How far we’ve come since Ronald Reagan stood in front of the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin and famously demanded: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” Today, President Barack Obama is singing serenades to communism.
While in Argentina last week, America’s apologizer in chief lamented:  “So often in the past there has been a division between left and right, between capitalists and communists or socialists, and especially in the Americas, that’s been a big debate. Oh, you know, you’re a capitalist Yankee dog, and oh, you know, you’re some crazy communist that’s going to take away everybody’s property.
“Those are interesting intellectual arguments, but I think for your generation, you should be practical and just choose from what works. You don’t have to worry about whether it really fits into socialist theory or capitalist theory. You should just decide what works.”
What works? Have we arrived at a new ideological low that our president feels compelled to defend the evils of communism, a system that left people living under it — from the Soviet Union to China and East Germany to Cuba — in abject poverty, declining health and without the most basic of human rights?
What about the 200 million or more people who were killed after Big Brother decided what worked for them? Did rulers like Mao and Stalin just get a little carried away?
The enduring lesson of the 20th century, as Milton Friedman often reminded us, is that communism, socialism, Marxism, or whatever “ism” you want to call it, is an abject failure that degrades human dignity and progress. At least, Obama has finally fessed up to what Bernie Sanders would never admit, that communism and socialism are flip sides of the same coin.
Obama wants to portray the struggle between capitalism and communism/socialism as an “interesting experiment” yet unsettled. But the superiority of one system over another is no deep mystery. Statism in whatever disguise leads to deprivation, not prosperity.
Look no further than Korea, Germany and China after World War II. Each was separated into two countries with pretty much the same geography, culture, ethnic makeup and educational level. After 40 years of being split, communist China, North Korea and East Europe had become desperately poor, while free market-oriented Hong Kong, South Korea and West Germany became among the richest nations on the planet.
China, North Korea and East Germany actually suffered declining life expectancy, at a time when life expectancy surged almost everywhere else. One leading cause of early death in these repressive nations was suicide; another was alcoholism.
East Germany gunned down citizens who tried to escape past the Berlin Wall and Mao starved to death millions of peasant farmers. Things worked just fine otherwise.
At one time, Argentina was one of the five richest nations in the world, with a per capita income rivaling that of the U.S. But for most of the last 100 years Argentina has suffered under socialism and then economic collapse. It now operates as virtually a Third World country. Yes, Argentina, by all means: Choose what works.
America’s special place in the world, as Reagan used to say, “is to serve as a beacon of freedom” for the rest of the world to emulate. Nearly every modern American president — FDR, Ike, JFK, Reagan and even Clinton — served as ambassadors to the world for the virtues of free market capitalism.
Obama, by contrast, seems to want us to be more like them rather than them being more like us. It speaks volumes that few in the media didn’t pick up on the president’s morally offensive and economically dimwitted declaration — and almost no liberal pundits corrected him.
Sometimes we wonder if Obama and his sycophants in the media even believe that the right side won the Cold War.