There are 4 main types of people who believe in the false promises of socialism:

With the rise of socialist candidates in the New Hampshire voting, it’s probably useful to look at what types of people feel comfortable with socialism.

1) Politicians, like Bernie, and bureaucrats who think they can spend other peoples money better than the people who earned the money can.

Bernie is the latest in a long line of liberals who believe that the people lack the ability to decide for themselves how they are to live. People like Bernie believe that the enlightened few, such as him, have a responsibility to save the people from themselves.

Needless to say, there should be nothing more frightening to any American who believes that success comes from hard work and effort than a politician who believes that he’s wiser than the people he is supposed to serve and who believes that it’s luck, not dedication, that decides who succeeds in America.

Socialists reject the idea that the government serves the people and embrace the idea that the government rules the people. After all, if the people are too stupid to wisely spend their own money they clearly need help in surviving life.

The attitude is very similar to the one slave owners used in an attempt to justify slavery. According to the slavers, Blacks just couldn’t take care of themselves and they needed the “helping hand” of white folk to survive. Today no one will say that Blacks can’t manage on their own, though many liberal policies clearly indicate that liberals don’t think Black people can make it on their own, but for some reason saying all the regular folk in America need the help of the liberal elites to live happy lives is considered an acceptable position for a politician to support.

This group is obviously small, consisting of the politicians who advocate socialism and the government employees who reap the benefits of ruling over the rest of the country, such as earning 78% more than the rest of us on average.

But they are also the most dangerous, because without them trying to sell socialism American’s freedom wouldn’t be at risk.

2) People who think that politicians and bureaucrats can spend the people’s money better than the people can.

There are probably not too many people who have money and who honestly think that the government will better know how to spend their money. If there were you’d see a lot more rich folks voluntarily donating money to the government.

When you hear a rich person supporting socialist policies, you can be fairly sure that those policies will benefit them via crony capitalism or because they can use loopholes to avoid paying the taxes that will be needed to support those policies.

3) People who think that politicians and bureaucrats will take money from other people and give it to them.

It’s fairly easy to understand how people who don’t work or who don’t pay taxes would be enthused about a socialist who promises them even more “free” stuff than they’re already getting since in their minds there is no downside for them.



Of course, there is a downside, higher unemployment in the short run and eventually the whole Greece thing, but the MSM ensures that the folks in this group never hear about the real cost of “free” stuff.



Alexis de Tocqueville wrote:

The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.

Clearly, this group of socialist supporters are all in for being bribed.

Sadly, the highly progressive tax system in the U.S. has led to more than 45% of American households not paying Federal income tax.

While many people who don’t pay taxes will do the honorable thing and not vote themselves more money there is still a huge pool of people who have every reason to fall for the siren lies of socialism.

4) People who believe in magic or that companies print money

Margret Thatcher said:

The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s mone.

But some people think that businesses magically run printing presses in their basements so that when a business is taxed there is no impact on the cost of the business’s products or the wages the business can pay to its workers.

These are the folks who complain about the oil companies that make roughly $0.25 in profit from a gallon of gas, at $4/G, when the government, at least in California, gets close to $1.00/G.

Essentially these people believe that there is no end to “other people’s money”. They haven’t learned the lesson of Greece mainly because the MSM and our educational system fail to point out the connection.

Due to a poor educational system that tends to condemn capitalism, many young people, Bernie’s base, have no idea that things like “free” college will result in massive tax increases that they will either pay directly, if they can find a job, or indirectly, through higher prices for the things they buy.

They also have been trained to not make the connection between the disastrous failure of the VA, a nice example of government-run health care, and ObamaCare or the even worse “single payer” health plan that Bernie supports.

A common definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting the results to change. Yet isn’t that precisely what someone like Bernie who condemns cost overruns and failures in the VA or the Pentagon is doing when he say’s that letting the government run the whole American medical system will be a great idea?

These people fail to understand that the Pentagon is no more inept than the rest of the government. Huge cost overruns and slow development processes are the result of an unresponsive government bureaucracy where failure is more often rewarded not punished.

These people condemn “big” business for being uncaring, but somehow fail to note that the biggest “business” of all, and hence the most uncaring, is the government.



To regain America we need to educate the people in groups 3 and 4 so that they realize that instead of bringing utopia, socialism will instead bring a uniform level of misery for all but the politicians, the very rich, and government employees.

You can read more of tom’s rants at his blog, Conversations about the obvious and feel free to follow him on Twitter