The Wall Street I Have Known Bernie Sanders should ask people like me—refugees from collectivist paradises—about income inequality.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-wall-street-i-have-known-1460675960
It takes an immigrant like me to parse the poison that Bernie Sanders is peddling to the naive youth of this country. It takes someone who has experienced socialism’s failures firsthand—as I did, initially as a small child, later as a young adult—to see why Sen. Sanders is succeeding: We elders, immigrants and native-born alike, have failed to teach our children and grandchildren about the economic history and false promises of the myriad forms of socialism that infest our world.
More than 75 years ago, I landed at Ellis Island as a 6-year-old child. My family had fled the despotism of National Socialism that had been foisted onto the gullible (albeit literate) German people. We were far from the only victims of collectivism. As all of us know but some refuse to admit, collectivism destroyed the economies of places like China, Russia and Cuba, and ruined the lives of millions of people.
Nine years after I arrived in America, the new state of Israel came into existence, making Jews like me both proud and curious. When I was 18, imbued with idealistic fervor, I decided to help the young nation grow and prosper by working the soil. Off I went to further the goals of social justice by joining a kibbutz, or communal farm. There the painful reality of the maxim Karl Marx popularized, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” hit home.
As an example of kibbutz ideology: Does it make sense for a person running the washing machines in the laundry to be receiving exactly the same pay and living benefits as someone who might be the community doctor after going to medical school? That may sound like an extreme example, but the same principles apply throughout the economic structure of a collectivist economy. Unlike Chinese or Russian collectivism, Israel’s was voluntary—but insane nonetheless.
I left Israel three years later, in 1954, because I was an American citizen and the time had come for me to serve my country. I was drafted and inducted into the U.S. Army. After two years of active duty, stationed back in my native Germany, I realized that my future lay in the capitalist U.S., not in Israel.
I came to see that I needed a college degree to get ahead in the competitive society of my home country. Because I had to work during the day to support myself and my family, I attended classes in the evening, taking eight years to get a bachelor’s degree in finance and an M.B.A. While going to night school, I got my first Wall Street job. CONTINUE AT SITE
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