From Investors Business Daily – economist Walter Williams explains the political left.

Excerpt:

One of the greatest sources of confusion and deception is the difference between leftists, progressives, socialists, communists and fascists.

I thought about this as I caught a glimpse of the Oct. 2 “One Nation” march on Washington.

[…]The gathering had the support of the AFL-CIO, Service Employees International Union, stalwarts of the Democratic Party such as Al Sharpton and organizations such as the NAACP, the National Council of La Raza, Green for All, the Sierra Club and the Children’s Defense Fund.

Let’s look at some of the history of socialism and communism.

Nazism is a form of socialism. In fact, Nazi stands for National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Nazis murdered 20 million of their own people and in nations they captured.

The unspeakable acts of Adolf Hitler’s Socialist Workers’ Party pale in comparison to the horrors committed in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Between 1917 and 1987, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin and their successors murdered, or were otherwise responsible for the deaths of, 62 million of their own people.

Between 1949 and 1987, Mao Tse-tung and his successors were responsible for the deaths of 76 million Chinese. The most authoritative tally of history’s most murderous regimes is in a book by University of Hawaii’s Professor Rudolph J. Rummel, “Death by Government.” A wealth of information is provided at his website.

[…]When Hitler, Stalin and Mao were campaigning for political power, you can bet they didn’t campaign on the promise to murder millions of their own people, and probably the thought of doing so never crossed their minds. Those horrors were simply the end result of long evolution of ideas leading to consolidation of power in central government in the quest for “social justice.”

It was decent but misguided earlier generations of Germans, Russians and Chinese, like many of today’s Americans, who would have cringed at the thought of genocide, who built the Trojan horse for a Hitler, a Stalin or Mao to take over.

[…]The primary goal of communism and socialism is government ownership or control over the means of production. In the U.S., only a few people call for outright government ownership of the means of production. They might have learned that government ownership would mess things up.

Instead, they’ve increasingly called for quasi-ownership through various forms of government regulation, oversight, taxation and subsidies. After all, if someone has the power to tell you how you may use your property, it’s tantamount to his owing it.

These are important things to understand about socialists/progressives/leftists/communists.

When you allow someone else to control the means by which you earn your living – by taxing you or by regulating your employer, for example – then you are giving up your freedom to earn your own money and to spend it as you see fit. Socialist dictators always get elected by people who have been duped into exchanging their liberty for the promise of “social justice” – equal life outcomes regardless of your free decisions. But the end is always the same – violence and poverty. To avoid mass murder, it makes sense to decentralize power over many individuals and businesses. And that’s why conservatives favor the free market and limited government.