Last Tuesday, The American Spectator’s Ben Stein pulled no punches while discussing socialism on Fox Business. Speaking on the results of socialism, particularly related to Venezuela, Stein eviscerated the Left’s notion that socialism will produce good results.
His full remarks were:
It depends on education, we have a society in which there are an awful lot of people who have no idea that Stalin, Hitler, Mao Zedong all came to power promising the same kind of things that Miss Ocasio-Cortez is promising and it led to mass murder, it led to dictatorship, it led to genocide. These promises are old promises and they invariably lead to bad things. The promise of just saying to people, do what you can within the law to make your life better and your family’s life better, that system works extremely well. Capitalism is a system that allows people to make something of themselves instead of oppressing other people. It’s an incredibly good system. Making money is one of the most harmless things there is to do in the whole world, and that is what our society is about. It’s not about ordering people around, putting them in concentration camps, What do you do if a person is a richer or poorer person? What do you do? Do you take him away? Do you shoot him? Well, that’s what the communists tried, it didn’t work out very well for them. At the end of the day, we wound up with Russia as one of the most unequal societies there has ever been in the world. In Vietnam, they were promised all these things, and we wound up with one of the most corrupt countries in the world. In Venezuela, I don’t know how corrupt it is but people say it’s one of the most corrupt countries in the world, we don’t wind up with the promises people make.
You can watch the remarks here.
Ben Stein: “We have a society in which there are an awful lot of people who have no idea that Stalin, Hitler, Mao Tse-Tung all came to power promising the same kinds of things that Ocasio-Cortez is promising. And it led to mass murder, it led to dictatorship, it led to genocide.” pic.twitter.com/2TEQWx02oM
— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) January 28, 2019
Per usual, angry socialist sympathizers and leftists decried the remarks, though not with any real criticism.
Some called for Stein’s money to be taken away.
We failed to take away Ben Stein’s money when we had the chance.
— Annika Barranti Klein (@noirbettie) January 23, 2019
Weekly Standard 2.0 writer Molly Jong-Fast had this particularly vile thing to say.
I thought Ben Stein was dead. ♀️ https://t.co/VxRA90NgFj
— Molly Jong-Fast (@MollyJongFast) January 23, 2019
These remarks prove Stein has a point, the proponents of socialism don’t care about helping people, they just envy people who are better off. Socialism still presents a real danger to America, and TAS realizes this. Paul Kengor laid the socialist plan to dominate the DNC in a recent piece, and Lee Edwards educated readers on the failure of socialism. Ben Stein brought these same ideas to the small screen, keep up the Good Fight Ben!
