The Socialist Left Wants to Make Things Right

Canada Free Press ^ | 06/17/15 | Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh

[Sean_Anthony]

Unfortunately many new immigrants, legal and illegal, want to establish in this country the exact third world poverty and crime they’ve escaped

It is a tune many failed socialist nations have heard before. When the mainstream media proclaimed a few years ago, “We are all socialists now,” people shrugged their shoulders and went about their capitalist business.

Do Americans at large understand that socialism involves various economic and political theories which advocate collective or government ownership of the means of production and the distribution of goods? I bold-faced the word “theories” because the practice is quite a resounding failure in most countries in which it was tried or it is currently used.

If you point to European Fabian socialists as being a success story, you are not paying attention to the bankruptcy level of debt of all these countries, the result of decades of unrestrained welfare and failed multiculturalism, to the level of confiscatory taxation, enslavement to government, and its forced tolerant social programs.

[mjp]

Capitalism is the only economic system that is both practical and moral. It is practical because its institutions lead to technological progress and capital accumulation, which leads to economic progress, which leads to prosperity. It is moral because it is compatible with reason, reality,human nature, natural rights, productiveness,increases in wealth, true justice, and the prohibition of force.

[TBP]

They only know how things worked where they’re from. The whole idea of markets, capitalism, and opportunity is foreign to them. The regimes back where they came from ingrained a hatred of the productive, successful people.

[John Locke]

My parents and I lived in a "third-world" country through the 1960s. We were surrounded by dirt poor Africans (and some very rich African politicians). But my father had a well-paying job, my mother had a well-paying job, and, during summer vacation from college, I had no trouble getting a well-paying job. The opportunities were there.

What had gone wrong? One big problem was tribalism. Anyone who had even a modest success was expected to hire his immediate family, his extended family, and anyone else in his tribe. With every worker surrounded by would-be parasites, the accumulation of capital was impossible. And without capital there is no investment, and no progress.

The socialist governments mentioned earlier have institutionalised exactly this system. They built welfare states, in which welfare is unconditional, index-linked to inflation, and a guaranteed right. If you think it through, across cycles of expansion and contraction, you'll see that this is a machine for diverting ever increasing amounts of money from the productive to the unproductive. And, in the process, destroying the capital needed for further progress.

And before we congratulate ourselves - in the USA, 45% of federal government spending is also on welfare, though we call it "entitlements". And these too are index-linked, unconditional, and an absolute right. We know what lies at the end of that road, and we are hurrying down it as fast as we can.

[Billthedrill]

The only real cure for socialist fantasies is a hard dose of reality, but it has to be up close and personal. Anyone who cares to follow life in North Korea or Cuba or Venezuela at the moment knows what the real results turn out to be: a rich, smooth-talking elite and an impoverished set of lower classes, the middle class having been plundered into nonexistence. And all of these counter-examples are ignored or glibly explained away and the credulous swallow the thing hook, line and sinker.

Intelligent socialists - yes, they exist - know this, and it is in order to avoid counter-examples that the Fabian ploy is followed, named after Fabius "Cunctator", the Delayer, the fellow who wore Hannibal out rather than engage him directly. Because if there aren't any counter-examples to socialist nonsense such as, say, West Berlin was to East Berlin, then there is no resistance (goes the theory). If there is no escape from socialism, if it is gradually imposed, there won't be any complaints. Goes the theory.

All of that runs contrary to history, and contrary to the fervent belief of the current Left, history can't really be rewritten for very long. In fact, as the author attests, those miserable under socialism knew it full well. "We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us" is bitter humor and an admission of truth.

Socialism is glib, attractive, and easy to understand, political fodder for the intellectually lazy. Why study history when you can codify the whole thing in terms of class struggle and dismiss it? The bill doesn't come due until later. But it does come due in the end.