As the Democratic Party has slid willingly down the gullet of socialism, many of us meanly point out that socialism doesn’t work; ask the nearest Russian, North Korean, Chinese, Romanian, German, or Venezuelan, and they’ll tell you plainly enough.

My own experience of living under the deadening pall of socialism was in Britain, which in 1976 after three decades of decline (sugarcoated farcically as genteel) needed to be bailed out by the International Monetary Fund. A great nation — for a long time, the greatest — was on its knees, squalid and broke. During the 1978-79 “Winter of Discontent” trash was left uncollected and festered on sidewalks in rat-infested mountains up to 20 feet high. Even gravediggers were on strike.