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We need only to revisit the 2016 presidential election to confirm many millennials preferred Sen. Bernie Sanders, an avowed socialist, to free market capitalists. Did they get the full picture of what a socialist society looks like? What they heard loud and clear were the words free," fair" and equal." Is there something in the way America has nurtured our children that lends toward an attitude of entitlement?

Americas foundation of a free society is built on the engagement of all society in the economy, initiative, entrepreneurship and personal responsibility. In socialist societies, the elite make the rules for the masses, thus stripping away individual freedoms. Senator Sanders promoted free health care, free education, and relief from college loan payback, which encourages an attitude of irresponsibility and loss of initiative.

What Sanders did not talk about is what socialism looks like in actuality. Cuba, for example, is no longer a classic socialist society because it wasnt working; recently it turned toward a mixed economy with some elements of capitalism. Socialism fails because it cannot financially support all the social programs for the masses. Prior to recent reforms, Cubans were denied private property rights. With socialism comes scarcity of commodities and greater poverty. Poor human rights records permeate many socialist countries.

Sir Winston Churchill, former prime minister of Great Britain, fought socialism within his country for 50 years. He understood it took away individual freedoms and would not lead to prosperity for the populous. Churchill revered Americas constitutional governance. Thus far, socialism has yet to yield prosperity for the masses.

I think some of what has attracted young millennials to socialism is the idea of equal distribution of wealth; the wealth gap in the world offends their sense of fairness. Perhaps the shrinking job market and burgeoning student loans have created a level of hopelessness that has led millennials to Bernie Sanders and socialism. Experience teaches that blessings given without working for them are valued less than those using the sweat of our brow. In a socialist society there is no benefit to the individual to invest greater effort, greater excellence, or innovation, so incentive is lost. This is not a path to personal prosperity. Is this a world you want to live in?

Ben Sasse, senator from Nebraska, has written a book that may give clues as to why millennials are susceptible to socialism. He questions the current culture of parenting in his book, "The Vanishing American Adult: Our Coming-of-age Crisis and How to Rebuild a Culture of Self-Reliance." The book discusses the dangers of delaying adulthood into the late 20s.

Sasse writes: Lowering expectations, cushioning all blows and tolerating aimlessness not only hurts them, it also deprives their neighbors, who desperately need their engagement."

In my experience, delaying adulthood encourages dependency, idleness, prevents growth of resiliency, initiative, self-confidence and the mental toughness necessary to successfully navigate adulthood. Millennials have grown up surrounded by bubble wrap, participation trophies" and safe places free from an opinion they disagree with.

Today's accepted norm is remedial classes for college freshmen to prepare students for college-level study. Sasse found that about one-third of college freshmen do not return as sophomores. When do they learn to navigate challenging situations which are always a part of life?

Overprotective parenting, or helicopter parenting," has led to 30 percent of teenagers reporting feeling sad or depressed (American Psychological Associations 2014 Stress in America survey). Christian Smith, sociologist from Notre Dame, reported the prevailing feelings of young adults are personal struggle, confusion, anxiety, hurt, frustration, and grief ("Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood," 2011). This kind of parenting coddles kids and gives them the impression they are the center of the universe, to their detriment.

Coddled youth are primed for an ideology that removes any responsibility for their circumstances. Experience taught me that free things are devalued, so why promote that expectation? Some millennials want fairness in all aspects of life. All people are flawed and treat people unfairly at times. If we practiced the godly principle of treating others better than ourselves, the results in society may yield more fairness.

Sasse promotes the idea of building five character traits: 1) Give youth more exposure to intergenerational experiences and break away from the tyranny of their peers. 2) Develop a work ethic. 3) Embrace limited consumption, dont overindulge in meaningless luxury. 4) Travel to learn about other cultures - discover what subsistence means. 5) Learn to read great literature.

Perhaps it is time to rethink our parenting styles.

Linda Holub, of Dakota Dunes, S.D., has lived in the Sioux City metro area for more than 40 years. She and her husband, Dave, have four adult children. A certified life coach professional with a master of arts degree from Liberty University in Human Services, Counseling: Life Coaching, Holub is co-chair of the Siouxland Coalition Against Human Trafficking.

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THE REGULARS: Why are many millennials attracted to socialism? - Sioux City Journal

NEW GEOGRAPHY--California is widely celebrated as the fount of technical, cultural and political innovation. Now we seem primed to outdo even ourselves, creating a new kind of socialism that, in the end, more resembles feudalism than social democracy.

