The Dictatorship of the Proletariat Ain't What It Used to Be

Julian Sanchez | March 19, 2004

Whatever else you think of the election result in Spain, Slate's Chris Suellentrop notes that it does at least provide a comforting reminder of how decisively the economic battle's been won:

Here are some of the economic promises on which Zapatero's Socialist Workers Party campaigned: lowering the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 30 percent, cutting income taxes, and reducing the value-added tax. Oh, and they're going to balance the budget and control inflation. The man expected to be the Socialist finance minister, Miguel Sebastian, is a U.S.-educated economist with a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. He's promising to put his faith in the Invisible Hand. "There will be a strict separation between politics and business," he told the Financial Times. "We will be a market-friendly government." These are socialists?

Now, maybe they're actually pure evil, but it's nice (not to mention amusing) to see self-described socialists forced to adopt at least the rhetoric of market economics.