Socialazzi and the Three E's

6/15/2002.

Socialazzi and the Three E's

By John Loeffler

France's petit mal de politique regarding Jean-Marie Le Pen, once again forced to the surface Europe's century-long struggle between communism and fascism along with its inability to recognize them as two sides of the same coin, and totally antithetical to a free society. Indeed Europe outside of the United Kingdom has always had a problem understanding the core concepts of freedom. France alone rocketed through five different governments in the same time the U.S. has had only one. Right now the entire continent is proceeding at breakneck speed into a new soviet-model collective as it coerces its member states through a deceptive dialectical process designed to march them from freedom to a totally planned society, all while promising them utopia.

Westerners erroneously adhere to the belief that socialism is leftist and fascism is rightist, dialectical opposites measured along a straight political plane of extremes. In reality, both lead away from freedom towards dictatorships, which are remarkably similar.

The Circle of Socialism

Perhaps a more realistic model would be a circle at the top of which stands a free market economy, private enterprise, a limited constitutional government with a bill of rights for the individual as a cornerstone of freedom. At the bottom of the circle rests a dictatorship -- individual or oligarchic -- sham rights revocable at any time by the state, and a world where the rule of law means everything is state controlled.

The only practical difference between the two opposites is that in a communist or socialist society government owns all property and directs all enterprise, whereas in a fascist society private property ownership continues but entrepreneurs must submit to government's ideologies and goals, chief of which is the task of funding government programs with the proceeds of private enterprise.

Socialism and fascism only appear different when they're sliding down the outside of their respective circles. Onece they arrive at the nether circle, both are functionally and historically very much alike. Both societies believe in total government control of the economy, education, morals, suppression of free speech and other rights, imposition of a politically correct ideology, subordination of citizens' rights to the goals of the state or collective, and the use of law to coerce and pro(per)secute those who dissent.

Bottom line: At the top of the circle in a free state the laws protect the people from government. At the bottom of the circle in a socialist or fascist state, the laws protect government from the people.

100% Successful Failure

Much of public debate today is not about whether we're going to have a free society vs. state control, but simply about which side of the circle we're going to slide down during the move away from freedom towards a global state-controlled society. Despite socialism's 100% track record of failure, the entire western world seems determined do it again, sliding down the left side of the circle, screaming epithets at fascism as it disappears around the curve, unaware that its current course will cause a head-on encounter with fascism going the other way at the bottom. Thereafter, both movements will be united, causing their citizens to live miserably ever after.

Indeed, after years of left-wing indoctrination in public schools systems, post-60s generations suffer from a curious myopia, which prevents them from distinguishing between a constitutional free-market republic and a top-down socialist state. Many even believe that socialism is the best a democratic government has to offer. Only a few apprehend the inherent evil and diminishing rights in the emerging political structures or understand why they are inimical to the free society they are happily leaving behind.

As we plot a plumb line toward global pantheistic socialism, it might be advisable to examine the three fundamentals of socialism: elitism, expropriation, and exemption.

Elitism

Genuine socialists are above all elitist. They know, and you don't. Socialists conceive themselves to be bright shining Quixotes tilting with windmills, saving humanity from itself, the planet from humanity, the economy from capitalism, the little guy from [your cause here] and everything else except big government, which socialists love. On the other hand, they view the putrid pile of pusillanimous pus we call society as the unwashed ignorant who must be saved from themselves. In this capacity, the opinions of the unwashed are to be ignored.

There is a difference between hard core socialist academics or politicians (ideologues) and the socialazzi (Lenin's "useful idiots"), the average Joe and Jane, who think government social programs are great, but never investigate whether or not socialism delivers its promises. Joe Socialazzi is also bothered that the rich seem to be getting richer and he seems to be getting poorer but just can't figure it out. To his credit, Joe Socialazzi genuinely cares about people, but he doesn't understand there is no such thing as a free lunch. The ideologues understand it's all about money, power, and control.

