Tag Archives: Socialism

Minimising Government’s Dominance over Your Life, by Jeff Thomas

Posted on November 3, 2021 | Leave a comment

If you really want to at least partially rid yourself of government, you’re probably going to have to move. From Jeff Thomas at internationalman.com:

Recently, whilst having lunch with several successful businessmen, the value of formal education was being discussed and one said, “When I got out of school, I thought I was fully educated and ready to take on the business world, but actually, I was clueless.”

The others laughed, recalling their own introductions into business. All agreed that, although they had taken all of the requisite courses, formal schooling prepared them not at all in the understanding of commerce.

That is, all except one. He, as a boy, had been encouraged by his parents to take on a paper route, open lemonade stands, cut lawns for neighbours, etc. Although his parents couldn’t afford university for him, by the time he graduated high school, he thoroughly understood the principles of commerce.

The bicycle that he rode in his early teens was bought out of profits from his early business ventures. Later on, he bought his first car out of his earnings. And so, when he left school, he hit the road running and was ahead of his “luckier” peers who were then at university.

When they graduated, each had an advantage the others didn’t have. Yet, at the lunch meeting mentioned above, each university graduate agreed that understanding commerce, which they had had to learn on their own, after graduation, was the central lesson that enabled their later success.

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Posted in Banking, Business, Civil Liberties, Economy, Governments, Investing, Taxes, Tyranny

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Central Banks and Socialism Are Forever Linked Together, by Jorg Guido Hullsman

Posted on October 23, 2021 | Leave a comment

You’ll never see free, private money in a socialized system. From Jorg Guido Hullsman at lewrockwell.com:

It is well known that socialism is a shortage economy. It is the economy of inefficiency and corruption, of indifferent workers and of bigwigs, of lacking spare parts, of lacking funds, of failure, of permanent reform needs and of constantly unsuccessful reforms. This concerns in particular total socialism, as it was realized in the Soviet Union or under National Socialism. But it is no less evident in the numerous partial socialisms that are featured in the real existing welfare state, in its numerous state “systems.” Budget deficits year in, year out despite high contributions—that is the reality in the state pension system and in the state health system. The state education system is similar: declining student performance and growing illiteracy despite sky-rocketing expenditure. No private entrepreneur could afford to let the costs get out of hand in such a way. Anyone who is in competition has to keep improving. Only those who have a legal monopoly and can make use of taxpayers’ money if necessary do not need it.

Now there is one partial socialism that stands out from the usual array of failures. Here we see gains instead of losses. Here we often find all the other signs of a successfully run company, from the private legal form to the pinstripe-filled boardroom. We are talking about central banking. The term “central bank” actually refers quite clearly to a centrally planned economy. But when people talk about the Fed, the ECB or other central banks today, hardly anyone thinks that they are talking about an offspring of the socialist spirit. On the contrary, central banks are typically viewed as particularly “capitalist.” After all, what would be more capitalist than money? And what would be more closely related to money than a bank?

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Posted in Banking, Business, Currencies, Debt, Governments, History, Philosophy, Politics, Propaganda

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“The Great Reset” Is the Road to Socialism Mises Warned Us About, by Tho Bishop

Posted on October 2, 2021 | Leave a comment

Socialism has been smuggled in by a thousand compromises. When a fundamental principle compromises with political expediency, who wins? From Thos Bishop at mises.org:

Through the sheer power of his intellectual output, Ludwig von Mises established himself as one of the most important intellectuals of the twentieth century. His work Human Action remains a foundational text of the Austrian school. His critique outlining the impracticality of socialism was vindicated with the fall of the Soviet Union and remains without a serious intellectual challenge today.

Just as important, but often overlooked, is his work on the economic system that continues to infect the world today: interventionism.

Like contemporaries such as James Burnham, Mises discerned that the true threat to free markets in the West was not a true socialist revolution, but rather a “middle of the road” approach that so attracted an intellectually shallow political class.

In 1950, during one of his most important speeches, Mises identified the most dangerous ideology on the global stage:

They reject socialism no less than capitalism. They recommend a third system, which, as they say, is as far from capitalism as it is from socialism, which as a third system of society’s economic organization, stands midway between the two other systems, and while retaining the advantages of both, avoids the disadvantages inherent in each. This third system is known as the system of interventionism. In the terminology of American politics it is often referred to as the middle-of-the-road policy.

