Occupy Wall Street: Socialism Makes Everybody Equally Poor

Old Russian Joke

It is 1917 a granddaughter of Decabrist (old revolutionary in Russia, 1825) sits at her home and suddenly hears about unrest on the street. She asks her aid Anushka to go and check what is happening.

When Anushka comes back she gladly proclaims: “Lady, there is a revolution!!!!”

Lady: “Oh that is great, my grandfather wanted a revolution! What do they want? What do they desire to change?”

Anushka proclaims in happy and excited voice :”Lady, they want to get rid of the Czar, and they want to get rid of all these rich people, so there is going to be no more of them!!!!”

Lady becomes really sad and utters: “That is disappointing, my grandfather dreamed to make sure that there are no more poor people”

 

Back to 1992. To the NY Times Editor:

I strongly disagree with Andrew Schotter in “Improve Capitalism. Use Some Socialism” (Op-Ed, Feb. 29). He calls for more socialism to deal with poverty and health care problems. Mr. Schotter gives us an excellent example of a mother of four, stating that “the economic battle for her is probably lost.”

I think Mr. Schotter does not know what real poverty is. I lived for 35 years in Russia, where my next door neighbor was Anna Uskov, a mother of six children, who lost her husband in World War II. The family lived in a single room with a kitchen shared with four other tenants, no water supply and no bathroom.

Most of the time the kids were hungry, and they ran barefoot in the snow because their mother was unable to provide shoes for them. When the oldest daughter married, for years she slept with her husband and two small children in the same bed. There was no welfare for that family because the fathers of socialism Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels decreed, “If you do not work, you do not eat.”

The streets of our suburb were infested by crime, yet all the children in my neighbor’s family became good and decent citizens. The mother worked hard as a janitor, and in the most important corner of their tiny apartment hung a traditional Russian icon, the symbol of God. The love and strong belief in moral norms, not Government programs, gave them the key to success.

In no country in the world has socialism, even in small portions, made people happy. Not in Russia and not in Sweden, which has the highest rate of suicides in the world. Our problem is not that we don’t have enough socialism; it is that we have too much of it.

The way socialism works is this: By distributing the wealth, it does not make all the people rich. It makes all the people poor.

JEFF MANEVICH Cliffside Park, N.J., Feb 29, 1992