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Friday, November 22, 2019

To survive, Trump voters in small Florida town turn to socialism, and it's working. It's okay this time.

Nothing is more convenient than conservative hypocrisy. But remember, they're the real Americans with a much higher calling than their "liberal" enemies.  

Let's go to Baldwin, Fla. where Mayor Sean Lynch gave town residents a taste of socialism in their government owned grocery store. What-a-ya know. 

Now, all of a sudden, their idea of socialism isn't really that kind of socialism, not if they can save time and help their town survive. 

Good ol' capitalism decided there wasn't enough money to be made in rural Baldwin, so see ya later, time for them to wither away and die. Best system in the world, right?

You really can't make this stuff up:

WaPo: People in Baldwin, Fla., (saw) the only grocery store in town shut down. Abandoned by mainstream supermarkets whose business models don’t have room for low profit margins, Baldwin is trying something different. At the Baldwin Market, all of the employees are on the municipal payroll, from the butcher to the cashiers.

In many rural, conservative communities struggling to hang on to their remaining residents, ideological arguments about the role of government tend to be cast aside as grocery stores shutter because of population decline and competition from superstores.
By definition, a collectively owned, government-run enterprise like the Baldwin Market is inherently socialist. 
Oh, but these rabid Trump voters have a good excuse and higher calling, so it's alright...
But Lynch, who governs a town where 68 percent of residents voted for Donald Trump in 2016, doesn’t see it that way. From his point of view, the town is just doing what it’s supposed to do: providing services to residents who already pay enough in taxes.

“We take the water out of the ground, and we pump it to your house and charge you,” he told The Post. “So what’s the difference with a grocery store?”
But socialism is a disaster and a failure where ever it's been tried?
So far, though, the experiment has been a success. The town council had hoped to take in $3,500 a day, and sales have routinely exceeded that, Lynch says. “Fundamentally, what you have is people that have lived in these rural communities all their lives, and they want these rural communities to survive,” Procter said. “And they realize that without access to food, they’re not going to survive.”
You can say the same for health care? But socialism this time is okay. Got it.
Matt Bruenig, the founder of the People’s Policy Project, a socialist think tank, likens it to having a “public option” for health care. “The idea that a municipality should have to beg private companies to provide basic goods and services to its people is absurd. And being able to say ‘we will just do it ourselves’ is very powerful.”

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