A new poll out the other week found that for the first time, a majority of Democrats say they prefer socialism over capitalism.

FoxBusiness.com reports: "A new Fox News poll showed that more Democrats favour socialism over capitalism, in a sharp reversal from just a year and a half ago.

The poll…showed that 59% of registered Democratic voters who participated had a positive view of socialism, compared to just 49% who felt that way about capitalism."

It's possible in some cases that they are just simply mistaken about definitions-that they think capitalism means greed, whereas socialism means sharing.

No, capitalism means freedom to earn, whereas socialism means the government is free to steal from those who earn.

Everywhere around the world, we see the bitter fruit of Marxism.

Everywhere his ideas have been put into practice, death, misery, loss of basic freedoms, and poverty follow.

Can anybody name a square inch spot on the planet, anywhere, where Marxism has brought anything good? Certainly not in China, Russia, Cambodia, Vietnam, Cuba, Venezuela, etc.

And yet there are millions of Americans who have been brainwashed into thinking that Marxism is good, that it means compassionately sharing with others.

No, it effectively means the government stealing from its citizens…for the sake of the ruling class to be enriched.

Here's an example: Most Cubans live on $44 (U.S.) per month.

In contrast, when Fidel Castro died in 2016, his net worth was estimated at $900 million.

In America, wealth is created by providing value in voluntary exchanges, and there is no inherent limit on it. But in a Marxist setting like Castro's Cuba, the government controls the economy, and it's a zero-sum game. Castro's wealth was at the expense of the Cuban people.

Even Critical Race Theory, which is tearing many school boards apart, is merely repackaged Marxism, enforcing the never-ending Marxist principle of "oppressor" versus "oppressed."

And all of this gets back to a miserable anti-Christian man in 19th century Germany-Karl Marx.

I recently learned from Dr Paul Kengor something I didn't know about Marx, his favourite quote.

It speaks volumes.

Kengor is a bestselling author and a professor of history and political science at Grove City College. I've interviewed him many times.

In his latest book, The Devil and Karl Marx, Kengor points out that Marx loved the line that comes from the devil character, Mephistopheles, in Goethe's Faust: "Everything that exists deserves to perish."

Dr Kengor elaborates: "Friends said Marx would chant this.

He would recite this-'Everything that exists deserves to perish. Everything that exists deserves to perish.'

This is a philosophy that's about tearing down, burning the foundation, levelling the house, to where you have Marx standing there in the smouldering embers, saying, ‘Now we are ready to begin.'

So, anybody that thinks that this is a philosophy that is just about helping one another or sharing the wealth or redistributing wealth, they do not understand Marx and Marxism."

And what do we see in our streets today?

Destruction, riots, tear it all down.

Let's build a new and supposedly better world. Continue reading

• Jerry Newcombe, CP is Op-Ed Contributor at Christian Post

Most believed the Bolsheviks would themselves be overthrown quickly.

Scarcely anyone recognized that the event marked the beginning of one of the world's most diabolical regimes, one which lasted until the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991.

The implications of what came to be known as the October Revolution weren't really grasped at the time.

That's partly because, as the historian Richard Pipes wrote in his epic The Russian Revolution (1990), "the West considered Russia to lie on the periphery of the civilized world," one which was "in the midst of a World War of unprecedented destructiveness."

Yet it didn't take long for Russia's new Communist masters to show just how far they would go to maintain and extend their rule as they sought to realise the Marxist dream.

A cult of amorality

The toppling of Russia's Provisional Government by Lenin and the Bolsheviks turned out to be an exercise in pushing down a house of cards.

Contrary to later Communist myths, the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg was never stormed. After token resistance, it was overrun by mobs of looters.

Moscow was a different matter. Fierce house-to-house fighting lasted until November 2.

In his account of the Bolshevik coup, Pipes points out that most of the population paid little attention to what was happening.

This owed something to Lenin and his colleague, Leon Trotsky, successfully portraying the Bolshevik coup as a takeover by the Soviets of workers and soldiers: organisations which had functioned as a type of parallel government in the months leading up to the coup.

That was hardly the first lie propagated by the Bolsheviks. From the beginning, Communism has held, and Marxists have believed, that the ends always justify the means.

By this, they mean they don't recognize any moral constraints whatsoever when it comes to seizing and using power to realise their goals. Continue reading

Sources

• The Catholic World Report article by Dr. Samuel Gregg, Research Director at the Acton Institute.
• Image: ArtRussia

The pontiff also denied reports that he would name a woman cardinal. He also said there was good progress in cleaning up Vatican finances and confirmed that he would visit Israel and the Palestinian territories next year.

In a report by La Stampa, the pope was quoted as saying "Marxist ideology is wrong. But in my life I have known many Marxists who are good people, so I don't feel offended."

Last month, American radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh, who has a huge following in the United States, railed against the pope for written comments made on the world economy.

Limbaugh, who is not Catholic, said that parts of the document were "pure Marxism coming out of the mouth of the pope" and suggested that someone else had written the papal document for him. He also accused the pope of going "beyond Catholicism" and being "purely political".

Pope Francis said he was not speaking "as a technician but according to the social doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church, and this does not mean being Marxist." He said he was just trying to present a "snapshot of what is happening" in the world today.

Sources

Reuters
Huffington Post
Time Magazine
Image: Reuters

Between his hints at rehabilitating liberation theology—condemned by his predecessors—and talk about casting off "the economic and social structures that enslave us," Marxism isn't totally out of the question.

But happily for nervous church leaders, Francis's first Apostolic Exhortation, issued Tuesday, doesn't quite suggest someone who would get "Marx" in an Internet-style "Which Economic Theorist Are You?" quiz.

Granted, he wouldn't exactly get Friedrich von Hayek or Ayn Rand, either.

But you know whom he might plausibly be matched with, though? A favorite political economist of anti-free market academics: Karl Polanyi.

Karl Polanyi is most famous for his book The Great Transformation, and in particular for one idea in that book: the distinction between an "economy being embedded in social relations" and "social relations [being] embedded in the economic system." Continue reading.

Source: The Atlantic

Image: The Telegraph

That's what conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh suggests, calling the Pope's latest document "pure Marxism."

Limbaugh blasted the pontiff on Wednesday, a day after Francis released "Evangelii Gaudium" (The Joy of the Gospel), a 50,000-word statement that calls for church reform and castigates elements of modern capitalism.

Limbaugh's segment, now online and entitled "It's Sad How Wrong Pope Francis Is (Unless It's a Deliberate Mistranslation By Leftists)," takes direct aim at the pope's economic views, calling them "dramatically, embarrassingly, puzzlingly wrong."

The Vatican issued the English translation of "Evangelii," which is officially known as an apostolic exhortation.

Francis - the first pope ever to hail from Latin America, where he worked on behalf of the poor in his native Argentina - warned in "Evangelii" that the "idolatry of money" would lead to a "new tyranny."

The Pope also blasted "trickle-down economics," saying the theory "expresses a crude and naive trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power." Continue reading

Bruno Rodriguez, the foreign minister of Cuba's communist government, was asked about the pope's remarks March 23 during the opening of the Havana press center for the papal visit.

"We are looking forward to an exchange of ideas" during the pope's visit March 26-28, he said.