http://www.onenewsnow.com/Perspectives/Default.aspx?id=1038130"Mom, what happened to Sesame Street?" I was an inquisitive six-year old and my little mind could not comprehend why Big Bird, Ernie, the Cookie Monster, and their beloved stuffed friends had vanished from the only TV station in Jamaica. It was the late 1970s and my dear mother attempted to explain that the government had banned the children's program and other "foreign" programs.
Michael Manley, the nation's prime minister and leader of the People's National Party, had begun implementing socialist policies, actively increasing the government's ownership of private enterprise and regulating the private sector, while strengthening ties with communist Cuba, 90 miles to Jamaica's north. The Caribbean island's experiment with socialism was cut short, however, when massive food shortages -- compounded by restrictions on imported goods, a stagnant economy, and widespread discontent -- led Jamaicans in 1980 to vote out the socialist-leaning government and elect a prime minister, Edward Seaga, who favored private enterprise, deregulation of the economy, and decentralization of government. Some 800 people were killed during that election.
"People here are very individualistic," said former Prime Minister Seaga, on why socialism, which asks that one sacrifice oneself "for the purpose of building the state," did not work in the island nation. Seaga told Jamaica's Daily Gleaner newspaper recently that Manley used government hand-outs to entice voters.
"People bought that as what socialism was supposed to be," Seaga said. "Then the harsh part came, the system broke down and shortages were there and all the other factors that made life distressing." That's when people began to understand, he said. Socialist policies helped give Jamaica seven straight years of negative economic growth.
All this leads me to this point. As a Jamaican native and now a citizen of America — whose free-market economy and unparalleled prosperity has been envied world over — it is unnerving that America has begun a waltz with an ideology that has a track record of failure. In recent months, the federal government has scooped up sizeable chunks of America's economy. It has captured control of the healthcare industry (one sixth of America's GDP), has a 60-percent stake in automaker General Motors, and has stakes in the largest insurance company and in mortgage companies. Just what's next on the government's radar? Marching down to Wall Street and announcing reforms?
If socialism failed on an island slightly smaller than the state of Connecticut, it will fail on an even larger scale if the government continues to roll out socialist policies for America. The new book, Ten Truths About Socialism, points out that socialist ideas disappoint wherever they are implemented (think Greece):
After nearly 100 years, socialism has an unblemished record of failure. Whenever central planning and state control have taken the place of private ownership and market forcers, the result has been the same. A descent into poverty.
Socialism's spectacular crash in the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union had many thinking that this tragic and bloody experiment was finally over. But it's as if we've won the Cold War only to fall prey to the very ideology the war was fought against.
Socialism promises a utopia it can never deliver. It impoverishes nations and people (think Cuba where wage earners make on average $17 a month). And at its worst, socialist tyrannies have slaughtered 100 million people in the 20th century alone.
On the other hand, free-market capitalism delivers when hard work and grit is applied. Why, then, exchange it for something less?
Topic: Sesame Street, socialism, and America (Read 381 times)