Paul, but was booed off the stage by Farmer-Labor diehards who werent about to cede control to Humphreys upstart liberal faction.

Tensions grew over the next two years, as Humphrey burrowed in his heels and formed a diaper brigade of young party moderates, mostly constituted by himself and DFL Executive Committee Member, Orville Freeman. The dynamic was characterized by a 1947 official party letter to Humphrey, the first draft of which was written by Freeman with a congratulatory tone. But when the Farmer-Laborers who still dominated the Executive Committee went through it with their red pens, all references to outstanding leadership were struck from the text.

A year later, in 1948, the ambitious Mayor Humphrey made it his mission to take one of Minnesotas Senate seats back from the Republicans. But first, he had to get through his own partys left flank. Humphrey activated his liberal anticommunist organization, Americans for Democratic Action, to red-bait radical Minnesotans out of political life. As a leaflet from Humphreys faction posed: Will the D-F-L party of Minnesota be a clean, honest, decent, progressive party? Or will it be a Communist-front organization?

To truly weed out the left, Humphreys crew would need to win control through the labyrinthine party caucus system. Ahead of the April 30 DFL caucuses, Orville Freeman organized a parallel formation of anticommunists, most of whom had never attended a party meeting, to complete the purge. In Hennepin County, Lester Covey, the County chair and an ally of Humphreys, rearranged the caucus locations to favor the Democratic wing. The move outraged party radicals, who opted to hold their own caucuses at individual precincts per tradition. But Humphreys faction won the night. As Minnesota historian Rhoda Gilman noted, Using tactics borrowed directly from the leftists of the party, they swept the DFL all the way to the state convention in the Spring of 1948.

Humphrey struck his most decisive blow by exploiting a hemorrhage over the partys presidential nomination. For well over a decade, the presidential question had been non-controversial for Farmer-Laborers who readily endorsed FDR, often with reciprocal support. It was his initiative, after all, that brought the two rival parties together. But with Roosevelt gone and Nazism defeated, the DFL, along with the broader Popular Front, had lost its common purpose.

Harry Truman, who inherited the Presidency in 1945 after FDRs death, was deeply unpopular among Farmer-Laborites who viscerally remembered how he was forced onto the ticket in 1944 to replace a man even more of their ilk than Roosevelt, Vice President Henry Wallace. In 1948, Wallace left the Democrats to rehabilitate the dormant Progressive Party as its presidential nominee. His campaign attracted what was left of the Popular Front, communists and social democrats unhappy with Trumans initiation of the Cold War, tepidness on Civil Rights and failure to marshal burgeoning strike activity into a cohesive movement. Naturally, Wallaces campaign drew a great deal of support from the DFLs left, including from Elmer Benson who served as campaign manager. Despite this, Hubert Humphrey was not only able to secure the DFL Presidential nomination for Truman, but used the party Steering Committee to disqualify Wallace supporters from Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party participation.

Having been banned from the official DFL convention in Brainerd, the Farmer-Labor left held their own protest convention in Minneapolis as the Progressive Democratic Farmer Labor League where they nominated Wallace and Senate candidate James Shields. This was their last gasp. After a round of legal jousting, Humphrey and Truman made the DFL ballot line, cementing the Democratic wings dominance over every aspect of the party but the last two words in its name. Over the next several decades, bitterness among old Farmer-Laborites grew, over both the purge and their own decision to fuse with Democrats in the first place. Elmer Benson, who lived to 89, decried Humphrey as a war criminal and ballyhoo artist in one of his final interviews and expressed regret over the 1944 merger: I think it was a mistake because the party became part of a larger party thats been taken over by political hacks.

In retrospect, its hard to imagine the Farmer-Labor left maneuvering their way into some better outcome. Aside from North Dakota, which is still home to the North Dakota Democratic-Nonpartisan League Party, there were very few factions of radicals across the country sharing state parties with Democrats for the Farmer-Laborers to coordinate with. The Progressive Party may have felt like it could be built into a national alternative for a time, but it netted a mere 2% of the vote in 1948 and collapsed from infighting a few years later. And while it was likely a better move for the FLP to remain independent of the Democrats, its not at all clear that they would have retained second party status and not been overtaken by Humphrey and his coterie anyway.

Some argue that by merging, the Farmer-Laborers did bring the Democrats leftward, at least on the issue of civil rights, which Hubert Humphrey boldly embraced from his mayoralty onwards. This may somewhat explain the DFLs position today, one or two notches to the left of the average state Democratic Party, as displayed by Minnesotas recent universal school meals law and Gov. Tim Walzs pronouncements on trans rights. That would likely be cold comfort to the original Farmer-Laborers and their vision for a cooperative commonwealth. Such a vision, however, is increasingly popular across America once again, including in Minnesota where voters have elected over ten current Democratic Socialist officeholders using the DFL ballot line. Ever so often, DFL moderates float shortening the name to Minnesota Democratic Party. But with changing political winds and dedicated organization, perhaps one day an opposite edit will come about and allow the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party to rise again.

