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Dear Sherman Logan:

I am VERY interested in defining what sets socialism apart from other ideologies. Maybe that should have been the title to this thread, but I’m a little slow sometimes. I don’t think I’m up to that challenge, but could you point me in the right direction?

Some may argue the point, but to me the distinguishing feature is the obsession with equality between people before all other principles. While this principle was an effective and good thing when it involved tearing down social and political distinctions of the ancien regime, it became a very bad thing when it was applied to economics.

The only way to achieve and maintain an equal distribution of economic goods is to destroy the market. (Actually, in practice it doesn’t even work then.) Since the market is an outgrowth of human nature, the attempt to destroy it and keep it destroyed involves declaring eternal war on human nature, which inevitably leads to great atrocities.

There are a large number of socialist variants, of which Marxism with its Leninist and Stalinist sub-species is only one. But I firmly believe that all Socialist ideologies have this obsession with equality at their root.

BTW, this varies considerably from the equally various forms of fascism, which do not have this obsession, and indeed believe in its opposite, that humans are inherently and properly unequal, with the factor by which human inequality should be assigned varying with the fascist variant from nationality to ethnicity to “race” to religion.