Sadly, The Salt Lake Tribune published both a front page story promoting Chris Stewart’s Sutherland Institute speech on socialism on July 30, and then his follow-up commentary on Aug. 1, titled “We need a new way to discuss socialism.”
Both are simply twisting reality.
His statement “Every time socialism is seriously put into practice, hunger, poverty, tyranny and death follow” is refuted by our Great Depression in the 1930s that was caused by capitalism and ended by implementing democratic socialism, which pulled millions of U.S. citizens out of poverty.
His statement that “nearly 1 billion people have been lifted out of extreme poverty in the last 20 years, thanks to free-market capitalism” ignores the fact that roughly 800 million of these people were living in China, which was not using “free-market capitalism,” but a highly regulated market economy and authoritarian government.
During that same period, the most “free” market economy in the world, the United States, gained a pathetic 1% drop in poverty, roughly 16,000 people per year. At the same time, income inequality grew significantly.
Whatever you want to call our brand of capitalism in the U.S., it is simply not working. Socialism is not a dirty word. It is the mechanism that funds the public good out of the great wealth that capitalism so effectively generates.
Theodore R. Kaly, Draper