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How Hubert H. Humphrey Purged the DFL of Socialists - Racket - Racket

By Dr. Samir Kagalkar

Socialists accuse him of Capitalism and Capitalists accuse him of Socialism! Prime Minister Narendra Modis welfare schemes on drinking water, electricity for all, banking for all, DBT, etc., have made the capitalists red eyed. At the same time, PMs pro-business efforts such as reduction in corporate taxes, support for start-ups, focus on FDI, ease of doing business have angered socialists! Where does the truth lie? Perhaps, the truth is sandwiched between Socialism and Capitalism!

The answer lies in BJPs economic philosophy. With Gandhian Socialism at its core, BJP stands for Antyodaya (development of most downtrodden). This is meant to be achieved through the Third way - as the senior ideologue Dattopant Thengde puts it by rejecting both Capitalism & Socialism in their pure forms. Capitalism promotes an individual at the cost of the society, while the opposite is true in the case of Socialism. A delicate balance between the individual, society, nature & divinity is being sought in the Ekatma Manavata Darshan (Integral Humanism) of the BJP.

How does one envision this Third Way in day-today economic policies? A vertical split between Capitalist vs Socialist policies is too nave and it does not provide convincing answers. But once you see this as a horizontal stack made up of two layers - welfare & empowerment - Prime Ministers Third Way becomes clear. The two stacks one above the other can be visualized assafety net layerat the bottom with focus on hands-on welfare and top layer asenabling zonewhere Government focusses on laissez faire policies with focus on maximizing outcomes through private sector.

Antyodaya philosophy mandates that the most backward person also should be ensured a life of dignity by the Government ( a life without wretchedness). The basics of a dignified life housing, clean water, electricity, access to quality healthcare, education, toilets, pension, insurance, farmer support, scholarships & gas connection to name a few of them have been taken up on a war footing by Modi Government. The speed & scale at which these have been completed is acknowledged as one of the most efficient ever done. Use of technology has aided in leakage proof delivery yet another feather in the cap of Modi Government.

With dignity of life assured even for the poorest of the poor (safety net zone via welfare schemes), the stage is set for the common man to explore his or her full potentionial. . It is here that the key features of PMs policy of laissez faire come into play. Repealing of obsolete laws & regulations, making access to credit easy (from a street vendor (Svanidhi) to the multi-billion corporates), ensuring a corruption free & transparent policy making, building massive infrastructure are some highlights which have put the Indian economy on the path of massive growth. Over 100 unicorns and around 75,000 startups are testimony to the fact that the second phase is rightly all about letting the potential of each person & entity reach its limit, incidentally furthering the cause of Indian prosperity.

As a society, the basic aim is a dignified life for all. And ensuring that it is States responsibility. And PM Modi believes that 130 Cr Indians with huge potential can contribute to Indias growth once basic facilities are ensured. And this growth in the spirit of 'Ekatma manavata darshan balances the individual, society & nature. And in this phase of new Atma Nirbhar Bharat, society supports everyone those below safety net, while those above the net contribute to Indias fast march towards economic prosperity. This truly is an Indian way going beyond the dichotomy of socialism & capitalism the Third way.

With Capitalism and Socialism in their pure forms at cross roads across the world, Indias Third Way may be the way forward.

The rest is here:
Modinomics: Socialism or Capitalism? - The Week

What happened in 1750? Well, we know what happened -- roughly -- in 1750 in Bengal: The British arrived. So, sorry for that on behalf of my forefathers (none of whom were involved, my ancestral involvement in the subcontinent starts post-independence).

However, the grand -- and according to the American economist Brad DeLong, only important -- question in economics is: What the hell happened in 1750?

This, sadly -- and like bad jokes -- requires some explaining.

Economic history, our evaluation of living standards in the past, is dominated by the work of Angus Maddison. It's possible to download his estimations of how our ancestors lived. What, approximately, was that living standard?

We end up measuring GDP per capita, which isn't a perfect guide. We adjust to modern dollars, not a perfect process. We include the value of things grown at home -- someone eating rice from their own paddy. We do the best we can in an imperfect world. The answer is that our ancestors all lived much more poorly than we did.

DeLong's version of those estimates says about $600 a year. That's $600 modern dollars a year. That's also about the same as the World Bank's estimate of absolute poverty, that $1.90 a day.

Yes, it's entirely true that this level of poverty still exists for some in Bangladesh, just as it does for some 700 million people around the world. It's also vile that this still exists, we should do everything to get rid of it.

Which brings us back to 1750. Because that's the first time there was a serious, sustained change in that level of living. Near all of history up to that point was near all people, living at that $600 a year standard.

It didn't vary much over the Chinese empires, the Roman, or the variations in Indian kingdoms and empires. That's just what the average human experience was. Even if things got better, what varied was the number of people living at that number -- Malthusian economies we call this.

A new crop increases incomes and more children survive -- so in a generation or two, there are just more people living at that same old standard. This is one of the proofs that there was growth in the Raj economy. When the British arrived, there were perhaps 170 million people (for what is now India), when they left possibly 350 million. More people at that same old standard of living.

In Europe these days, that standard of living is more like $20,000 to $40,000. Yes, the same dollars, we are measuring the same thing. 30 to 50 times better off. The increase in Bangladesh, so far, is more like three times, not 30. Not good -- we'd like to do better, obviously. We should, too.

