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

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.