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Never, ever would we ever say, or even wish to imply, that a death was bracing, refreshing, or needed. And so we wish that Michael Novak one of those names you seldom hear but whose bearer achieved true greatness; in this instance, in the twinned fields of philosophy and theology was still with us, spreading his unique perspective on the American Dream, as he both lived and defined it.

Mr. Novak, who died Friday at the age of 83, hailed from one of those classic and now largely forgotten Rust Belt cities Johnstown, Pa., whose steel (and the local Pennsylvania coal that fired it) built modern-day America and helped win its wars.

Mr. Novak left Johnstown a Roman Catholic as most boys did from those Cambria County hills populated by immigrant Eastern Europeans but, over time, surrendered his faith to socialism. To be sure, he came full circle, as exemplified by a decade that saw him begin as a speechwriter for George McGovern and end as the author of The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, not to mention Ronald Reagans ambassador to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights.

What returned Mr. Novak to his roots? Viscerally, perhaps the Catholicism hard-wired into his heart and soul, but, on an intellectual level, most likely the utter common sense that marks capitalism. As he implied in an article published in The Wall Street Journal two days after Christmas in 1994, neither capitalism nor democracy are perfect, but together democratic capitalism; hence the title of his seminal 1984 work they are the most moral conjoining of theory and method for the betterment of man on both an individual and communitarian basis.

Better than the Third World economies, and better than the socialist economies, Mr. Novak wrote that December, capitalism makes it possible for the vast majority of the poor to break out of the prison of poverty; to find opportunity; to discover full scope for their own personal economic initiative; and to rise into the middle class and higher.

Unlike the great economists of that time Milton Friedman, pre-eminent, but also, for instance, Thomas Sowell Mr. Novak did not so much look at capitalism from the perspective of, say, entrepreneurial supply and demand, but rather from how the demands of the soul could be supplied by capitalisms provisions. Take this abbreviated disquisition, found in the Journal piece, of capitalisms effect on envy, which Mr. Novak called the most destructive social passion ... a deadly invisible gas:

When all the people in the [commercial] republic, especially the able-bodied poor, see that their material conditions are actually improving from year to year, they are led to compare where they are today with where they would like to be tomorrow. They stop comparing themselves with their neighbors because their personal goals are not the same as those of their neighbors. They seek their own goals, at their own pace, to their own satisfaction.

So Mr. Novaks continued relevance, to our way of thinking, is obvious. But never so much more than today, when people are almost fixated on the present, and often the pettiness folks choose to extract from it. If nothing else, Michael Novak instructed us to take the long view, to appreciate the present for the promise it portends for tomorrow.

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Our Views: Michael Novak A journey away from socialism - The Winchester Star

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The Citizen-Times 6:24 a.m. ET Feb. 21, 2017

I guess people easily forget the past.

The ACA was a conservative idea. Two conservative senators introduced a proposal formed by the Heritage Foundation as a means of requiring personal responsibility. So I guess if ultraconservative senators and the ultraconservative Heritage Foundation are in favor of socialism then the writer has it correct. If the writer has no clue what socialism is, look at the military the ultimate form of socialism or Border Patrol, or farm subsidies and oil subsidies.

But I am guessing those forms of socialism are acceptable. But helping those who cannot get insurance are not. I should not be surprised that people will accept government where they want it and hate it where they do not. That is people. And the Electoral College has twice put into power someone who lost the popular vote.

George Sharp, Black Mountain

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Letter: America is full of great 'socialist' ideas - Asheville Citizen-Times

The Opposition Peoples National Party (PNP) often refers to its members as Comrades. Yet it may be more of an anachronism, considering the current political flavour that prevails within the PNP and the country.

Comrade, according to one description in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, is a fellow Socialist or communist. But the PNP, which declared that it was democratic socialist under then Prime Minister Michael Manley in 1974, has seemingly dropped its left of centre posture to a more right-wing approach, promoting a more capitalist path since the 1990s.

Is there still a place for democratic socialism? The Jamaica Observer put the question to president-designate of the PNP, Dr Peter Phillips, during a recent interview.

We dont reject our history, nor the principles that formed us, and democratic socialism was an essential foundation of the partys history an essential element, Dr Phillips said.

Slogans mean different things to different people and they have to be made to fit the times. We are not committed to any notion of the State dominating the economic life of the country. We recognise and we have moved this country forward most on the basis of creating a viable market-driven economy, and we will remain committed to that. But we are also a party that has always believed that the State needs to act in support of the aspirations of the majority of the people; that the State needs to be the vehicle of affirmative action, if you will, on behalf of the marginalised.

Democratic socialism, as articulated by Manley, was a non-revolutionary political system that sought to maintain the democracy of the State on the one hand, and meet the needs of the majority and not just to create bigger profits for a few by broad-based ownership of the means of production on the other.

But Manley, political analysts often argued, did not get far with his philosophy, as many of the structures upon which the political system could have been built were not in place, nor were the resources readily available to reform the economy along socialist lines.

We have to take on a role that makes certain that the landless can get land, because from 1838, freedom never meant access for us, the majority of the people. So all those thousands of people who live on so-called squatted land for generation after generation, it is the obligation of the country to allow them to own their piece of the Rock, Dr Phillips stated, emphasising the need for agrarian reform.

But what is the next PNP leaders position that less than 10 per cent of the population owns more than 90 per cent of Jamaican businesses, real estate, and other entities?

We are not against anybody who owns things. We want to open the ambit for ownership; thats why we are for broadening the scope of ownership through the stock market, thats why we are the party that introduced the land reform effort during the time of (former Prime Minister) Comrade (PJ) Patterson with LAMP (Land Administration and Management Programme). We want to accelerate it. We want to find ways of getting the people who have lived on squatted lands for generations to get the land. Thats why we introduced Operation PRIDE in those times. We want to deepen those efforts to create a stakeholder society where you dont have a country divided between haves and haves not, but that everybody will have enough, the incoming PNP president said.

