A lot of truth comes out of that group, and so does a lot of pro-gold, pro-bigotry, pro-founding-fathers claptrap. If there is a violent civil insurrection, these guys (and their patriot radio assets) will be the guys to say start shooting.

RFK Jr. expressed the same sentiment in a different way -

“America is now a land of socialism for the rich and brutal capitalism for the poor.”

Public works go privatized when they turn a profit and the kinks are ironed out. If they falter, the taxpayer bails them out. If they falter badly, the “public” picks up the tab again, until the bugs can be worked out again and it can be privatized. It’s like we get all the worst parts of all systems (or the best of all systems, from the perspective of the elite).

A number of early communist thinkers (including Marx, I believe) did say that capitalism and communism would eventually merge into one system. I think that’s maybe the best explanation for what we see today. This is a classic case of Hegelian Thesis - Antithesis - Synthesis. You use different wealth centralization strategies on different cultures, then you gradually move them together so they can be reconciled, centralized, standardized.

From my perspective, if the State owns everything through communism or an oligarchy of businessmen own everything through monopoly capitalism, I’m in the same sad helpless position.

I tend to use the terms “communism” and “socialism” a little too interchangeably for some people’s tastes. I see it as a gradient. Socialism left to run its course couldn’t become anything but communism, as the prime directive of all bureaucracies is to expand and get bigger, get more powerful.

I’ve also been re-reading selections from Zbigniew Brzezinski’s “Between Two Ages” (I’ve been a little obsessed with this man lately) and was fascinated by the way he described the different social strata of the Soviet Union and how each group (elites, technocrats, scientific community, working class, etc) were each given a different definition of communism and a different meaning as to how it really works.

Some of these words have become so muddied and emotionally charged it’s hard to use them in conversation anymore, but I have to try. It’s easy to see my parent’s generation was brainwashed to hate communism (they were the badguys at the time) — I think it’s less obvious but no less correct to say that, by the time I was in school, children were being brainwashed to love communism. And pre-WWII, who knows. Before Stalin was the Big Bad Bear, he was Uncle Joe.