Which brings us to this by Syed Badrul Ahsan in this newspaper.

Socialism once underpinned the sovereign nature of this republic. Can someone give it back to us, please?

Things are unfair, no doubt. Things are not as good as we'd like them to be, certainly. So, our grand question is how can and should we make them better? To which the answer is not socialism.

For the answer to that original question, what the hell happened in 1750, is that for the very first time, a society managed to break free of that Malthusian poverty. We got, for that very first time in all of human history, a sustained and substantial rise in the living standards of the average working man and woman.

Sure, it took a couple of centuries to get to 30 times in the first country that did it. China just did it in only 40 years. And here's the thing: Absolutely none -- no, not one single one -- has done it by implementing socialism.

Everywhere that has got rich has done so by some variation of the capitalist free market. There are no exceptions to this rule. Maoist China was not an exception, nor were Castro's Cuba, Stalin's Russia, Eastern Europe, and on and on.

All the evidence we have, the global centuries of it, is that capitalism and markets, not socialism, are what make a society and the people in it rich.

Sure, as Mr Ahsan says, it's a better society when people can afford a whole chicken, not just pieces or the guts. We should adopt those policies which make this possible. That means not socialism. For we did actually try this.

The 20th century is a grand natural experiment. The capitalist and market economies continued to get vastly richer, the non-capitalist and non-market countries did not. We even have 21st century evidence -- Venezuela's institution of modern socialism meant no one had chicken, not even gizzards or chitlins.

Economics is not a perfect science, that's entirely true. But we do have our grand question -- what makes people rich? We also have our answer -- not socialism. No, really, it was tried and it didn't work -- into the dustbin of history with it. Well, unless our intention is to make people appreciative of a bag of chicken guts that is. That actual chicken in every pot requires capitalism and markets.

Tim Worstall is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute in London.

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For Bangladesh, socialism is not the answer - Dhaka Tribune

A common question asked by those learning about socialism is whether there are any actual examples of socialism in practice, either somewhere in the world today, or in history. Clearly, it would make it easier to argue for socialism as a real alternative to capitalism if such examples could be provided to sceptics.

Unfortunately, we have to disappoint. There are no such ready-made examples of socialism, but understanding this is an important part of understanding what socialism actually is.

At its most basic, socialism is a society in which the wealth and resources, including the means to produce wealth, are owned in common by society as a whole and the decisions about how to use them are made democratically, with the principal aim of providing for needs of society as a whole (not competing individuals, businesses or states). It means a society of real equality and democracy, without poverty or injustice.

It hardly needs to be said that no country in the world today looks anything like this.

Still, for different reasons many people do cite examples of actually existing socialism. Whether its people like Bernie Sanders in the US speaking of a Scandinavian socialism, as if countries like Sweden with many universal public services such as free education and heavily-subsidised healthcare and childcare valuable reforms won through struggle by a powerful organised workers movement amount to socialism.

This would be mistaken even if such services werent being continually eroded, as they are in Sweden. In fact, since the 1990s, inequality has risen at a faster rate in Sweden than anywhere else in the world. The fact is Swedens economy has always been market-based, with private ownership of industry and banks by capitalists, who of course have always been intent on overturning all the reforms won in the past.

Others point to the example of the former Soviet Union, and the regimes modelled on it such as those born out of the Chinese and Cuban revolutions. Their economies were based on state ownership and planning. This marked a real progression from the anarchy of capitalism and its rapacious drive for profit, and resulted in significant increases in living standards, literacy levels and life expectancy through the provision of free health, education and housing.

However, these societies were ruled by authoritarian regimes dominated by self-serving bureaucracies and therefore were always anathema to genuine socialism, which necessitates both political and economic democracy (economic planning cant work without the active input of the producers and consumers). The isolation of these regimes in a hostile capitalist world, along with bureaucratic mismanagement, resulted in capitalism being restored in the former Soviet Union and China, and its relentless encroachment on Cuba today.

In short, there are currently no socialist countries, and in a way thats not surprising as a socialist country couldnt exist for very long as an island in a capitalist ocean. Sooner or later it would be engulfed. Capitalism is a global system and has to be overturned on a global level. Socialism too, therefore, has to be international.

But socialism is the product of a revolution that of course has to start somewhere. It is the culmination of the struggle of the working-class majority against its exploitation and oppression by a capitalist minority. Its seeds are sown in all mass movements of the working class, which in the right conditions with the addition of the requisite organisation and leadership can flower into a revolutionary transformation of society.

Capitalism means class war, and even though the capitalists have had the upper hand in the fight for a long time the potential for socialism exists everywhere the class war does. This was glimpsed in all the revolutionary movements of the past 150 years since the Paris Commune first put the rule of the working class into practice in that city for 72 days. Only the workers and peasants in Russia went further with the heroic but tragically betrayed and strangled revolution that began in 1917.

Countless other attempts since then didnt get as far, but they all in different ways give inspiration and confidence that socialism is possible, even if it doesnt exist yet.

See the article here:
Revolutionary Theory || Are There Any Socialist Countries? Have ... - International Socialist