Ownership through cooperatives, too, is not something that Dr Phillips has ruled out, should his party regain State power.

Cooperatives are necessary where appropriate and where people are organised. We promoted Employee Share Ownership, not to ram it down anybodys throat, but as a viable means for sharing the benefits of ownership and creating a society with greater solidarity among the elements, the political economist said.

Original post:
Whither democratic socialism and the PNP? - Jamaica Observer

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders holds a campaign rally in San Diego, California. (Photo: Mike Blake/Reuters)

All forms of statism are despicable because theyre morally and practically evil. Theyre morally evil since theyre based on coercion. And theyre practically evil since they deliver such awful results for ordinary people.

The good news is that some forms of statism are widely discredited. Outside of universities, you dont find many people who defend and advocate communism. And other than a few lonely cranks, you dont find many people who defend and advocate national socialism and other forms of fascism.

But for some inexplicable reason, you still find some folks who harbor positive feelings about socialism.

To be sure, that opens up a bunch of questions, such as whether they even understand that socialism at least in theory involves government ownership and operation of the means of production. Such as the United Kingdom in the post-WWII era.

For what its worth, the fans of Bernie Sanders probably dont understand anything about economics (goes without saying, right?) and they probably think that socialism is simply a system with lots of redistribution. Such as modern Denmark (even though that nation is just as market-oriented as the United States).

Im not sure how we educate these people, and I doubt these three photos will have much impact on them, but I chuckled when this showed up in my inbox.

I guess the top photo might be Detroit. The second photo could be Cuba. And the last photo might be where Al Gore lives.

If thats the case, the first is actually an image showing the destructive impact of the welfare state and the third is actually an image the benefits of insider cronyism, but lets not get hung up on details. The real point is that corrupt insiders are the only real beneficiaries of big government.

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Everything You Need to Know About Socialism in Three Images - People's Pundit Daily

The year isnt off to a good start for the Park Slope Food Coop. In January, two members of the venerable Brooklyn institution were accused of stealing more than $18,000 worth of goods. Each had been caught shoplifting once, and when police consulted surveillance tapes, it turned out that the two men (one of whom was 79 years old!) had some seriously sticky fingers.

But maybe the two bandits just assumed that the other 17,000 members really took the coops mission statement to heart. It is, after all, supposed to be an alternative to commercial profit-oriented business. Whats a few thousand dollars when youre working together [to] build ... trust through cooperation?

At the coop, though, trust is on back order. In 2013, The New York Times reported the shop lost $438,000 in stolen items.

But thats only a drop in the bucket compared to the value thats recently been lost from the coops pension fund. The fund which is for staff, not members had been invested in small, speculative companies and racked up two years of losses.

According to the Times, It appears to have gone into hedge-fund mode years ago, when one co-op member, also a hedge-fund investor, made stock-picking his unpaid job. Last summer, members were told that the coop had to pour in more than $1 million to keep it flush.

Perhaps its not surprising that an institution claiming to be above making money has been losing a lot of it. But theres more going on here. For decades, the coop has been offered a useful lesson to anyone paying attention: Socialism doesnt work.

In 2011, for instance, coop members were caught paying other people notably their nannies to take over their 2-hour-per-week shifts at the market. As it turned out, the well-heeled bankers and lawyers and psychiatrists in the neighborhood who bill several hundred dollars an hour for their time didnt think rearranging the broccoli was worth it.

Which is not exactly shocking. It happens to most socialist utopias, eventually. In a 2002 article in Commentary called Socialisms Last Stand, Joshua Muravchik describes how even the socialism of the Israeli kibbutzim has had to succumb to this logic. These days, Thai immigrants work in ... fields, and Arabs clean the hotel guestrooms and serve the meals.

Its not that rich or middle-class people will always pay someone else to do their manual labor. Some people like cooking dinner for their families or planting their own gardens. But very few people even when offered good produce in return would choose to spend their spare hours working in a supermarket. Not even the virtue-signaling that comes with belonging to the coop could make up for time spent keeping the parsley properly watered.

But this is part of the problem with socialism. Most people arent looking to live out Karl Marxs vision where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity, but everyone can hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner.

People who aspire to be lawyers want to be lawyers and want to be paid accordingly. They dont want to fish for their dinners after work.

Its not only the basic misunderstanding of human nature that makes socialism a problem. Its also all the self-dealing and the corruption.

One of the trustees of the pension fund was a friend and investment adviser of President Barack Obama. A coop member asked in the organizations newsletter: I am curious why and how we have a relationship with him. It certainly isnt because theres a dearth of financial acumen in New York City. No kidding.

Historian Ron Radosh says the coop stories remind him of the old Soviet Union. The Nomenklatura a class of apparatchiks lived very well. They had private stores. They could get Western goods at cheap prices while everyone else was on line for 20 years. They spouted the party line, of course, but they were not exactly living the life of the proletariat.

Radosh, author of Commies: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left, and the Leftover Left, explains that there were two big buildings in the center of Moscow reserved for members of the Politbureau or when the government wanted to entertain foreign visitors. They were always playing with other peoples money.

Its hard to imagine how much longer this is sustainable. Maybe the coop made sense in 1973, when Brooklyn was filled with working-class idealists looking to escape the boredom of the suburbs. But in a neighborhood where the median apartment sale price is $1 million, socialisms a tough sell.

Naomi Schaefer Riley is a senior fellow at the Independent Womens Forum.

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The sad socialist saga of the Park Slope Coop - New York Post