Perspectives of a Russian Immigrant (IBD Series 2)

A Russian Immigrant Sees U.S. Making Same Mistakes As USSR | Stock News & Stock Market Analysis - IBD: " ibdeditorials.com."

I ran into this on one of my old blog posts -- I'll likely put up a few of them at least, it looks like they may all be a good read by a woman that emigrated from the USSR in 1980.

“Authors writing about socialism need to know what socialism is. The author of this article would rather just go into a tirade about the problems in our country … and automatically jump to the conclusion the problem is socialism. Huh? What? Where is the socialism you’re talking about?”

An old Soviet joke goes as follows: “A Soviet and an America journalist argued about whose society is freer. The American declared, ‘I can stand in front of the White House and yell that our president is a fool!’ ‘Big deal,’ responded the Russian, ‘I can stand in front of Kremlin in Moscow and yell that your president is a fool too!'”

This joke is at least 40 years old. But today in the U.S., very much as it was in the USSR, a rodeo clown’s livelihood is in peril because he dared to make a joke about the president. One can measure level of socialism by the number of lives wasted, humiliated or destroyed by a centralized government that is pursuing its agenda and control.

I covered the Rodeo Clown incident a bit here.  She has an excellent list of some of the techniqes used by socialist / centralized / command and control nations. I'll bring a few here, but the whole set is worty:

• Polarizing society by dividing people into groups by ethnicity. 

• Controlling speech, enforcing political correctness and attempting to suppress opposition media.

• Intimidating opposition through Justice Department investigations of journalists, IRS intimidation of groups and individuals who oppose government policies, and information collected on citizens that becomes quite handy. 

• Controlling people by making them dependent on government for basics such as medical care, property rights and income. 

• Applying separate standards in medical and other services for government employees and acolytes vs. the rest of society.

The control spreads ... Curt Schilling losing his job is a current example.  I liked the following quote:

A prominent Soviet physicist, Lev Landau, defined the USSR’s system as “a dictatorship of bureaucrats.” It amounted to socialism, he said, “because the means of production do not belong to the people, but to bureaucrats.”

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