The new consensus is being pushed by, among others, hedge-fund-billionaire-turned-green-patriarch Tom Steyer (photo above). The financier now insists that, to reverse our worsening inequality, we must double down on environmental and land-use regulation, and make up for it by boosting subsidies for the struggling poor and middle class. This new progressive synthesis promises not upward mobility and independence, but rather the prospect of turning most Californians into either tax slaves or dependent serfs.

Californias progressive regime of severe land-use controls has helped to make the state among the most unaffordable in the nation, driving homeownership rates to the lowest levels since the 1940s. It has also spurred a steady hegira of middle-aged, middle-class families the kind of tax-burdened people Gov. Jerry Brown now denounces as freeloaders from the state. They may have access to smartphones and virtual reality, but the increasingly propertyless masses seem destined to live in the kind of cramped conditions that their parents and grandparents had escaped decades earlier.

A green peoples republic?

There is some irony in a new kind of socialism blessed by some of the worlds richest people. The new policy framework is driven, in large part, by a desire to assume world leadership on climate-related issues. The biggest losers will be manufacturing, energy and homebuilding workers, who will see their jobs headed to other states and countries.

Under the new socialism, expect more controls over the agribusiness sector, notably the cattle industry, Californias original boom industry, which will be punished for its cows flatulence. Limits on building in the periphery of cities also threaten future growth in construction employment, once the new regulations are fully in place.

Sadly, these steps dont actually do anything for the climate, given the states already low carbon footprint and the fact that the people and firms driven out of the state tend to simply expand their carbon footprints elsewhere in their new homes. But effectiveness is not the motivation here. Instead, combating climate change has become an opportunity for Brown, Steyer and the Sacramento bureaucracy to perform a passion play, where they preen as saviors of the planet, with the unlikable President Donald Trump playing his role as the devil incarnate. In following with this line of reasoning, Bay Area officials and environmental activists are even proposing a campaign to promote meatless meals. Its Gaia meets Lent.

A different kind of socialism

The oligarchs of the Bay Area have a problem: They must square their progressive worldview with their enormous wealth. They certainly are not socialists in the traditional sense. They see their riches not as a result of class advantages, but rather as reflective of their meritocratic superiority. As former TechCrunch reporter Gregory Ferenstein has observed, they embrace massive inequality as both a given and a logical outcome of the new economy.

The nerd estate is definitely not stupid, and like rulers everywhere, they worry about a revolt of the masses, and even the unionization of their companies. Their gambit is to expand the welfare state to keep the hoi polloi in line. Many, including Mark Zuckerberg, now favor an income stipend that could prevent mass homelessness and malnutrition.

How socialism morphs into feudalism

Unlike its failed predecessor, this new, greener socialism seeks not to weaken, but rather to preserve, the emerging class structure. Brown and his acolytes have slowed upward mobility by environment restrictions that have cramped home production of all kinds, particularly the building of moderate-cost single-family homes on the periphery. All of this, at a time when millennials nationwide, contrary to the assertion of Browns smart growth allies, are beginning to buy cars, homes and move to the suburbs.

In contrast, many in Sacramento appear to have disdain for expanding the California dream of property ownership. The states planners are creating policies that will ultimately lead to the effective socialization of the regulated housing market, as more people are unable to afford housing without subsidies. Increasingly, these efforts are being imposed with little or no public input by increasingly opaque regional agencies.

To these burdens, there are now growing calls for a single-payer health care system which, in principle, is not a terrible idea, but it will include the undocumented, essentially inviting the poor to bring their sick relatives here. The state Senate passed the bill without identifying a funding source to pay the estimated $400 billion annual cost, leading even former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to describe it as snake oil. It may be more like hemlock for Californias middle-income earners, who, even with the cost of private health care removed, would have to fork over an estimated $50 billion to $100 billion a year in new taxes to pay for it.

In the end, we are witnessing the continuation of an evolving class war, pitting the oligarchs and their political allies against the states diminished middle and working classes. It might work politically, as the California electorate itself becomes more dependent on government largesse, but its hard to see how the state makes ends meet in the longer run without confiscating the billions now held by the ruling tech oligarchs.

(Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center forOpportunity Urbanism. His newest book,The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, was published in April by Agate. He is also author ofThe New Class Conflict,The City: A Global History, andThe Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.Prepped for City Watch by Linda Abrams.

Originally posted here:
California's Descent to Socialism or How the 'Nerd Estate' Controls the Rest of Us - City Watch

This article originally appeared on AlterNet.

The signal couldnt have been clearer if the entire British electorate had beamed it into the clouds Thursday night, standing with 13 million flashlights on hills and towers to project a blinding new sun over the Eastern Seaboard. No, Corbyn didnt win the election outright, but nobody else did either. This was supposed to be a rout, the final destruction of left-wing electoralism, a tiny and barely formed thing crushed under Theresa Mays heels; instead, Labour has denied the Conservatives their majority, and destabilised the government to the extent that it might have to call another election within a few months, one which theyre well on course to win.