La vision grande

Socialist Quixotes usually have their gran vision del mundo, and ride in on the back of white Rocinantes -- a glittering response to genuine human need or an environmental crisis du jour. However, socialist solutions always ignore basic rules of both human nature and economics. As such they not only absolutely fail but also create far worse problems than existed before they started, which is why socialism always collapses of its own weight, but only after much damage has been wrought on the little guy.

Socialists do not like opinions in variance with the great vision. Thus, high priority on the socialist docket is to suppress free speech by whatever method feasible, without making themselves look like bad guys. Suppression of speech in the elitism phase is important. By the time everyone arrives at the exemption phase, everyone knows socialism is a lie but they can no longer say so. Indeed a hallmark of soviet society was that everyone had to give lip service to a series of official lies, which everyone knew were false but couldn't say so.

Expropriation

Once the socialist is in a position to implement his grand vision, he immediately faces a critical problem: funding. Grand designs require grand amounts of money. However, the ignorant unwashed masses -- curse their darkened uncaring hearts -- don't like to work for free, or have their hard-earned money taken from them.

So the socialist creates warfare between classes of people. He demonizes the haves and sanctifies the have-nots. He demonizes those who don't see the wisdom in the grand vision. Then he tells the have-nots it is moral, just, and good to seize what the haves have by force, and give it to the have-nots. He also says it is wrong for the haves to even try to earn what they have. Soak the rich, and save the planet. Viva el free lunch!

Here lies the core contradiction of socialism: socialists demonize capitalism but always require the wealth capitalism generates in order to implement and perpetuate their political schemes. The double speak must be maintained if socialists are to remain in power! The socialazzi never learn that there is no such thing as a free lunch until late in the game, when it's too late.

As socialist programs are created in rapid succession, a staggering bureaucracy comes into existence to support the administration of same, which siphons off the lion's share of what is supposed to be transferred from the haves to the have-nots. Once entrenched, this new bureaucracy has a vested interest in (1) perpetuating the problems it is supposed to be fixing in order to (2) sustain its cash flow in order to (3) keep itself in existence, regardless of who gets soaked. Remember, socialism is about power and control.

Fool me once...Shame on You

Socialism continues in existence as long as two factors remain in play:

(1) The underlying capitalism is resilient enough to bear the load. This involves being able to pay increasing levels of confiscatory taxation and dealing with an increasingly crushing regulatory burden or a horribly corrupt political system. These factors, however, always eliminate the little guy from the game! Little guys do not have the financial resources to fight an increasingly abusive system, resulting in one of socialism's most important dicta: Under socialism the middle class always disappears!

(2) The masses must continue believing that there is a free lunch and that only rich people are being soaked.

Exemption

While the game is ongoing, socialists always exempt themselves from the restrictive laws and confiscations they impose on everyone else. In essence, they become exactly what they preach against, but more importantly, once the jig is up, a more pernicious form of exemption sets in, as socialists make themselves immune from responsibility for the havoc they have caused: morally, legally and above all politically.

Sooner or later even the most mentally challenged becomes dimly aware that socialists look a lot like the rich haves they perpetually promise to soak. The socialazzi discover their money has been devalued, their assets seized, their freedoms quashed, their economy wrecked, they're broke and the system is out of control.

At this point, revolutions -- bloody or unbloody -- usually occur; exemption phase two. The economic horse collapses from abuse and overwork but the socialists adamantly refuse to dismount, even when confronted with a veeeeeery angry populace (vis a vis Argentina).

First they try to convince the public that evil rich capitalists are responsible for the horse's ill health and that the horse will recover if the people just make more sacrifices of their money and property. Occasionally the socialazzi are stupid enough to believe this and the horse can be kept alive for a little while longer this way, but it never regains its former health. Invariably the games socialists play to keep Rocinante alive radically exacerbate an already desperate situation to an ultimate conclusion.

The Third Way

In the end, the poor horse simply dies, leading socialists to the major challenge of their dubious careers. It is now impossible to convince the public that the bad smell isn't rotting horse carcass and that they're not responsible. Disaster is at hand when lo and behold, socialism meets its old enemy fascism going the other way in an encounter called, the Third Way.

