At war with socialism

This is almost like a war. We’re fighting socialism on so many fronts. One wave of the dreaded enemy is approaching from the west as California seeks to tax soft drinks, tires, guns, car batteries, even lawyers. Anything the socialists don’t like they tax. Another big battle front is in the southwest. The one at the southern border. They’ve penetrated our defenses with thousands of illegal aliens with an invasion wave designed to destabilize the country. And then there’s the east in Washington, DC. The socialist enemy has infiltrated the Democrat Party to the extent that they’re on the verge of taking it over, and with that they take control of the House of Representatives.

Their inroads into the Democrat Party are almost complete. Although Joe Biden still leads in the polls, he’s been badly wounded by the socialists’ planned attack on his character as some sort of sexual predator. Bernie Sanders, an unapologetically avowed socialist, is leading the pack of socialists who are gaining on him. He’s followed by other socialists like Beto O’Rourke, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, and Cory Booker. There’s hardly a declared candidate for the Democratic nomination who isn’t a socialist.

This should come as no surprise. For the first time since Gallup has been asking the question, more Democrats approve of socialism than capitalism. It’s no longer on the fringes. At least not in the Democrat Party. In fact, with Democrats socialism is now mainstream. What exactly does this new breed of socialists want?

They want greater control of corporations by labor unions. In fact, they want workers to control some of the seats on corporate boards. That particular idea is big with Elizabeth Warren. That assumes several things. It assumes that just by working for a corporation that you’re somehow entitled to help run it. It also assumes that you know what you’re doing. Putting a worker on a corporate board just because they happen to work for a company will lead to that board member most likely voting for things that will help the workers even if it hurts the company. Which misses the point of the company altogether.

Socialists believe companies exist to provide them jobs. They don’t. Nobody ever started a company with dreams of employing people. At least nobody who’s ever run a successful company. Let’s go back to the infant stages of one of our largest corporations. Take Amazon, for example. Jeff Bezos started Amazon in 1994 to sell books online. He saw an opportunity. People were driving to bookstores to browse a limited inventory. Bezos allowed you to browse the bookstore in your bathrobe with a virtually unlimited inventory that would be delivered to your doorstep. I doubt Bezos started Amazon with a socialist dream of employing hundreds of thousands of people. It just so happens that Amazon needs about a half-million people to do what it does. However, if Amazon can find a way to do some of the things it does without people it will. Its distribution centers are already using robotic technology to stock and distribute product. That’s because the goal of a company is not to employ people. It’s to make money for its shareholders. Think of it this way. If you were to start a business today what would be your goal? Exactly.

Workers are the beneficial side effect of business. If they ever become the primary focus then the company stops being profitable and fails. And guess what. Everybody loses their job.

Socialism is a failure and will always be simply because it does not understand that basic principle of business.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show. He's also co-host of The PodGOATs podcast.

The race to Venezuela is on

There’s this guy named Andrew Yang. You’ve probably never heard of him. The San Francisco Chronicle is singing his praises. Why? Because he’s running for president and he’s promising a ‘freedom dividend’ to every adult American. What’s a freedom dividend? It’s $1,000 a month just for being alive. How does he expect to pay for this? Oh, he has no idea, but they’re lapping it up in San Fran.

Yang’s yet another socialist in the crowded field of Democrat presidential contenders who are trying to out-promise each other to the nomination. They think that if they can just get the party crown it’ll be a cakewalk over Donald Trump to the White House. Not so fast.

A recent Siena College poll showed more people in New York had a favorable impression of Trump than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Granted, neither of them broke 40 percent popularity, but AOC was less popular than Trump. The primary reason is the recent Amazon debacle. AOC spearheaded an effort to run Amazon out of New York and it worked. They had planned a massive job-creating headquarters in Queens and she and her socialist minions killed it. It’s encouraging to see that even in liberal New York jobs still trump free stuff. But for how long?

Beto O’Rourke is on the campaign trail promising everything to everybody. He brought in over $6 million in campaign contributions in his first 24 hours. He even out-socialisted socialist Bernie Sanders. What does he stand for? Who knows? If it’s socialist, he’s in. He was asked recently if he was for abortion in the third trimester of pregnancy. He said he was unequivocally for a woman’s right to make that decision, to roaring applause from the crowd. That’s great red-meat politics for the whacked-out Democrat base, but murdering a kid on his delivery date is a non-starter with the rest of sane America.

But these Democrat candidates don’t care, because right now there’s socialist blood in the water. It’s a veritable feeding frenzy of big government ideas, and each candidate is trying to prove to the Democrat base that they are willing to go as far as it takes to give them free everything.

Meanwhile back in Realville, President Trump announced that he wants to cap federal student loans. You want to know why the official school bird of your favorite state-supported university is the building crane? It’s because the federal government took over student loans during the Obama error and is shoveling tuition money into the public college oven like a runaway steam locomotive. Our nation’s student debt has more than tripled since 2003 to $1.5 trillion. All of the Democrats currently on the campaign trail want to continue shoveling more money into that furnace. I’ve long predicted that it’s the next financial cauldron to blow.

Never in our lifetimes have we seen such a race to socialism by one political party. As I’ve observed before, they see Donald Trump as so vulnerable that they believe the American people will even turn the ship of state toward Venezuela rather than stay on our current course. They may be in for a rude awakening. A new CNN poll shows 7 in 10 Americans give the economy high marks, and the majority—just barely at this point—give Trump the credit.

This may be a defining moment for the Democrats, but it should also be a defining moment for the Republicans. As the Dems bleach their hair blonde the Republicans need to go full brunette. Instead I fear they may opt for dirty blonde.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show. He's also the co-host of The PodGOATs podcast.