Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is the proud new owner of a summer home in the Champlain Islands. The Burlington resident last week plopped down nearly $600,000 on a lakefront camp in North Hero, VT.
Sanders’ new house has four bedrooms and 500 feet of Lake Champlain beachfront on the east side of the island — facing Vermont, not New York. The Bern will keep his home in Burlington and use the new camp seasonally.
Interesting. Sanders advocates socialism. He describes himself not as a Democrat, but as a socialist.
Most Sanders supporters don’t know what socialism is. Socialism means public or government ownership of the means of production. In practice, this means nothing happens without the government’s permission, and all or most profits/proceeds go to the government.
The Sanders family also owns a row house on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., and a house in Burlington’s New North End. That’s three houses. Nobody should begrudge Sanders his private ownership, except for the fact that he has made his money by railing against … private ownership. And as a long-time U.S. Senator, he’s on the government dole.
It seems that for socialists like Sanders, private ownership is sometimes OK, and sometimes not. In principle, they’re for public/government ownership of the means of production in all or most cases. In actual practice, they’re not always for it, and certainly not for it when it comes to themselves.
Hillary Clinton is another excellent example. Unlike Sanders, she does not go so far as to call herself a socialist. But she favors moving the United States even more in the socialist direction. Like Sanders, she wants free college tuition for all, higher taxes on everyone, and a single-payer health insurance plan rather than the totally disrupted “market” for health insurance Obamacare created.
“We’ve traveled up to the islands many times over the years — almost always on day trips,” Sanders’ wife, Jane O’Meara Sanders, told the website Seven Days in a written statement. “We’ve been impressed with the North Hero community, eaten at the North Hero House and Shore Acres and have suggested them to friends who were looking for a beautiful place to stay or have dinner. St. Anne’s Shrine in Isle La Motte is my favorite church and it is nearby.”
Churches are private property. Restaurants are private property. People operate these entities for a profit. With a restaurant, the profit is financial. With a church, the profit is more personal or spiritual, although sometimes financial as well. Regardless, private property is the basis for the quaint little town where Sanders and his wife, America’s most highly visible socialists, plan to retire.
What does it say about socialism that you must betray its principles and priorities in order to enjoy your life in a civilized way?
Capitalism is the exact opposite of socialism. Remember that we don’t have capitalism in America today. We have a hybrid mixture, with government heavily involved in most private enterprise, particularly the most successful enterprises. This creates the pull peddling both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump decry. Neither side blames it on socialism, but without socialist principles, hands off capitalism would keep government out of everything private, other than the initiation of force or fraud. Businesses would focus solely on pleasing customers, with little or no concern for the whims of politicians who regulate/tax and/or subsidize their every move. Everybody seems to hate the results of socialism, but nobody wants to actually break with socialism in favor of private enterprise.
A relaxed-looking Bernie Sanders posed for a photo at Hero’s Welcome General Store in North Hero, VT. The store, a bit south of his new abode, serves a sandwich called “Feel the Bun” in the senator’s honor. The $6.99 deli delight consists of a “HUGE” homemade roll, sliced turkey, fresh apple chutney, hot pepper relish, lettuce, tomato and provolone cheese.
“It’s not fair that the Billionaire Class controls 99 percent of the bread,” the menu description reads. “Here’s a sandwich for the rest of us … to keep us nourished until everything cool is free!”
Just a little humor? Perhaps. But socialism is based on the very thing the joke implies. Socialism invites us to wait for utopia, for heavenly paradise on earth, until every sandwich—and every other valuable commodity in life—is “free.”
But “free” means working for free. The owners of this sandwich shop probably don’t wish to do that. Nor should they. So if we don’t want to engage in a slave society, the kind that collapsed in places like Soviet Russia, Cuba and elsewhere, where profit was outlawed, then what else are we to do?
Simply wait. No worries. Hillary Clinton will take care of it all. Somehow.
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