This ideology succeeded where communism failed, successfully toppling governments around the world that never had true respect for property rights.

But as Mises understood, however, this “managerial revolution” could not last as a sustainable form of government. Interventionism may be politically convenient, but ultimately it is grounded in volatile inconsistencies. It must be rejected completely, or it will inevitably lead to more and more power shifting to the state.

This is precisely what we have seen.

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Posted in Capitalism, Civil Liberties, Collapse, Government, History, Politics

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Capitalism—A New Idea, by Jeff Thomas

Posted on September 28, 2021 | Leave a comment

There’s not one person on this planet who has lived under a purely capitalistic system, yet every economic ill and shortcoming is attributed to capitalism. From Jeff Thomas at internationalman.com:

Capitalism, whether praised or derided, is an economic system and ideology based on private ownership of the means of production and operation for profit.

Classical economics recognises capitalism as the most effective means by which an economy can thrive. Certainly, in 1776, Adam Smith made one of the best cases for capitalism in his book, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (known more commonly as The Wealth of Nations). But the term “capitalism” actually was first used to deride the ideology, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, in The Communist Manifesto, in 1848.

Of course, whether Mister Marx was correct in his criticisms or not, he lived in an age when capitalism and a free market were essentially one and the same. Today, this is not the case. The capitalist system has been under attack for roughly 100 years, particularly in North America and the EU.

A tenet of capitalism is that, if it’s left alone, it will sort itself out and will serve virtually everyone well. Conversely, every effort to make the free market less free diminishes the very existence of capitalism, making it less able to function.

Today, we’re continually reminded that we live under a capitalist system and that it hasn’t worked. The middle class is disappearing, and the cost of goods has become too high to be affordable. There are far more losers than winners, and the greed of big business is destroying the economy.

This is what we repeatedly hear from left-leaning people and, in fact, they are correct. They then go on to label these troubles as byproducts of capitalism and use this assumption to argue that capitalism should give way to socialism.

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Posted in Business, Capitalism, Civil Liberties, Collapse, Government, History, Philosophy, Politics

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Sustainability and Super Pandemics: The Connection by Dr. Igor Shepherd

Posted on September 16, 2021 | Leave a comment

Sustainability is one of those code words endlessly repeated by our would-be rulers. It means: let us rule the world. From Dr. Igor Shepherd at lewrockwell.com:

Sustainability. What the heck is this and what does it have to do with super pandemics? The “Kool-Aid” version of sustainability is defined as a way for people to use resources without the resources running out—but the actual blueprint behind it is to subvert current governments for global takeover. Sustainability is already deeply entrenched in all governments, world health organizations, military, universities, corporations, and the pharmaceutical goliaths rolling out the mRNA weaponized vaccines. Through sustainability, super pandemics become one nasty way with which to transform the world.

In the 1980’s, Agenda 21 emerged on the scene, and began to circulate among American thinkers, and cause a stir. Agenda 21 was a United Nation’s-founded “communist” scheme to globalize world governments by the year 2021, under the guise of “saving the environment.” The marketing campaign that our earth needed saving was the means with which the founders hoped to revamp the world’s governments under one stringent global umbrella. The premeditated “coup d’état” was out there in plain sight, but the globalists employed effective propaganda to convince the majority of people that Agenda 21 was all about the environment, and nothing more. The foolery worked, and the majority of Americans ignored the visible signs of infiltration.

To continue keeping this “freedom-flattening” plot under wraps, the globalists shifted gears, and labeled Agenda 21 under a softer tag, calling it Sustainable Development. Sustainable Development (SD) is code word for communism. It became popular in 1987, after a report titled, Our Common Future, was circulated under the direction of Gro Brundtland, who endorsed communism, and was vice president for Socialist International. She had previously worked as director for the World Health Organization. One of her most notable quotes provides clues that a planned emergency was on the books to usher in global change. She stated:

“In the face of an absolutely unprecedented emergency, society has no choice but to take dramatic action to avert a collapse of civilization. Either we will change our ways and build an entirely new kind of global society, or they will be changed for us.”

