Authored by Doug French via The Mises Institute,
Franklin Bynum was unchallenged and won the Democratic nomination to become a criminal court judge in Houston. Mr. Bynum is an avowed socialist and he’s not alone in that conservative state. At least 16 other socialists appeared on the ballot in primary races across Texas.
Socialism has oozed out of college classrooms and into the ballot box.
“Yes, I’m running as a socialist,” Mr. Bynum told the New York Times. “I’m a far-left candidate. What I’m trying to do is be a Democrat who actually stands for something, and tells people, ‘Here’s how we are going to materially improve conditions in your life.’”
Wannabe-Judge Bynum is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which is growing by leaps and bounds after Trump’s election, even in conservative states.
The NYT reports, “D.S.A.’s membership has increased from about 5,000 to 35,000 nationwide. The number of local groups has grown from 40 to 181, including 10 in Texas. Houston’s once-dormant chapter now has nearly 300 members.”
Texas, a hot bed for socialism? Who would have thunk it?
“We want to see money stop controlling everything. That includes politics,” said Amy Zachmeyer, 34, a union organizer who helped revive the moribund Houston DSA chapter.
“That just resonates with millennials who are making less money than their parents did, are less able to buy a home and drowning in student debt.”
Ms. Zachmeyer’s student loan payment burden of $1,000 a month convinced her to become a socialist. Good grief.
Don’t worry about a blue wave, worry about a red (commie) wave.
Unsurprisingly, the NYT recently featured an opinion piece by Jason Barker entitled, “Happy Birthday, Karl Marx. You Were Right!” Just a few paragraphs in, Associate Professor Barker gets off this doozy of a paragraph,
educated liberal opinion is today more or less unanimous in its agreement that Marx’s basic thesis — that capitalism is driven by a deeply divisive class struggle in which the ruling-class minority appropriates the surplus labor of the working-class majority as profit — is correct. Even liberal economists such as Nouriel Roubini agree that Marx’s conviction that capitalism has an inbuilt tendency to destroy itself remains as prescient as ever.
It gets better, while millennials struggle under the weight of student loan payments and underemployment, Barker writes,
The inroads that artificial intelligence is currently making into medical diagnosis and surgery, for instance, bears out the argument in the “Manifesto” that technology would greatly accelerate the “division of labor,” or the deskilling of such professions [doctors, lawyers, and well, all jobs].
The good philosophy professor then throws Black Lives Matter and the MeToo movement into the Marxist class struggle bucket.
Of course, accelerating the division of labor...