Bernie Sanders, a man with a proudly 100% pro-abort voting record, has obviously been keeping track of the Catholic bloggers bending themselves into pretzels to justify voting for him:
In regard to economics, it is hard to argue that Pope Francis does not know as little about the subject as the Senator for Vermont. Whether he is as big a left wing loon as Sanders, PopeWatch will leave for others to judge. However, it is clear that Democrats will be running in the fall assuming that they have a friend and ally in the Vatican, and they are likely right.
I have worked in nuclear power for almost 4 decades now and continue to do so in order that those who read this may continue to have the 24 / 7 supply of electricity to which they have become accustomed. The ONLY candidate for President who is anti nuclear power is Bernie the commie pinko geriatric Sanders.
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http://dailycaller.com/2016/02/20/heres-where-the-2016-candidates-stand-on-nuclear-power/
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Not even Livia Drusilla Augusta Caesar is anti nuclear power. Only that godless freaking Marxist leftist senile hippie drop out from the Soviet Socialist Republik of Vermont is anti nuclear power. He is personally responsible for the shutdown of Vermont Yankee, a perfectly well-functioning nuclear power plant that supplied 620 MWe of clean, pollution free energy around the clock. And if Bernie the nit wit Sanders wins, then within a few months of his occupancy of the White House:
My company will go out of business and I will be permanently jobless
Future refuelings of existing nuclear power plants will stop
Within two years they will all be shutdown as fuel runs out
Nuclear powered aircraft carriers and submarines will be decommissioned
Our strategic nuclear deterrent will be no more
And you can forget about electricity 24 / 7 as coal is also shutdown, and wind and solar cannot make up for the difference.
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Mark my words. That commie pinko geriatric will do what he says. He is honest that way.
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But young dumb idiot wide eyed spoiled brat millennials who have not worked a day in their lives support him with the same fervor and mania that seizes a heroin addict when it is time for his next fix. And they are the future of Amerika. God have mercy on us all.
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I will be frank. I despise this Papacy in the same way that I despise the Demokratik Party – I loathe, abhor, detest, and hold in utter disdain and contempt the both of them.
Nobody knows what socialism means anymore.
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Personally, I notice that the conflict can repeatedly be boiled down to trade offs, whether a side acknowledges them or not. Sanders, the Pope, Shea, and many others seem to believe that Good Things can never conflict. That if two orphans are sick, it’s impossible for there to be only one pill to cure them.
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Unfortunately these folks will probably end up doing a lot of damage to societies before they finally figure out that sometimes, choices have to be made and trade-offs are very real.
“When (the pope) talks about wealth being used to serve people, not as an end in itself, I agree with that,” Sanders says.
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Good for you. You use your wealth to serve people your way, and I’ll use my wealth to serve people my way. Just as soon as you and your ilk stop confiscating my wealth to serve people your way, that is.
How do we judge whether something is a socialist or a capitalist policy?
It seems to me that much of what we see in the Welfare State is the externalizing of risk mitigation to government. Purchasing insurance is risk mitigation but a private contract and, so, not part of the Welfare State. The ACA is kind of an hybrid of private contract and government program and many Universal Coverage programs are more government and less contract than even Obamacare.
So, at what point is it Socialism?
Really, what representative isn’t a shade of socialist, at some level? Certainly GOP leadership is content to convert private contract to government program, across a wide range of policy matters.
It matters because Sanders and the Pope agree that government has a duty to take assets from some to provide for others, to mitigate risk through government programs. If that makes them “socialist,” then most Americans support socialism, at some level.
I suggest, therefore, that socialism must either mean something different than “risk mitigation through government” or must be a measure of amount, rather than kind, of government policy.
Sure, we can see socialism when the government declares it so. By that measure, Bernie is a socialist and Pope Frank isn’t. By that definition, none of the Democrat party’s policies are socialist, so that can’t be it.
Is it the underlying assumptions, Bernie assuming the perfectability of Man? Utopianism is certainly a feature of Progressivism and Socialism’s rabid brother Communism fails precisely on its mistaken belief that men, cut off from the rewards of labor, will perform well. Of course, no Christian can believe this and Pope Francis shows no inclination to wax poetic about the inherent perfectability of Man.
So, what is socialism?
“So, what is socialism?”
“Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.”
Winston Churchill
Thank you for that clip,Donald.
Also Nate, that great article points out the need for ongoing education, somehow in our society even despite the bias that seems to be in our schools and media. I don’t know how to bring up people’s level of awareness.
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Maybe conservatives could send out capitalism evangelizers – “missionaries of mercy” – doing a subtle level re-education.
Ughhhhhhh!!!!
Don, you have added yet another book to the “need to find time to read them!”
(Thank you, I think.)