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Posted in Business, Civil Liberties, Collapse, Economics, Economy, Energy, Environment, Governments, Media, Medicine, Politics, Propaganda, Science

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The Soviet Union Is Gone, but the Young Yearn for Socialism, by Richard Ebeling

Posted on August 19, 2021 | Leave a comment

It’s one of the more pitiful aspects of contemporary education that most young people have no clue about the twentieth century horrors of socialism, and think it would actually be a desirable system under which to live. For their sake, and our own, let’s hope they never get their wish. From Richard Ebeling at aier.org:

This August marks the 30th anniversary of the beginning of the end to the Soviet Union. During August 19-21, 1991, hardline members of the Soviet Communist Party and the KGB attempted a coup d’état in Moscow to prevent the political and economic reforms introduced over the prior five years from going any further. The coup failed, and on Christmas Eve, 1991, the Soviet Union was dissolved and disappeared from the political map of the world.

The events of those days are especially imprinted on my mind because I was in Moscow at the time, watching and, indeed, even participating in those August 1991 events. Frequently traveling to the Soviet Union on privatization and market reform consulting work, especially in the, now, former Soviet republic of Lithuania and in Moscow, I witnessed the failed coup attempt and its immediate aftermath.

The Soviet regime had ruled Russia and the other 14 component republics of the U.S.S.R. for nearly 75 years, since the Bolshevik Revolution in November 1917 led by Vladimir Lenin and his communist cadre of Marxist followers. During that almost three-quarters of a century, first under Lenin and especially Joseph Stalin and then their successors, historians have estimated that upwards of 64 million people – innocent, unarmed men, women and children – died at the hands of the Soviet regime in the name of building the “bright, beautiful future” of socialism.

Mass Murder and Slave Labor Under Soviet Socialism

The forced collectivization of the land under Stalin in the early 1930s, alone, is calculated to have cost the lives of nine to twelve million Russian and Ukrainian peasants and their families who resisted the loss of their private farms and being forced into state collective farms that replaced them. Some were simply shot; others were tortured to death or sent to die as slave laborers in the concentration and labor camps in Siberia or Soviet Central Asia known as the GULAG. Millions were slowly starved to death by a government-created famine designed to force submission to the central planning dictates of Stalin and his henchmen.

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Posted in Economics, Economy, Education, Governments, Philosophy, Politics, Propaganda, Tyranny

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‘You Just Don’t Understand Socialism Like I Do,’ Says College Freshman To Man Who Escaped Socialism On A Raft

Posted on July 15, 2021 | 1 comment

From The Babylon Bee:

MIAMI, FL—While on his way to a summer sociology course at the University of Miami, local college freshman Eddard Pollyton noticed a Cuban American man sitting on a bench. He took the time to lecture the man, who had escaped socialism on a raft when he was young, on why socialism is actually good and how he knows a lot more about socialism than people from socialist countries.

“Greetings!” Pollyton said. “I’m Eddard, he/him. I see from your skin color—which is the most important thing about you—that you are Cuban. Pretty sad how those Cubans aren’t appreciating the great social programs they have right now, am I right?”

The man stared dumbfounded as the student went on and on about private ownership of the means of production, the plight of the proletariat, and the need for the workers to unite and work for the common good. He explained to the man who had nearly starved to death as a child and only survived because his parents had put him on a raft and dared a dangerous sea voyage across the Gulf of Mexico that Cubans have some of the best healthcare, free food and medicine, and literacy programs in the world.

Finally, the man had heard enough. “Get out of here. You young people have no idea what socialism is like, man.”

“Wait a minute—did you just assume my gender?”

https://babylonbee.com/news/you-just-dont-understand-socialism-like-i-do-says-college-freshman-to-man-escaping-socialism-on-raft

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The Sexual Left, the Welfare State, and the Divorce Revolution, by Stephen Baskerville

Posted on June 29, 2021 | Leave a comment

How the government destroyed the family. From Stephen Baskerville at chroniclesmagazine.org:

“All politics is on one level sexual politics.” —George Gilder

Extremists break out of the margins and take power when they fool opponents into advancing their agenda. By politicizing the family and sexuality, the left duped conservatives, and all of us, into becoming their accomplices.