Corbyn has shown that while centrism and fascism gurgle mindlessly over a landscape flattened by low voter turnout and mass political apathy, its socialist politics that can drive the optimism and engagement needed to stop them. And if a left-wing platform can flourish here in Britain, a country toxified by decades of assault on the commons and centuries of racism, it can win anywhere even in a country that elected Donald Trump.

Similarities between Corbyn and Sanders can be overplayed yes, theyre both kindly white-haired socialists despised by their party apparatuses but immensely popular among younger voters, but Corbyns socialism is situated in a far deeper internationalist tradition, while also being considerably more inflected with recent theoretical developments than Bernies Cold War New Dealism. And while its still unfortunately important to keep relitigating the 2016 election, Corbyns triumph offers a blueprint for the future. Its left the dominant myths of 21st-century politics crushed along with the Tory majority, namely thatelections are won from the center.

For 20 years, Labour governments under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown pitched themselves to everyone and no one, jettisoning socialist dictums like public ownership and a general suspicion towards finance capital. The result was 20 years ofsteadily fallingvote shares. In 2015, Ed Miliband abandoned his leftist leanings for more of the same, and he barely improved on the previous election.

This year, as the entire country appeared to have lurched sickeningly to the right, while newspaper columnists lauded a rabidly nationalistic Conservative party for occupying thenewmiddleground of British politics, as every numbers-obsessed party wonk urged Labour to drift rightwards with what appeared to be the national tide, Corbyn stood on an unashamedlyradicalmanifesto. The newspapers, almost without exception, derided it as a fairy tale, bordering on Bolshevism. And it delivered a 9.6 percent shift towards Labour, a swing that outstripped Blairs victory in 1997, the biggest increase in the partys vote share since 1945.

Its not just that centrism is unpopular; theres simply no such thing. The center is a fiction, believed in only by politicians and the people who would like to become them; political science majors and the people who teach them; journalists and the people who imitate them. Nobody else has ever identified themselves with something as vapid and empty an ideology of no ideology, the plan to keep everything the same, the residue of class power disguised as a doctrine. Its the imaginary space between parties, a desert, a wasteland. For most people, the world doesnt revolve around a happy stable core: its a nightmare, in which the rich want to fill their veins with the blood of the poor, in which the old promises of health and security are vanishing, in which everything has gone and continues to go monstrously wrong.

The Tories did not have a workable plan to actually improve things for the people of Britain. Instead, they demonised Corbyn personally. As the campaign whirred to a finish, a vast media campaign excoriated him for supposed links to the IRA, mostly based on meetings he held with the Irish Republican Sinn Fein party, and supposed sympathies for Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran. After the brutal attacks in Manchester and London, the Daily Mail cynically tried to spin the horror into a campaign issue, devoting a fullthirteen-pageattack on aLabour party it claimed was led by a terrorist ideologue under foreign influence. It didnt work. None of it really stuck. Nobody really cared.

This experience should haunt Democrats as they pursue a byzantine investigation into Trumps alleged Russian ties. In a world that still hasnt recovered from the 2008 crash, most voters simply do not care about geopolitical conspiracy theories; they want politics that will make a difference to their own lives. And the Democrats cant offer that either: whatever its merits, the Russian probe offers a distraction from the fact that the mainstream offers noideological alternative to Trumpism. After all, if Trump is impeached, the country is left with Mike Pence, and then after him a catalogue of further monstrosities, degenerating and without end. Even if the collusion narrative is true and its become so vast and convoluted it seems unlikely to prove Trumps undoingthis is not the terrain on which modern conservatism should be fought. Political change doesnt come out of Senate hearings; it comes from the people, and people are far more receptive to good progressive policies than they are to shrieking about treason.

The questions that the reactionary right offers itself as the answer to, it turns out, are actually far better solved by socialists. Trumps Republicans as well as the Tories and UKIP launch themselves happily into questions of identity and community. People, and older people especially, feel like they have lost their country and want to get it back; theyre concerned by the disintegration of close-knit social ties, the anonymity and alienation that comes in the wake of a world surrendered entirely to market forces and lacerated by international free trade.

These are genuine and important concerns. The rights solution, whether tacit or overt, is anti-immigrant hysteria and ethnic homogeneity: we can restore a mouldered social fabric just by making sure that nobody has to see any Muslims on the street. And there are people who will embrace this answer, if its the only one offered. But the better answer that we can take a country back by wresting it away from private interests and into communal ownership; that we can restore communal ties by restoring the sphere of the commons will always be more popular.

