The America Rising political action committee, a Republican PAC that works in opposition research, uploaded a video to YouTube on Tuesday in which it posted a clip of Florida Democratic Congressman Joe Garcia talking about how great Communism is.
Speaking during a Google hangout regarding immigration reform with supporters, the left-leaning representative pointed out that despite rhetoric from Republicans about limited government and spending cuts the GOP is content in allocating substantial budget finances to border security.
“Let me give you an example, the kind of money we’ve poured in. So the most dangerous — sorry, the safest city in America is El Paso, Texas. It happens to be across the border from the most dangerous city in the Americas, which is Juarez. Right?” stated Garcia. “And two of the safest cities in America, two of them are on the border with Mexico. And of course, the reason is we’ve proved that Communism works. If you give everybody a good government job, there’s no crime.”
Garcia defended his comments in an interview with the Miami Herald in which he made a sarcastic remark aimed at his Republican opponents. “This is an absurdity, accusing the son of Cuban immigrants of believing in Communism is just ridiculous,” he told the news outlet.
Does Communism/Socialism work?
As of late, there has been a growing movement of folks who want more government, have an intense opposition towards capitalism and espouse an incorrect account of socialism and communism. The detest for free markets can likely be attributed to the financial crisis and the economic collapse a few years ago in which people blame on capitalism, though they often neglect the massive intervention by the federal government and the Federal Reserve.
Of course, we can look back to history to see the numerous economic failures of communism and socialism:
Gandhi’s Swadeshi Philosophy: government plan, economic central planner and a government planning authority, which led to the government to abandon trade and investment, public sector enterprises that were inefficient and a License Raj that distorted the market, diminished capital and hurt the development of India.
USSR: The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was an interesting case when it came to experimenting with socialism. The empire was able to develop a destructive arsenal of nuclear weapons, but it starved millions of people to death with massive food shortages and environmental dilapidation because of socialist mismanagement of food production.
As Kevin Williamson wrote: “The left has long argued that a capitalist is a guy who steals candy from a baby; in fact, a socialist is a guy who steals milk from a baby.”
North Korea’s Juche Idea: The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), otherwise known as North Korea, has had a massive famine issue for decades.
During the 1990s, under the communist Juche Idea, the government had instituted a Public Distribution System (PDS), a sort of biweekly and monthly food rations initiative, which consisted of one cup of food per day per person.. The government had seized farmer food production and only the government elite and well-connected could eat well. Meanwhile, more than 2.5 million starved and perished because the PDS program only supported six percent of the population.
North Korea still suffers to this date: a growing number of people are becoming cannibals because there is such a paucity of food. Only in the last couple of years have markets started to open up but they are under intensified government scrutiny.
This is the result of central planning. Of course, these are just a few examples of the incompetence and failures of communism and socialism. Yet, there are people in Western countries that want these kinds of systems.
Sorry, Congressman Garcia, Communism doesn’t work.
Garcia didn’t actually claim that communism works. He was making a sarcastic joke about massive Republican spending on border security creating lots of jobs and making El Paso a safe city.