[quote=""Elton John and Bernie Taupin"]Someone saved my life tonight
Sweet freedom whispered in my ear
Made me a nillionaire
And nillionaires are free to fly
Fly away, high away, bye bye...[/quote]

What's that, you say? Those aren't the lyrics? Well, screw you.

Okay, okay. That isn't the way Elton John sang the song. That's the way Sheila Jackson Lee sings it.

She sings of freedom, wealth, and helping everyone become nillionaires.

You know what a nillionaire is? The Left wants everyone to be a rich nillionaire. They want everyone to live the good life. They want to help everyone become nillionaires. (Thanks to KR2004 for the coining.)

Here's the full-frontal snapshot of a nillionaire:

KARL MARX, The German Ideology wrote:For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic and must remain so if he does not wish to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, to fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening,criticize after dinner, just as I have in mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.

In other words, the State provides you a livelihood and this liberates you thus giving you your life to do with as please.
~
This is the promise of the Left. This is The Dream. The promise of the Left is the promise of giving you your life. Never make the mistake otherwise. They are offering people their lives. This is a very important thing to understand. The appeal is the very human and real desire to posses your own life. It addresses a very real aspect of the human condition that everyone can relate to. The Dream of the Left must be explicitly identified and answered or it will continue to hold sway.

And so we come to Sheila Jackson Lee.

Sheila Jackson Lee, House floor, May 6, 2013 wrote:“One might argue that education and health care fall into those provisions of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” she said.
Ms. Jackson Lee added, “I think that what should be continuously emphasized is the president's leadership on one single point: that although health care was not listed per se in the Constitution, it should be a constitutional right.”

And once education and health care "fall into those provisions of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" what doesn't fall into those provisions? From the Marxist point of view of freedom, that to posses your life to do with as you will you must be unencumbered of economic concerns, the sky is the limit. The triumph of socialism is a world where everyone wins the lottery, so to speak. Everyone becomes a nillionaire. No more worries. I've known people that think Cubans are freer than we are. They are nillionaires.

Nancy Pelosi made pretty much the same case for ObamaCare a couple of years ago as Jackson Lee when she said ObamaCare actually increases our freedom. With ObamaCare people are free to pursue their dreams. The Marxist idea of freedom is what she meant. Don't think for a second she isn't fully aware of that fact. These people know what they're about.

So, to sum this up: The Dream of Marxism addresses a very real need of the human condition, the ability to fully posses your life.

This is the allure of communism. This is THE DREAM. In answer to THE DREAM you can throw away all the egghead economic bullshit about the efficiency of market capitalism versus the poverty of socialism. What moves people is what goes to the very core of the human condition - people want to posses their lives and do with their lives what they will.

I don't know what your counter to the Left's promise is, but this is mine:

There's only one reason you posses your life at all, and though it at first sounds sort of dense to say and rather dull, you posses your life because you conceive of your life. You can conceive of the years and the decades in front of you and those that are behind you. In this way you posses yourself, your life, because you can conceive it. Other living beings don't posses their lives in this way. For the purpose of this discussion I don't care if you believe that we have this gift by the grace of God or by the gift of nature. This very human ability to posses our lives in this way is simply an expression of our human spirituality if you will; our ability to think abstractly.

Because you do conceive of your life as a span of years and decades, because you understand that your very life is that span of years and decades, it is right that you should act on this in order to live and be happy throughout the span of your life. Your life, that span of years, is your first true possession; your span of years to plan and live is your property. It is the first property right. Those years are both yours and are YOU.

To posses your life in this way you must be able to live in a stable society and you must be able to own what you produce or else you simply cannot posses the span of your life, which is YOU.

This is why the animal rights crowd is so far removed from reality, and why the socialists simply cannot understand the failure of socialism. Animals don't conceive of their lives as a span of years and so what is 'right' for them and the 'right to their life' has no relation to ours. And the socialists always deny people the right to the possession of their lives to plan and do with as they believe will be best for their own happiness because for one thing they deny that property rights are important, but also because a collectivist society is NOT a stable society. It is a society in which politics becomes loyalty to the politically powerful and the politically powerful are always afraid of each other. There is no way to posses your life in such an environment.

Perhaps what I say isn't as convincing to others as it is to me. I mean the answer to THE DREAM of the Left. It's pretty much the Objectivist answer, but I like to refer to a person's life as something they posses because they are capable of conceiving it - which I think gives a better understanding of several important issues, some I haven't touched on here [rather than simply saying we must use reason and to deny us to act on our reason is to deny us the right to our lives and leaving it at that].

/soap box

They want everyone to be a 'nillionaire.'

Except them.

I think Comrade Elton's lyrics went something like this:

Someone saved my life tonight
My boyfriend poked me in my rear
Made me a nillionaire
And nillionaires are free to fly
Fly away, high away, bye bye...