Competition and Capitalism Are Good For Your Soul

In the area were I live, there are a number of different supermarket options. There’s a Kroger that’s nearly as nice as the Wegman’s “Back East,” and another Kroger that’s as a nasty as the Weis “back East.” There’s a chain of upscale fresh/organic supermarkets, clean and immaculate. And Another large supermarket is in the midst of a massive renovation and upgrade to keep up with the nice Kroger across town.

Someone like Bernie Sanders thinks this is a terrible waste of resources. Supermarkets remodeling when “children are going hungry?” Oh, how awful. And why do there need to be so many different options for people to get their food? And, you know, people don’t always make the kind of nutrition choices the Government would like them to.  Wouldn’t it be more efficient if food were simply distributed at plain gray warehouses by unionized Government employees. You would be assigned one food distribution center in your district and that would be the one you were required to use. (Or pay exorbitantly to use members-only markets accessible only to party apparatchiks and elites, like in the Soviet Union.) That would, the socialists believe, free up money for things like public education.

Leftists believe they know what’s best for everyone, but the philosophy they embrace is ultimately dehumanizing. Getting your allotment of rations from the State-Run Ration Distribution Center might possibly be more efficient if the system were run to the perfection leftists believe they can achieve (Spoiler Alert: they can’t and it wouldn’t be. Venezuela tried this, it doesn’t work). But in robbing people of the opportunity for choice and self-sufficiency, they also would make the world a far more drab and dreary place.

What Bernie Sanders, Barack Obama, and Pope Francis are pushing is a philosophy that ultimately dehumanizes and crushes the soul.