America is no exception. The Democratic Party still sees two distinct working classes: a core, traditional working class that is white and intrinsically, helplessly racist, and a more peripheral working class, ethnically differentiated, its own kind of special interest. The only difference is that while British centrists desperately try to appease this imaginary proletariat with witless flag-waving and a constant tilt towards social exclusionismis this racist enough for you? how about this? American centrists tend to write it off altogether in favour of a minority coalition who, presumably, dont need a roof over their heads or anything to feed their kids.

Corbyns success shows that none of this is necessary. Instead of a politics based on the triangulation of various evils unfettered capitalism, institutional racism, endless war abroad, endless immiseration at home something good is possible, and not just possible, but viable.

But it wouldnt be right to talk about what the American left can learn from Corbynism without also thinking about what we in the UK can learn from the American left. The Outline hascataloguedthe immense enthusiasm among Americans for Corbyn; Ive seen it first hand. Throughout election night I received a constant stream of congratulations from friends across the Atlantic; comrades Id visited in New Orleans let me know that theyd crammed themselves into a bar to watch the BBC live stream. Others sent pictures of themselves in Corbyn T-shirts and badges.

Throughout the difficult two years of Corbyns leadership, plagued by petty in-fighting and the occasional terrifying doubts, every American leftist I knew was absolutely confident that he could pull it off. They could see something a lot of voters and commentators here, even those of us on the left, couldnt. While British people contended with the heavy historical baggage of Labourism and the questions of the partys future, Americans saw only a politician who had the chance to do something good. And they were right.

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The truth about Jeremy Corbyn staring us smack in the face: Socialism isn't bad - Salon

How many additional millions of people have to die before intentional fools like Bernie Sanders will acknowledge that socialism quickly destroys any society that it takes over?

The death toll is easily at least 75 million when you add up all the innocent people who were starved to death, worked to death or shot in the back of the head like weve witnessed in the last 100 years in the Soviet Union, Cambodia, China, North Korea, Cuba and now Venezuela.

In 1999, when the socialists took control of Venezuela it was the wealthiest country in Latin America.

Venezuela still has the greatest petroleum reserves of any country in the world but children now needlessly die there because hospitals dont have very basic medicines. The average Venezuelan has lost 20 pounds because there is no food, beverages, dairy products or cooking oil. All the farms and food-processing facilities were nationalized by the government. Basic hygiene products arent to be found.

An uncharismatic socialist Venezuelan dictator ignores the will of 85 percent of the people there. The capital has been locked in daily violent demonstrations for several months. Scores of demonstrators have been murdered by roving gangs of para-military goon squads, funded by the socialist dictator.

Socialism is always quickly destructive.

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Harry Griswold: Keep deadly socialism in check - La Crosse Tribune

Posted by Paul Anthony Melanson, June 13, 2017

Robert P. Barnidge noted that, Pope Francis has made his social and economic tendencies clear since the early days of his pontificate. In his 2013 apostolic exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium, Pope Francis criticizes the notion that reducing the disproportionately-high income tax burden on high-income earners can stimulate investment and economic growth as a crude and nave trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system. For the Holy Father, inequality is the root of social ills, though he fails to explain precisely why a society of unequal wealth but a relatively high standard of living would somehow be less reflective of Gospel values than a society that shares equally in poverty.

Going further still, Evangelii Gaudium calls for structural transformation that would restore to the poor what belongs to them. If, as Pope Francis suggests, property is possessed not by its owners, then, truly, property is theft, to quote 19th-century French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhons famous phrase.

Contrast this embrace of Socialism with the thought of Pope Saint John Paul II:

the fundamental error of socialism is anthropological in nature. Socialism considers the individual person simply as an element, a molecule within the social organism, so that the good of the individual is completely subordinated to the functioning of the socio-economic mechanism. Socialism likewise maintains that the good of the individual is completely subordinated to the functioning of the socio-economic mechanism. Socialism likewise maintains that the good of the individual can be realized without reference to his free choice, to the unique and exclusive responsibility which he exercises in the face of good or evil. Man is thus reduced to a series of social relationships, and the concept of the person as the autonomous subject of moral decisions disappears, the very subject whose decisions build the social order.

The Popes have consistently condemned Socialism because it is intrinsically evil. See here.https://www.tfp.org/what-the-popes-have-to-say-about-socialism/

But Francis promotes it.

If youre not concerned about Francis as a Catholic, you should be.

http://lasalettejourney.blogspot.com/2017/06/francis-property-is-theft-and-socialism.html

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Francis: Property is theft and Socialism is the answer - Catholic Citizens of Illinois (press release)