Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, polling second among Democratic presidential candidates, will reportedly butt in on Walmart’s annual shareholder meeting, where he will demand the company change its policies to please him. Voters take note: This is how socialists operate. They believe all businesses belong to them.

Sanders, who has long self-identified as a socialist, will “push for the retail giant’s workers to get a seat on the board of directors” at next month’s meeting, says MarketWatch. Fortune magazine is a little more descriptive in its coverage. It says he “plans to crash” the meeting.

“Sanders, a longtime critic of labor practices at the nation’s biggest private employer, will introduce a shareholder proposal at the June 5 meeting in Rogers, Ark.,” Fortune reports. “The proposal, which has no chance of passing, calls for Walmart to give its hourly workers a board seat.”

How a private company structures its board is none of Sanders’ business. Yet he believes that he has the right to dictate how Walmart conducts its affairs. The fact the proposal “has no chance of passing” is irrelevant. The point is Sanders is trespassing.

But that’s what socialists do. They have authoritarian urges they either cannot or will not contain. They crave control, want to organize society by force, and put in long hours diminishing the individual while expanding government’s reach. Socialism is incompatible with human nature (except for those humans whose nature it is to rule over others), and marginalizes and oppresses many while empowering a few thugs at the top. Raw political power is its goal.

Remember these things the next time Sanders is provided a friendly media platform, the next time Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is celebrated in the most shallow way possible by some “news” organization, the next time one of the 23 other Democratic presidential candidates besides Sanders takes another leap leftward to please the party’s socialist mob.

In an effort to obfuscate, the socialists will say they’re not communists, or Marxists, or Leninists, or Maoists. What they won’t speak of is the journey, a short one from the soft socialism they claim to support to the hard, boot-on-the neck regimes that have caused so much misery.

Why? Because, as Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek wrote in “The Road to Serfdom,” the worst always get to the top in socialist systems. He argued, and history has confirmed, that “the unscrupulous and uninhibited are likely to be more successful” in systems where government is at the center of society.

“They are precisely the kind of people who elevate power over persuasion, force over cooperation,” says Lawrence W. Reed, president emeritus of the Foundation for Economic Education. “Government, possessing by definition a legal and political monopoly of the use of force, attracts them just as surely as dung draws flies.”

Or, put another way, good men and women don’t get to the top in these systems because good men and women don’t want to rule over others.

Intruding on a Walmart meeting uninvited would be just the beginning for Sanders if he were elected president in 2020. His time in the White House would be marked by many more unfriendly visits to private businesses. Sanders has been watching how socialists regimes across the world behave, and he’s learned from his comrades.

Issues & Insights is a new site formed by the seasoned journalists behind the legendary IBD Editorials page. We’re just getting started, and we’ll be adding new features as time permits. We’re doing this on a voluntary basis because we believe the nation needs the kind of cogent, rational, data-driven, fact-based commentary that we can provide.

Be sure to tell all your friends! And if you’d like to make a contribution to support our effort, feel free to click the Tip Jar over on the right.

We Could Use Your Help Issues & Insights was founded by seasoned journalists from the IBD Editorials page. Our mission is to use our decades of experience to provide timely, fact-based reporting and deeply informed analysis on the news of the day. We’re doing this on a voluntary basis because we think our approach to commentary is sorely lacking both in today’s mainstream media and on the internet. You can help us keep our mission going. If you like what you see, feel free to visit our Donations Page by clicking here. And be sure to tell your friends! You can also subscribe to I&I: It's free!

Share this...





Reddit

Linkedin

email