Socialism has never worked, wouldn’t work for Harris admin

OPINION:

Former President Donald Trump frequently refers to Vice President Kamala Harris as a communist. That’s not entirely correct, because her beliefs and her policy positions — to the degree they can be extracted from her — are more in line with those of the Democratic Socialists of America party.

If she could, Ms. Harris would turn America into another Cuba while claiming to help the middle class.

Cuba’s socialist regime has oppressed the island nation since the Castro revolution in 1959. For all but the ruling junta, things have gone downhill ever since. Food shortages are the norm. Electricity is at best a sometimes thing, and even health care is scarce and random.

Recognizing that food prices in the U.S. have increased by 25% since January 2021, Ms. Harris wants to pass a federal law against price gouging by food suppliers and grocery stores. Not that she would reduce government spending to reduce inflation, she’d punish suppliers and stores. This is pure socialism and would result in food shortages like Cubans suffer.

Ms. Harris also favors Sen. Bernie Sanders’ “Medicare for All” plan. No private health insurance would be allowed — just a government “single-payer” system, which is what many socialist and quasi-socialist countries have. People wouldn’t get the care they need and would have to wait in line for what care they can get.

Ms. Harris has supported the Green New Deal, which aims to end the use of fossil fuels, which means outlawing internal-combustion engines. Set aside for the moment that climate change is a scam based on junk science. What the Green New Deal means for America is the destruction of our economy.

Socialism has never worked, and it wouldn’t work for a Harris administration.

To top it off, there is “Bidenomics,” which Ms. Harris has praised. She says there’s more work to do. This brings me back to Cuba, which has been oppressed by communism and socialism for 65 years.

One of my most unusual friends died in 2020. He and his parents fled Cuba in 1960 and emigrated to America. They arrived with little more than the clothes on their backs, but they learned English, assimilated and did far better than just get along.

Decades later, Ambassador Jose Sorzano, my friend, was appointed deputy U.N. ambassador when Jeane Kirkpatrick was our top representative to the U.N. President Ronald Reagan later appointed him to the National Security Council as a special assistant to the president.

Jose taught me much about the Cuban economy. He said it always boiled down to the same things when you went to a grocery store, clothing store, a gas station or for anything else you didn’t have at home. The answer was either “no hay” — there isn’t any — or “no te toca” — it’s not your turn.

That’s where we’ll be if, in four years, Ms. Harris has continued Bidenomics with more inflation, more wild government spending, regulation of food prices and the Green New Deal.

Jose’s favorite saying was “ladran senal de que cavalgamos,” which translates to “the dogs bark because we gallop.” Before the Biden administration, America did gallop. From our first war with Islamist terrorists and hostage-takers — the Barbary pirates (1801-1805 and the whole “to the shores of Tripoli” thing) — until Mr. Trump sent American drones to kill Iran’s chief terrorist in January 2020, every nation had to respect us and some aggressor nations had cause to fear us.

America galloped then but no longer can. As this column has said, we are no longer a reliable ally. The “woke” ideology forced on our military has weakened both the readiness and the lethality of the armed forces. The interest on our national debt is over $1 trillion, more than the entire defense budget.

Iran, as Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said, is within a week or two of producing a nuclear weapon but hasn’t decided to do it yet. What a dunce.

Ms. Harris will be a better ally of France — whose president, Emmanuel Macron, has proposed an arms embargo on Israel — than of Israel. NATO’s members, supposedly unified in the face of Russia’s war on Ukraine, are at odds with themselves. The Danish government says we should give Ukraine anything it needs. The German government doesn’t agree, and other members are speaking out in arguments among themselves.

Ms. Harris can’t unify NATO except around Mr. Biden’s appeasement diplomacy.

It is a depressing thought that Ms. Harris could sit across a summit table from Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un or any representative of Iran. Any of them would eat her lunch.

If Mr. Trump is reelected in November, America may again be a surging economy and a force to be reckoned with. He understands that American prosperity is the key to national security, and that evil nations must be defeated.

• Jed Babbin is a national security and foreign affairs columnist for The Washington Times and contributing editor for The American Spectator.