Every socialist is a disguised dictator
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action
Human progress has been three steps forward, two steps back. That a non-fringe candidate of a major political party in the United States can call himself a socialist constitutes a leap backward. That it can happen after a century of socialistic horrors: impoverishment, ruination, tyranny, war, and tens of millions dead, bespeaks not just deadly ignorance and delusion, but depravity.
Socialism is a political system whereby the state owns or controls the means of production for goods and services. It can be partial—government control of some industries, or total—government control of all industries. According to Marx, who advocated the total version, the goods and services would be produced by each according to his or her ability, and distributed according to each individual’s need: production severed from distribution. No particular acuity is necessary to see the fatal flaw. The “needy”—and those who garner political power by distributing goods and services to them—are all for this system, but what’s in it for the able? They have to be coerced to produce, and something has to be done with those who object or refuse to submit.
Coercion sounds like slavery and that something has to be done sounds like repression. That is what socialism has produced—slavery, concentration camps, and slaughter—on a scale unimaginable prior to the twentieth century. Once you reach 10 million killed you’ve plumbed the depths of evil. Additional deca-millions are redundant blood on your hands, but the Titans in the Socialist pantheon—Lenin, Stalin, and Mao—killed around 100 million between them, while lesser lights like Pol Pot and the Kim dynasty in North Korea killed single digit millions. The numbers are exclusive of war dead.
What about Adolf Hitler? The full name of his political party was Nationalsocialistiche Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or Nationalist Socialist German Workers’ Party, which sounds like a group of socialists. However, modern socialists try to distance themselves from Hitler by arguing that the Nazis allowed private ownership of the means of production, were supported by wealthy German industrialists and bankers (wealthy Brits and Americans, too), persecuted Communists, and fought the Soviet Union. Once the Nazis assumed full control, especially after Germany began waging war, the owners of businesses had to comply with their directives or else. Under the circumstances, full government ownership of the means of production versus full government control that allowed nominal private ownership was a distinction without a difference. However, to give today’s socialists their best case, exclude Hitler’s deca-millions from the tally.
The case the socialists aren’t allowed is the one they always make: comparing purely hypothetical, daydream, visionary socialism with real life socio-economic-political systems. Either fantasy socialism gets measured against fantasy capitalism or fantasy welfare-statism or some other fantasy, an obvious waste of time, or the real life socialism gets measured against other real life systems. SLL is partial to capitalism, so let’s take as real life capitalism the closest the world has ever come to laissez-faire: Industrial Revolution America from 1865 to 1913.It is indisputable that the Industrial Revolution produced the greatest economic growth and rise in living standards, as measured by per capita income (which was not subject to an income tax—Happy Tax Day!), in America’s history. It also produced the biggest scientific and technological explosion in human history. It is true that millions worked for very low wages while others made vast fortunes—income inequality. However, jobs were plentiful and upward mobility the norm.
Whatever its flaws, there was no deca-million body count in Industrial Revolution America. A telling detail: millions of immigrants came to America to be “exploited” (they didn’t come for the government benefits; there were none), and laws were passed to restrict immigration, while real life socialist countries built walls and otherwise made it difficult and dangerous to try to leave their workers’ paradises. Many have died trying.
The coercive foundation of socialism leads to slavery and slaughter. Capitalism is an economic system in which the means of production of good and services are privately owned, characterized by voluntary exchange and the state’s protection of contract and property rights. It is the economics of freedom. That conceptual foundation leads to progress and prosperity.
In a political order where individuals and groups cannot forcibly or fraudulently take what others have produced, capitalism will be the natural evolution. If you can’t take, you must produce and exchange. You own the ultimate means of production—your talents, aptitudes, training, experience, ingenuity, capacity for work, and intelligence—and if you want something you haven’t produced, you must exchange for it with someone else on mutually advantageous and agreeable terms. Capitalism’s extraordinary results when it has been given anything approaching full reign are unsurprising. Humans accomplish extraordinary deeds…when they are free to do so.
Modern education has for the most part abandoned teaching history, facts, or concepts, replacing them with toxic goo. The zombie minds at colleges and universities (both students and professors) fail or refuse to grasp the conceptual and ethical distinctions between capitalism and socialism. They are unaware of, indifferent to, or deny the yawning chasm between Industrial Revolution America and the twentieth century’s socialist horror shows.
What they do know is that avuncular Bernie Sanders is promising free university education and lots of other free stuff, paid for by someone else, just like in those European welfare states, which by the way, is what they really mean by socialism, or to use the popular euphemistic moniker, “democratic socialism.” And they intend to be either the “needy,” or better yet, running the government that “cares” for the needy. Only fools raise their hands when the call goes out for the able to pull the load, although someone has to.
Welfare states are on a fiscally and demographically unsustainable course, de facto bankrupt. You do run out of other people’s money to spend, especially when the load-pullers get tired of working for you. Welfare states are unstable ideological halfway houses between capitalism and socialism, inexorably sliding towards the latter.
Banking offers an example. Banks have been both captured and have captured governments, and when they run into trouble they become wards of the state and its taxpayers. Modern banking is more socialist than not, yet Sanders’ critique condemns it as capitalism. The problems of banking—regulatory capture, cronyism, excessive leverage and concentration, borrowing at preferential, below market rates, too big to fail, and taxpayer-backed speculation—flow directly from banks’ involvement with the government. Yet Sanders’ reforms entails more government. Real reform would go the opposite direction: elimination of the Federal Reserve, too big to fail, and deposit insurance.
