For
those who are not familiar with the name, John Bachtell is the reigning
chairman of the Communist Party USA. On June 6, 2017, he published an article
on the party website. It demands a response.
The
article entitled “Capitalism
is destructive and unsustainable – It needs to be replaced” is a rather extensive and predictable screed
describing just what he thinks is wrong with America and why Communism is the
answer to everything that ails this republic.
Unfortunately,
Bachtell gets many of his facts mixed up with talking points that sound, not
surprisingly, akin to those spouted by the Democrat Party of late. He claims
that America is experiencing multiple crises of “contemporary capitalism” and
goes on to name several including “social inequality, job loss and dislocation
from automation, and the existential threat posed by the ecological crisis
[apparently the latest euphemism for man-caused climate change].”
In
every category he describes, Bachtell
blames all of it on the greed of capitalists and failures on the part of government
to reign them in. The ability to obtain cheap energy is ironically called the
causal factor in the poor getting poorer and the rich getting richer at their
expense
Despite
the shift from coal to natural gas being highly beneficial to the amount of
emissions generated, Bachtell can’t help but twist it around and call it the
opposite – an opportunity being used by the “oligarchy” to suck more profits
from the system at the expense of “the 99%”.
While
many of the statistics quoted (with sources) in his article are generally
accurate, his interpretation would likely be enough to make the sources cringe
at how badly those numbers were crushed – not crunched. In fact, capitalism has
been so over-regulated by the federal government that it can no longer be
called free or market-based which is the only way it can work as intended.
Once
his laundry list of capitalism’s failures is laid out for all to contemplate,
he begins to describe what a good communist (or Democrat) would do about it. It
can be succinctly summed up by the familiar words of former President Obama –
wealth redistribution.
Granted,
wages have stagnated following eight years of leftist excess that has screwed
up the banking system, frightened investors, and caused many of the world’s banks
to hoard capital while the fed dilutes our money by printing more and more of
it. Whether it was Dodd-Frank, the Community Reinvestment Act, Federal Reserve
policy, or the introduction of hundreds of business-stifling regulations under
Obama, Bachtell continues to bark up the wrong tree.
Automation
– another boogie-man blamed on capitalism – certainly has reduced the demand
for manual labor for repetitive jobs in factories and service businesses, but
it has, in many cases, been the only answer – again – to government’s continual
upward pressure on wages at times when our economy cannot possibly sustain
itself against the rising costs of doing business.
Communism
and leftists more generally, are quick to bash profit as a “dirty word”. To the
contrary, profit is not much different than what every person who has a bank
account expects…a reasonable return on the money deposited/ invested in the
bank/business.
When
anyone starts a business, all their money is usually at risk if the business
fails. As the business becomes established by providing a useful product or
service the price charged for that service or each product includes a
relatively small amount that represents the owner’s return on that initial
investment. In the case of those big, nasty corporations, that profit is
typically reinvested to expand (more jobs) or returned to individual
stockholders in the form of dividends.
At
last count, about 50% of Americans own stock in one form another. Bachtell is
simply doing what leftists do – using common terms in a dishonest way that
makes his straw-man argument sound conclusive and convincing to the uninformed.
The
argument proffered by Mr. Bachtell that the workforce has been decimated by
temporary contract workers and forced part-time work fails to hold water as a
fault of capitalism. Until the advent of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) the
problem of forced part-time work was not a common practice outside of Wal-mart.
The ACA created the incentive for employers to limit employee hours to avoid
having to comply with its insane provisions.
Temporary
workers have become popular for similar reasons and simply because much of the
administration of personnel is taken off the back of the business and handled
by people who specialize in that field while ensuring that workers are
compensated and have their benefits administered efficiently. Forced
unionization didn’t help in this area either.
Virtually
every solution presented in his article has been made by a Democrat
office-holder at some point in the past 100 years. Whether it is more
infrastructure spending, green industries, taking money from the military and
spending it on civilian needs, a guaranteed “living wage” (whatever that
means), or every other Democrat wish-list item, it becomes apparent that two
facts cannot be denied:
·
The goals and methods of the Democrat Party are
indistinguishable from those being promoted by the Communist Party USA, and while there are problems with our economy at present, rather
than capitalism being to blame, the source of most of the problems cited by
Bachtell are actually, in large part, due to the same misguided leftist
policies that he so passionately endorses as solutions.
The
capitalist system is the only one in the history of the world that has
consistently lifted people out of poverty and expanded the size of the pie. It
is only through the interference of overreaching central government policies
like those espoused by Bachtell that the gifts of capitalism fail to reach
their intended beneficiaries.
With
the likes of Bernie Sanders and John Bachtell still wandering the streets of
America, we should all be prepared to answer their truly devious arguments with
facts based on sound economic and political principles. Think about it.
http://politichicks.com/2017/06/communist-party-usa-now-fully-aligned-democrats/
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