Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., have amassed a huge following among millennials by propagating the myth that the only way to solve society’s problems is to seize wealth and property away from law-abiding citizens so that the federal government has significantly more power over all of our lives.
However, history has proven repeatedly that the collective ownership and management of property eventually leads to death, destruction, coercion, and tyranny. More than 167 million people have been killed, exiled, or imprisoned by socialist and communist regimes in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. That’s comparable to more than 50,000 attacks as deadly as those that occurred on September 11, 2001.
Whenever socialism is tried, it fails miserably – whether it’s in China, Nazi Germany, North Korea, Russia, Venezuela, or Zimbabwe. Yet, despite the mountains of evidence against collectively owning and managing property, Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez continue to allege that anyone who argues against socialism is nothing more than an untrustworthy right-wing propagandist and that all people like Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez really want is to tweak the current system to make things better for the poor.
In a recent interview with NPR, Sanders said he needs to “do a better job maybe in explaining what we mean by socialism … Obviously, my right-wing colleagues here want to paint that as authoritarianism and communism and Venezuela, and that’s nonsense. What I mean by democratic socialism is that I want a vibrant democracy.”
Sanders later added, “Second of all, what it means, Rachel, is that in the wealthiest country in the history of the world we can provide a decent standard of living for all about [sic] people. … Health care for all can be done, and we can save money in doing it. We can have a minimum wage which is a living wage, and I’m delighted to see that, you know, right now, five states already passed $15 an hour minimum wage.”
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05.06.2025