It’s easy to be the great guy in the bar when you’re buying rounds on someone else’s dime. Uncle Bernie is peddling poison and calling it craft brew. If you encounter someone who’s feeling the Bern, listen patiently as they wax enthusiastic about the coming socialist utopia…if only we’ll all wise up and elect him. When they’re done, offer to buy them a one-way plane ticket to North Korea, Cuba, or Venezuela, but only if they’ll stay there for a year. That, of course, is not what they have in mind, and those nations are not, of course, the intended models for the United States. Intentions, of course, don’t mean squat. You shall know socialism by its dark deeds. Nothing would be more gratifying than seeing its proponents discover darkness the hard way. Unless, of course, they take the rest of us with them.
READERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!
DAS KAPITALISM:
AN EPIC NOVEL OF THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
I grew up in a John Birch household. Robert W Welsh,Jr was held in high esteem. The basic principles remain .Producers vs recipients.
Socialism is death and destruction incarnate. Satan and his minions could not devise a finer plan. Recognize and confront evil. Evil does not require another label. It speaks for itself.
When you need a Bogeyman, take a look in the mirror. That person staring back at you should be the baddest motherfucker on the planet.
Someone tells you socialism/communism is great…punch them in the face. Tell them to get used to it. A way of life. Welcome to the communist party,”Pal!”
I have a relative, well “edumacated’ with a PhD, who believes there are only two options, socialism OR fascism. We disagree on this point, and many (if not all) others.
For those who have not been exposed to same, here is Rand’s assessment:
“It is obvious what the fraudulent issue of fascism versus communism accomplishes: it sets up, as opposites, two variants of the same political system; it eliminates the possibility of considering capitalism; it switches the choice of “Freedom or dictatorship?” into “Which kind of dictatorship?”—thus establishing dictatorship as an inevitable fact and offering only a choice of rulers. The choice—according to the proponents of that fraud—is: a dictatorship of the rich (fascism) or a dictatorship of the poor (communism).
That fraud collapsed in the 1940’s, in the aftermath of World War II.It is too obvious, too easily demonstrable that fascism and communism are not two opposites, but two rival gangs fighting over the same territory—that both are variants of statism, based on the collectivist principle that man is the rightless slave of the state—that both are socialistic, in theory, in practice, and in the explicit statements of their leaders—that under both systems, the poor are enslaved and the rich are expropriated in favor of a ruling clique—that fascism is not the product of the political “right,” but of the “left”—that the basic issue is not “rich versus poor,” but man versus the state, or: individual rights versus totalitarian government—which means: capitalism versus socialism.”
This is Oh So Clearly obvious with the explication of the acronym “Nazi”; yet vehemently denied by those who favor an alternate reality. And there is a Rand observation for that as well.
That was a great essay, thank you.
Thanks.
Merkel has Hitlers’ old job, but the song also stays the same. Socialists in power then, socialists in power now. Lebensraum and deadly anti-jewishness are two ingredients missing now, but they’re already clamping down on free speech there that doesn’t tow the party line. Their military isn’t much to speak of, but it could be a great way to revive the economy, and cause their neighbors to resort to the “German Look”, over their shoulders at what is going on in Germany. Thing is, the Panty-Waist socialists are in charge now, and screwing the pooch. If the National Socialists ever get back in, look for a Change in the Weather. Here, the Smiley Faced Socialists are in charge, and they’re screwing the pooch as well. If they get their way, look for them to eventually go all Cheka on the remaining middle class, and other producers, because they’re not achieving their goals. Every thing they need to do so is already in place. All that’s lacking is a fire and brimstone “Fuhrer”.
I would love your thoughts on the idea of Free Enterprise (i.e. Capitalism) constrained by the idea that the Capitalist must operate within the Country that protects it so that the people of that Country get the benefit of Capitalism. It seems that the flaw of capitalism is that once it is no longer constrained by the borders of the Country that fosters it; it packs up its factories and jobs and takes them to the nearest 3rd World hellhole to get the labor costs down.
Likewise, a Capitalist like Bill Gates can import H1B visa engineers to his hearts content, essentially bringing the third world within the borders of the Host Country, driving down wages. We have seen this in every segment of the economy where this citizen replacement has been tried; illegals in the Construction Industry (essentially slave labor), H1B visa engineers who get paid 60% of what a White engineer gets paid in the USA and dare not speak out against their employer else they get deported, the Aircraft Industry, Steel Industry, manufacturing of nearly every form. Destruction of a nation state in the form of “free Trade” and “International Capitalism” seem to destroy those who adopt it, but without the mega death of Socialism.
Could there not be a third way? Jefferson ran the Country with no internal taxes at all, doubled the size of the USA and developed the production capacity of the USA by imposing tariffs, which forced the USA to use what was available within the borders or pay the tariffs, thus employing the Country.
The proof is ALWAYS in the Pudding ! If Socialism was any good had any credence and had an overpowering love for the Workers why did it freeze work and torture to death untold millions ! The biggest fiend / Butcher in world History of course was the egregious sex-maniac and Tobacco -addicted Dictator Mao-Tse -Tung ! This evil tyrant bully and Womaniser was the only Billionaire in China and had over 50 Nuclear proof Villas all over China …probably financed by his Swiss accounts which were ultimately paid for by expropriation of State funds ! Yet STILL many of our western intellectuals praise this dreadful form of ” Government ” from the horn-rimmed Salons of Britain’s ultra-dim fact-denying University Dons and Donesses! If we do not learn the lessons of History and devote more time to removes the Communist agitators in our Schools and Colleges our ” Crackpot ” Judiciary and our slanted WOKE press we are bound to repeat the Catastrophic History of the Socialists in all their heinous guises !