Speaking at small rally in Las Vegas before the upcoming GOP debate, presidential candidate Marco Rubio continued the grand illusion of national-level politics: liberals are silly leftists and conservatives are upstanding free market warriors. Firing shots at Democrats, he contrasted the GOP field,
saying, “We could have nine people on that stage [and] not a single one is a socialist.”
While the audience applauded that campaign-grade one-liner, I had a hearty lol. It was for this very delusion that I wrote
God versus Socialism. Yes, I was hard on the left in that book, but the place where the argument really matters is with the various forms of Socialism practiced, protected, and cherished by alleged free-market conservatives as well. If we don’t clean our own house, there will be no hope at all. And we can only clean our own house if we start being honest about the dirt.
The truth is just the opposite of what Rubio claims. The truth is that he and all the other GOP candidates are absolutely Socialist. They are Socialists because they believe and support socialistic policies that involve massive wealth transfer, massive taxation, and massive government interventions in banking, finance, and foreign wars. They are so deeply involved in appropriation and transfer by government coercion that the claim not to be Socialists is laughable by any objective measurement.
Candidates like Rubio can only maintain the conservative delusion by comparing themselves to other Socialists like Bernie Sanders who happen to be a little further down the road than they are.
In fact, Rubio is so Socialist he has actually criticized Democrats on certain issues for not wanting to do as much as he does to preserve Socialist programs.
