Socialism, the Nightmare That Never Dies | The American Spectator

"Socialism is coming,” J.A. Wayland, publisher of Appeal to Reason, predicted at the dawn of the last
century. “It’s coming like a prairie fire and nothing can stop it.”

More than 100 years later, American socialists speak with similar ebullience. A 74-year-old candidate who once produced a hagiographic documentary about Wayland’s friend, employee, and hero Eugene Debs runs for president as the vehicle of their faith in future.

“And yes, my policies will demand that the top one percent and the largest corporations in this country start paying their fair share of taxes,” Bernie Sanders told MSNBC last year.

The top one percent currently pay 44 percent of federal income taxes and the bottom 45 percent don’t pay, according to the Tax Policy Center. If one percent shouldering 44 percent of the income tax burden represents paying less than a “fair share,” what number, precisely, does Sanders regard as just?

The Vermont senator told Charlie Rose last year of “working right now on a comprehensive tax package, which I suspect will, for the top marginal rates, go over 50 percent.” The Tax Policy Center’s Howard Gleckman pegs the top federal rate at 58 percent under Sanders while Dylan Matthews last month assessed his plan at Vox as imposing a top rate of 77 percent.

Under Sanders’ vision, high earners turn over most of their income to the government he presides over. In return, America’s socialist CEO doles out free tuition at state universities, institutes single-payer health care, and more than doubles the federal minimum wage to $15 — all of which does little to benefit those subsidizing all of that. At least the transactions that brought Donald Trump great power came voluntarily.

America meets a Bernie Sanders every few decades. He may go by Norman Thomas in this generation or Michael Harrington in that one. The common denominator of the various reincarnations involves their rejection by the American people.

In 1906, German academic Werner Sombart famously asked, “Why is there no socialism in the United States?” A better question subsequently came from Princeton University’s Wilbert Moore: “Why are there any socialists in the United States?”

The United States within nearly a century of its founding became the wealthiest nation in the history of mankind. It accomplished this without an income tax, free university tuition, universal health care, or even Social Security. In Bernie Sanders’ lifetime, he witnessed the fall of National Socialists, Soviet Socialists, and more benign iterations of the collectivist ideology. But he imagines the command economy, rather than the free market, as our savior.

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Socialism, the Nightmare That Never Dies | The American Spectator