Since last fall’s electoral coup, the United States has been well on its way toward becoming a de facto communist government. But it is not the communism that conservative Cassandras have warned against, nor did it come about as they expected. In fact, conservatives bear a huge share of the responsibility for what happened. Misunderstanding the dynamics of today’s left, they helped fulfill their own prophecies.

Americans have long prided themselves on being impervious to socialism. They even avoided creating an extensive European-style welfare state. But the U.S. was not lagging behind Europe; as always, it was leading. For Americans took a unique road to socialism: They created a government engine that bred its own class of insurgents.

Knowing that doctrinaire Marxism held little appeal for Americans, the left did an end run around this ideological obstacle. They enlisted conservatives to the cause of socialism by forsaking the rhetoric of class warfare, appealing instead to a sense of compassion for women and children that compassionate-conservative gallants could not resist.

The liberal left erected a different kind of welfare state: not broad-based social insurance for all, but a “safety net” limited to the poor (which in reality was anything but safe). In doing so, they defied the purists within their own ranks who rejected “welfarism” as a capitalist scheme to co-opt the working class. Operating according to its own innovative dynamic, safety-net socialism literally bred its own quasiproletariat of the marginalized, resentful, and entitled—all managed and directed by a vanguard of radicalized civil servant apparatchiks. At all levels, essential roles in this system were played by women.

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Posted in Government, Morality, Politics, Propaganda, Society

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Revisiting Parenthood, After A Century of Socialism And Freud, by Paul Rosenberg

Posted on June 21, 2021 | 1 comment

It’s not your fault! From Paul Rosenberg at freemansperspective.com:

We all know that parenthood has been publicly trashed over the past half century. The larger culture portrays Fathers as dolts and full-time moms as second class women. These ideas, hammered endlessly and over decades, have had their effects.

The big drivers of this abuse have been socialism and Freudian beliefs. I’ll explain below, but let’s be clear on the fact that both socialism and Freud’s “it’s your parents’ fault” can and must be thrown aside. We don’t need to keep arguing the same points, simply because dogmatists in marble buildings refuse to see reality.

If you’re not convinced that these twin gods of the 20th century preached ideas that failed at horrifying costs, please be honestly convinced first. But at this point I think most adults understand the truth of this: Socialism was a failure of the highest order, and Freudian ideas have failed at both large and small scales.

And so we should be convinced of something else: People still espousing these ideas are not to be taken as serious thinkers. Be kind to them, help them if you can, but stop wasting your time on them.

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Posted in Governments, Morality, Philosophy, Psychology

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Welcome To The Socialist Paradise Of California, by Michael Snyder

Posted on May 11, 2021 | Leave a comment

The People’s Republic of California is not quite the egalitarian utopia of which the socialists dream. From Michael Snyder at themostimportantnews.com:

If you like extremely high taxes, a ridiculously inflated cost of living, horrifying bureaucratic nightmares, rising crime rates, endless homeless encampments and “health restrictions” that make it nearly impossible to operate a small business successfully, then you are going to absolutely love California.  Vast hordes of people have fled the state over the past 12 months, and so that means that there is now plenty of room for more socialists to move in.  But before you come, you will want to make sure that you have completely discarded any lingering notions of “freedom” and “liberty” because they won’t be of any use to you once you arrive in California.

Over the past few years, California has gotten a bad rap for being an absolutely filthy place, but the truth is that authorities are going to great lengths to try to clean things up.

In fact, they just removed 180 pounds of feces from one homeless encampment alone…

This week, Echo Lake Park in Los Angeles California, the location of a former homeless encampment, received a much needed, and long overdue, deep cleaning.

The park was closed last month and since then, city officials have been working to clean and revitalize the park and have reportedly removed over 170 tents and other debris, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Among the 35 tons or 70,000 pounds of garbage, there were literal piles of poop, amounting to 180 pounds of feces and 564 pounds of urine according data from L.A. Sanitation & Environment workers. This did not include excrement collected from portable or permanent restrooms. Other hazardous waste like needles used for drugs, gasoline, and kerosene amounted to 300 pounds of the total trash collected, the LA Times noted.

Critics of California often focus on the worst parts of the state, and that is very unfortunate.

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Posted in Collapse, Crime, Governments, Law, Politics

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