D'Souza, Dinesh - Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party by D'Souza Dinesh

Author:D'Souza, Dinesh [D'Souza, Dinesh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781621575320
Publisher: Regnery Publishing
Published: 2016-07-17T23:00:00+00:00

COLONIZING THE PRIVATE SECTOR

This continues a trend under Obama in which major industries have, one by one, been colonized by the federal government. The process began in 2009 with banks and investment houses being taken over in the aftermath of the 2008 market crash. Next, the government established control over the automobile sector through bailouts, paying the unions, and stiffing the bondholders.

Next came health care. Through Obamacare, the federal government became the boss of every insurance company, every hospital—that amounts to one-sixth of the U.S. economy. Next stop is the energy sector. Through EPA regulations, the government can control what type of energy Americans are allowed to use and how much can be used per day. Higher education would be the next prize in this ongoing usurpation of the private sector, further tightening federal control which is already exercised through regulations and grants.

Three features of his progressive expansion of power stand out. The first is entitlements: progressives advance by declaring that people are entitled to something without having to work for it or earn it. Second, there is typically an element of fear. Progressive control over banking and investment firms came about in the aftermath of the 2008 panic. Obamacare played on fears that people who got sick would not have access to hospitals and doctors. Third, the progressive move is not to actually take over and manage the private sector but to direct and regulate it from the outside; in other words, state-run capitalism.

Where do these ideas come from? We are accustomed to linking progressivism with socialism but none of the three features of modern progressivism come from socialism per se. Socialism doesn’t involve “entitlements.” Marx never appealed to fear. He did predict that class conflicts would generate a socialist revolution in which the workers overthrow the capitalists, but that prophecy has long been discredited.

Finally, state-run capitalism is not socialism. Socialism is not about the state relying on private industry to create resources and then staking its claim to steer and direct those resources. Rather, socialism is about nationalization, which means the government actually takes over an industry like oil drilling or health care and manages it. We have seen nationalization in Russia, China, India, Venezuela, Cuba, and other socialist regimes.

Obama and Hillary are not socialists in that sense. In fact, they are too lazy to be socialists. They have no interest in actually running companies or factories. They don’t intend to build automobiles or computers or figure out how to extract oil from the ground. Neither do the vast majority of American progressives. They don’t know how to do any of this, nor do they want to. Rather, they want the private sector to produce resources, and then they want to direct the use of those resources. This isn’t socialism; it’s something else.

Perhaps Hillary and Obama’s approach can be understood in terms of another version of socialism—socialism in the classic sense. Socialism in the classic sense means that workers control the means of production. An automobile company, for instance, would be owned and controlled by its workers.

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