RUSH: I want to expand on something that I said right before the top of the hour ended. Walter Williams, who still occasionally guest hosts the program, once said, “Prior to capitalism, the way people amassed great wealth was by looting, plundering and enslaving their fellow man. Capitalism made it possible to become wealthy by serving your fellow man.” Nothing could be closer to the truth than that. In a communist/socialist society where nobody has any freedom, nobody has any liberty, how do you get anything?

You have to be a member of the party, and what are they going to do? They’re stealing from people. They’re imprisoning people. They’re looting. They’re taking what other people have. You had to go out and steal things to have anything. Capitalism frees people to provide services and products people are willing to pay for, and if you hit it big, you get really wealthy. If you don’t hit it big but do reasonably well, you’ll do reasonably well.

Capitalism is made up of people who are forever dreaming about coming up with ways to make life better. Capitalism is about improving the quality of life, improving the standard of living for as many people as possible. That takes us back to: It’s not possible for everybody to be the same. So the socialists play on this class envy business. “Well, it’s not fair that X should have all of that. Not everybody does, so it isn’t fair.” So they say we need to do what the left always does, what socialists always do to “equalize” society.

They never elevate the people at the bottom. They always try to penalize the people at the top and take away from them and blame them for the inequities and the problems in society. But it doesn’t stop with economics. Then they go after what people say. Then they go after the way certain people live. They have to make sure that anything that creates human triumph is discredited, because that sends the wrong signal to a socialist or communist government. You can’t have exceptions on the plus side.

You simply can’t.

The whole system is defeated once people see that. You know what brought down the Soviet Union? I mean, no question it was the Strategic Defense Initiative and the Soviets realizing that there was no they could keep up. But what was also a factor: Reruns of Dallas and Dynasty showing up on television in the black market of the Soviet Union, and they found out their government was lying to them all those years about what life in America was all about.

Literally lying to ’em.

The stories that were told about Americans and the hell that their lives were, the Soviet citizen had no way of knowing any different. They believed it. All of a sudden they started seeing American TV and there was a run on blue jeans in the Soviet Union. Blue jeans became one of the biggest black market items in the seventies. Blue jeans! At that point, it was only a matter of time. Now, had the Soviets been willing to do what they had done in previous years and simply murder their own citizens in the millions, they could have controlled it.

But they weren’t able to get away with that anymore. Stalin could do it via a famine but there wasn’t any television to see the results and there weren’t any networks that cared to show it, and the New York Times was willing to deny it and the writer get a Pulitzer Prize for it. But in today’s media, you’d have a tough time getting away with that. Never mind the sympathy that leftists have with communists, you’d still have a tough time getting away with that. So it’s getting tougher and tougher on the left.

So they have to be trickier and trickier in order to succeed, and one of the fastest ways to take away people’s freedom — one of the fastest ways to do it — is to take away their money. You limit people’s financial resources and you limit their freedom. You limit people’s availability or access to energy and you limit their freedom. It’s no wonder the left attacks the things they attack. The things that leftists attack are the things that provide the most opportunity for wealth and freedom.

You take a look at their enemies list, and that’s what you’ll see. That’s why they have those enemies. “Prior to capitalism, the way people amassed great wealth was by looting, plundering, and enslaving their fellow man. Capitalism made it possible to become wealthy by serving your fellow man,” and “serving” doesn’t mean slavery or servitude. It means making an iPhone. It means building a car that a lot of people want. It means having a service for people that want a butler if somebody provides a butler service.

If that’s what people want, they’ll see if they can make it work. Whatever the service is, capitalism lets you make people happily pay for what they’re getting. It ratchets up everybody’s wealth and creativity, or the vast majority of people, and that’s the real source of prosperity. All of that taking place, it’s called commerce. Too many people now think the source of prosperity is government.

All government does is take away prosperity. All government does is destroy wealth. It doesn’t create it, and it certainly doesn’t reward it, unless — there are exceptions to everything — government will reward you with wealth if you’re one of them. They’ll share the wealth with you. There are any number of ways that can happen, but those are corrupt things, folks. All of that is corruption. Corporate cronyism is corruption. It’s not genuine. It’s level-playing field kind of stuff.

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RUSH: one more observation here on Walter Williams. This is from a column that he wrote, by the way. “Prior to capitalism, the way people amassed great wealth was by looting, plundering, and enslaving their fellow man. Capitalism made it possible to become wealthy by serving your fellow man.” You might say to yourself, “That’s so obvious. Why do we have these arguments?” There’s a very good reason why we have these arguments.

Capitalism is always evaluated against dreams. Utopia is a dream. It’s a fantasy where everything’s perfect; where there’s no pain; where there’s no suffering; where everybody has whatever the socialists think is important today. Everybody’s got health care. Everybody has a house, has an electric car. It’s a dream. It doesn’t exist. Capitalism is hard, cold reality. There’s no question it is by far and away the best economic organizing system of human beings there’s ever been. But it is said to be a failure because it’s evaluated against fantasies. There never has been a successful socialist country. There’s never been a successful communist country.

So the people that promote that stuff are always talking to you on the come. They’re always telling you about what can be. And they’re always telling you, “Well, yeah, it may have failed but the right people are finally in charge now.” That was Obama’s sales pitch. “We’re the ones you’ve been waiting for. We’re the ones we’ve been waiting for.” What that meant was, “Okay, it may have never worked in the past, but finally the right people are charge.” But it never has worked. It never will. So capitalism, which is a proven, demonstrable, there hasn’t been any other legitimate world superpower, economic and everything combined, except the United States of America.

Now, we might have created military superpowers in a psychological sense, or there might have been military superpowers with the Soviets. And the ChiComs might because of the numbers of people they can send into a battle and lose. They got a billion people in their population, but there isn’t another United States. Well, there wasn’t. We’re in the process of throwing it away. We’re in the process of transferring it to other places. But in the history of the world there has never been anything close. There have been wealthy societies, but very few people participated in that. The rest were slaves or common, ordinary, everyday nothings who made all the wealth possible but never shared in it. There’s been wealthy places but there’s never been a wealthy superpower.

The United States developed, fed, clothed, protected, defended, provided for, took care of disasters, the world over. No other country has ever been able to do that. And yet there’s this constant battle in this country. The United States is unfair, it’s unjust, it’s racist, sexist, bigoted, homophobic, it’s immoral, it’s run by white guys. None of that has ever been true. But let me ask you a question. What else has a chance when evaluated against a fantasy or a dream. Let’s say, guys, you have this fantasy of the perfect woman, and you really think she exists.

I mean, every aspect of your dream, every aspect of your fantasy, you hold out for it. Guess what? Your life is going to be miserable because it doesn’t exist. Take any other fantasy, any other dream, any other figment of your imagination where there is perfection and then evaluate that against reality, and I guarantee you reality is gonna lose every time. Capitalism is reality and it’s got more to recommend it than any other way or system. But compared to the utopian dreams of socialism and communism, it is always going to come up short with the dreamers and the fantasizers. And when those people end up in power, like now, then you end up with real problems. And we have them. But we’ll come out of it.