Alan J. Kellner: The green and gold rely on some red -- just don't call it communism
Dear Editor. In Alan Kellner’s long panegyric to collectivism, he expresses surprise that his working-class father loathes communism despite not having read Marx. Maybe dad has read history and is aware that communist regimes murdered well over 100 million of their own people in the 20th century. Maybe he knows that there has been no communist regime without one-party rule, or one that allowed freedom of speech, freedom of religion and freedom of the press.
Maybe dad understands that free markets have raising hundreds of millions of people from poverty. Maybe he know that when India and even autocratic China instituted some free-market reforms, the numbers of the middle class increased by several orders of magnitude. Maybe he didn’t want to live in a society run like the USSR, China, Cuba, East Germany or, now Venezuela.
Maybe dad knew that even Denmark says it is not a socialist country. Or maybe he knew that Socialism and Communism inevitably lead to a planed economy, and always, always, to coercion, oppression and privation.
The brilliant economist Dr. Thomas Sowell, who grew up in a poor black family in the south, started his career as a Marxist. But he looked beyond the pretty theories to the results for real people and became a free-market advocate. Kellner should do the same. But with thousands of professors like him teaching the chimera of collectivism, I’m afraid future generations will have to go through the fire themselves. It is an open question if, once lost, they can ever get back to the prosperity and freedom of our current system.
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