SOCIALISM, THE NIGHTMARE THAT NEVER DIES
…The United States within nearly a century of its founding became the wealthiest nation in the history of mankind. It accomplished this without an income tax, free university tuition, universal health care, or even Social Security. In Bernie Sanders’ lifetime, he witnessed the fall of National Socialists, Soviet Socialists, and more benign iterations of the collectivist ideology. But he imagines the command economy, rather than the free market, as our savior….

…“The struggle under the competitive system is not worth the effort,” a dejected J.A. Wayland — who first serialized The Jungle, once provided winter lodging for Mother Jones, and transformed Girard, Kansas, into America’s unlikely Socialist Mecca — wrote five days after his friend Eugene Debs’ six percent finish in 1912. “Let it pass.” The publisher of one of America’s most-widely read weeklies then wrapped a bedsheet around his rifle, and let loose a muffled shot that ended his life…