By Charlie Greco | Observer Contributor
As the 2020 presidential campaign moves into high gear, progressive Democrats have begun touting radical changes that would impact the entire U.S. socio-economic system as we know it. The thrust has been to try and move the U.S. from capitalism to socialism.
As a country that has mastered capitalism and free markets, America has been a global economic power for more than 200 years. It has outperformed all other socio-economic systems that have either been experiments or forced upon other countries around the globe, like socialism in Venezuela.
But what effect has socialism had on people besides doubling and tripling taxes to cover more than $45 trillion in costs for all of the free subsidies currently being proposed by the progressives?
The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) calls socialism nothing but a “Ponzi scheme,” like a chain letter or a pyramid scheme. People who are “first in” do well, before the house of cards collapses.
Women in the workplace seem to have paid a very high price for the shift to socialism. Looking at those Nordic countries that have been practicing socialism for years, women have been impacted dramatically.
The CATO Institute’s research indicates that the proportion of female managers, executives and business owners has collapsed in those countries.
Public sector monopolies, huge personal income taxes, publicly funded childcare, parental leave and even ineffective gender quotas have held back female equality in the workplace. So much so that OECD data shows that while 14.6% of women in the U.S. are in management positions, only 1% – 4% of women in socialist countries like Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland are working in management positions.
It gets worse! In the U.S., women are shown to now have an almost equal chance as men to reach management levels. At the same time, women in Nordic countries are only half as likely to achieve those levels as women in the U.S.
Why? The CATO Institute sites the following reasons like the high costs of daycare forces women to stay at home longer. The benefits of much longer parental leave make a woman much more expensive to employ and part-time work does not lead to promotions and/or management roles…. “out of sight; out of mind.”
Women get left behind in a socialistic environment. In the U.S., it could erase nearly 20 years of reform and an effort to correct gender inequality.
Whenever socialists speak, the keyword is always “free.” Nothing is free, not even in America. Someone has to pay the cost. In social subsidies it’s the taxpayer; in human cost it will be women who will have to deal with more than a “glass ceiling” and a reversal of the progress made over the last two decades.
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