Over to the Left of responsible people like you and me, there’s a huge interest in socialism these days. Bernie Bros can’t get enough of the senator’s “democratic socialism” and the Democratic Socialists of America seem to be one of the fastest growing political organizations in the country. Millennials seem to be flocking to the banner – not all that much of a surprise, to be honest, as it really does sound good to those who are, by definition, too young to recall the disaster that actually existing socialism revealed in 1989.
At which point, if socialism is what you want, well, why not? I say this as a senior fellow at one of the most insistently free-market think tanks on the planet – we at the Adam Smith Institute tend to think of the guys at the Cato Institute as something akin to pantywaist liberals. The only people even more extreme than we are those who’ve entirely fallen over the edge: John Birch, Ayn Rand’s Objectivists, and so on. And still, I say if you want socialism, then why the heck not?
