PERSPECTIVE FROM THE 19^TH HOLE: This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus use an image from my favorite sport, golf. Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all of my professional positions, including as a Congressional press secretary in Washington, D.C., an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and a private sector lobbyist. This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.

Issues of socialism came to mind this week, though I never lived under such tyranny.

What prompted thoughts of socialism involved our ground tour guide in Prague, Czech Republic, where my wife and I spent three days on the way to a river cruise on the Danube.

The guide reported that her mother, still alive in Prague at the age of 73, yearns for a return to the socialist state in the Czech Republic. The reason? She feels that collective action, not individual action, would protect her in her old age.

Her daughter, the guide, relishes the ability, in a non-communist state, to be able to think for yourself, discuss subjects, and practice creativity. All are banned in communism.

Socialism also came to mind as I read a piece by author Joseph Epstein in the Wall Street under this headline:

Socialists Don’t Know History

Young people don’t remember the Soviet nightmare. But what’s Sanders’s excuse?

Epstein continued:

“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. I can’t help but mumble this famous sentence from Karl Marx’s ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’ whenever I hear about the socialist wing of the new — and distinctly not your father’s — Democrat Party. Socialism caused the deaths of more than 100 million people under Lenin, Stalin and Mao, but young progressives (I dislike that word to describe someone who wants to change because the change support surely does not represent “progress) in the U.S. want to give it another go.”

As the headline says, Epstein gives some of the young people a pass because they did not see or live through the history of previous socialists movements, such as in Russia or the Czech Republic.

But he gives no pass to Senator Bernie Sanders who fancies himself, again, as worthy of being president as he stands on a platform of socialism.

It is hard for me to fault the woman in Prague who worries about her future.

It is not hard for me to fault Sanders – and others like him – who believe that government is the answer to every problem.

Epstein wonders if Sanders, who proudly calls himself a “democratic socialist,” actually is practicing a real political dogma. “Democratic socialist,” Epstein avers, is much like “military justice” or “good kosher meal,” — an oxymoron. Under socialism the state always takes priority over the people. “Unfortunately,” as Win McCormack writes in the New Republic, “no self-identified socialist regime in the world — all of which have been installed by professional revolutionists in the Marxist-Leninist tradition — has ever been the least bit democratic.”

More from Epstein:

“Many Democrats who are looking to socialism are not old enough to remember the more than 70-year-long socialist horror movie called the Soviet Union.

“Throughout history under its various regimes, in its pursuit of a spurious utopian equality, socialism has produced no great art, profound thinkers or enduring science. It has been death on entrepreneurship. Yet it is an idea — or, more accurately, an ideal —that refuses to die. The socialism currently advocated by a segment of the Democrat Party brings to mind another famous sentence, this one by George Santayana: ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’”

Notice the phrase above – “It (socialism) has been death on entrepreneurship.”

One of the virtues of capitalism is its emphasis on the power of effort, energy, verve and “entrepreneurship.” Without complimenting myself too highly, those were exactly the phrases that we – myself and two partners – claimed when we started our firm, CFM Strategic Communications, about 30 years ago.

Without entrepreneurship and the freedom of individual action, we would have been dead in the water.

Besides the all of the “e’s” – energy, effort and entrepreneurship – we also benefited from one of my previous bosses, an Oregon congressman, called being “a fiscal conservative with a conscience.”

That is part slogan, of course, but it also represents a commitment to help those who happen to be less fortunate than you, even, as in our case, we started and ran a business. As a firm, we supported a variety of good causes, including representing some worthy clients on a pro bono basis.

So, I say, tell Bernie Sanders and his ilk to acknowledge the lessons of history and disavow socialism. No chance, you say. Probably right.

But, if those who favor capitalism would behave smart when it comes to a “social conscience,” we would see huge benefits from the commitment and would not follow down a negative path advocated by Sanders and others running for president from the left.