Patterico's Pontifications

3/11/2019

Patterico at PJ Media: No, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Socialism, not Capitalism, Is the “Irredeemable” System

Filed under: General,Patterico at PJ Media — Patterico @ 12:01 am



I have a new piece at PJ Media. It’s a long one, coming in at over 3000 words. It’s a cri de coeur against socialism — a reaction to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s ridiculous comment that capitalism is “irredeemable.” The title is Meet Two Men Whose Lives Were Ruined by Socialism. Here’s how it starts:

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whom my guest blogger JVW memorably calls “everyone’s favorite daffy socialist niece,” has announced another dopey opinion: that capitalism is “irredeemable.”.

There are, of course, countless ways to refute this incredibly uninformed and ungrateful opinion. One could point out statistics showing that capitalism has brought more people out of poverty than any other system in history. Capitalism has saved billions of lives, even as socialism (the government ownership and operation of the means of production) has killed tens of millions.

But, as a famous socialist murderer (sorry for the repetition and redundancy) once reportedly said: “If only one man dies of hunger, that is a tragedy. If millions die, that’s only statistics.” So today, I will skip the statistics, and tell the stories of two men whose lives were ruined by socialism in North Korea: Shin Dong-hyuk and Masaji Ishikawa.

These two people share a rare distinction: they escaped the hell that is socialist North Korea and lived to tell about it. I recently finished books about their lives, and I thought I’d share some of the details I learned with you, the reader — because although we all know that North Korea is a bad place, these books provide a compelling picture of the reality that its citizens suffer through, both inside and outside the labor camps. And the books together paint a somewhat less than flattering picture of socialism, to put it mildly.

It is one of the grimmest posts I have ever written, but I hope you read it, and pass it along to others.

[Cross-posted at The Jury Talks Back.]


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