Biden’s Stalin-esque 5-Year Plans
https://issuesinsights.com/2021/04/09/bidens-stalin-esque-5-year-plans/
In 1928, during his first year of what became known as the Stalin era, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin issued his first five-year plan, a centralized economic blueprint that focused on industrialization and collectivism. In 2021, during his first year as president of the United States, Joe Biden introduced a $2.3 trillion infrastructure plan that both the White House and its cheerleaders have called “transformative.”
History tells us Stalin’s plans were transformative, too.
Before we go any further, we state here for the record that Biden is not Stalin. Not even close.
Yet we see policy parallels that should make Americans – at least those who still relish freedom from big government – mighty uncomfortable.
Biden is not unique in pitching an infrastructure plan. Donald Trump had an infrastructure plan. Most politicians, from president to members of the smallest city council in the country, like infrastructure projects. But Biden’s objectives are different. There’s more social engineering than civil engineering in his proposal.
Actually, there’s much more.
Of the $2.3 trillion Biden proposes to spend, only $921 billion would be dedicated to what most agree is infrastructure. As we noted earlier this week, the remainder “would go to pet Democrat projects, payoffs to unions and left-wing groups, squirrelly climate change projects, money for misgoverned and impecunious Blue States, and other waste.”
Others have noticed this, as well. Barron’s believes Biden’s plan “reads like a Rooseveltian blueprint for economic and social engineering.” Fox News’ Tucker Carlson says the spending breakdown of the proposal is “5% on infrastructure, 95% on social engineering.” Former Georgia Republican Sen. David Perdue also describes it as “a social engineering bill.”
Changing the behavior of the millions under his boot was as much a goal for Stalin as transforming the Soviet economy.
“The scale of this gigantic act of social engineering” during Stalin’s first five-year plan, “unique in world history, affected more than 100 million people living in villages and on the nomadic steppes,” the Australian Financial Review said in a 2014 article about Princeton University history professor Stephen Kotkin’s research on Stalin.
Others have referenced the “Soviet government’s intentional efforts to restructure Soviet society in a kind of a social engineering experiment,” and “the worst excesses of Communist social engineering” in regard to Stalin’s plans.
Just as the Soviet revolutionaries did, today’s “American” Democrats are trying to corrupt the language for their political benefit, telling the country that the words we’ve understood for so long don’t mean what the dictionaries say they do. For instance, Democratic Sen. Kristen Gillibrand of New York tweeted that “Paid leave is infrastructure. Child care is infrastructure. Caregiving is infrastructure.”
The president himself said, as if his office makes him the arbiter of truth and accuracy, that “to automatically say that the only thing that’s infrastructure is a highway, bridge, or whatever, that’s just not rational.” Reminds us far too much of his mendacious comment that the new Georgia election law is “sick.” He uses language as a blunt instrument.
Biden is convinced that it’s his destiny to fundamentally transform the U.S. Unless a nation is failing, suffering internal war, crushed by the weight of dictatorship, or plagued by persistent disorder and depression, those are dangerous thoughts. A free and prosperous nation does not need to be remade. It doesn’t need to be rescued. It requires no secular deliverer. Only those who crave political power, who want to carve a place for themselves in history, believe it’s their task to overhaul a country that isn’t broken.
Nor does America need five-year plans, two-year plans – or central planning of any length. We pray there are enough rational lawmakers in the House or Senate to stop Biden’s plan to obtain a blank check for perpetually expanding government.
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