Since the socialists don't want to give up money and power, they cut a deal with the big-time capitalists. The socialists make laws that are favorable only to the big guys, excluding the little guys from the game. At the same time the big capitalists agree to fund the socialists' dreams and agendas as long as they get exclusive preferential treatment.

Fool Me Twice...Shame on Me

In the end, the little guy gets soaked from both sides and loses both political and economic freedom as socialist governments inexorably follow this round-the-wheel pattern, away from freedom toward total state control. When disaster has finally overtaken the grand vision, the disorder and social disarray created by socialism can only be halted by either a dictatorship or an injection of free market capitalism imposed from without.

Europe never seems to have learned this lesson and keeps flirting with the same dangerous economic and political philosophies, which carried it into two world wars in less than a century. However, the U.S. and the U.N. seem equally determined to join Europe in participating in this new round of global socialism and dabbling in the Third Way.

But now we must ask: When this socialist round collapses -- which it will as all its ancestors did -- given that this is the first time socialism will be implemented on a global scale, since there will be no remaining source of external free-market capitalism to stop the endgame chaos, what will the global dictatorship look like?

John Loeffler is host of the nationally-syndicated weekly news program Steel on Steel, heard on the Information Radio Network. The program may be heard on the internet at www.steelonsteel.com.

THIS article at ECO - LOGIC --- ON - LINE

Once an economic factor has been rendered into a democratized commons, claims against uses producing transformation products can then be effected through the courts. These claims can be brought by anyone and focus exclusively upon controlling negatively valued transformation products without consideration of the total integrated impact of the contested use. (Since when did anybody sue in order to pay for a positive externality?)
As concentrations of transformation products in process outputs approach zero, minute reductions in pollutants can greatly increase the cost of treatment. As the cost of compliance consumes a higher fraction of the sale price of the economic good, the return on the original use approaches zero. Once the return on assets goes negative, investment in improving technology to reduce production of negative externalities becomes negatively valued as well. Few would develop new control technology because few could pay for it. If there is no return on the use of the asset, that use of the property will be abandoned, as it has become a zero-priced good. Negative investment return destroys the market value of the use.
Both claimant and agent are thus motivated to focus upon those transformation products that are most difficult to control, because it is those properties that are most likely to convert the use of the asset to that which they prefer. The fight between landowners, regulators, and activists then degenerates into increasingly trivial arguments regarding specifications, measurements, and enforcement that have increasingly large financial consequences for the owner. Remedial measures thus structurally diverge from an objective assessment of the total impact upon environmental health because that was never the claimants’ primary objective.
Rarely does either acquiring interest consider the possible unintended consequences of their actions, among other reasons because they have little experience in actual operations and no accountability for the consequences. The legal process is thus alienated from its purpose to establish justice, just as the regulatory process is directed away from ecological health. There is little civic accountability for maintaining a successful balance among competing interests, indeed, very likely the contrary is true. Problems are sources of civic claims by which to control the entire economy, a motivational structure antithetical to the very purpose of regulation.
As claims proliferate, the legislatures and courts are overwhelmed with cases that are technical and difficult to prove. They rely upon opinions from supposedly disinterested experts regarding the impacts of transformation products. Neither legislators or courts have the power to enforce a judgement; that power lies exclusively with the executive branch of government. The demand for expediency seduces legislatures and the courts to default upon their Constitutional responsibility, to the only civic agency with relevant expertise and police power. Control of use and, thus ownership of that use, is effectively transferred to the executive branch of government.
When taking land out of production profits the financial sponsors of a claim, it is cheaper to control the target use than to compensate the owner or buy the property. All it takes to manipulate a resource market by democratic means is to buy out the competition by manipulating majority perceptions about the risk of ecological harm associated with that target use. The few who can profit by taking competing resources out of production then have reason to sponsor the investment in political or legal action. They focus the first case against a weak target or obvious problem (which is why most such takings appear as local actions).
Established precedent then extends the applicability of cited legislation and lowers the cost successive claims. Property owners gradually lose their ability to finance the cost of compliance or legal resistance. Absent a profitable use, the market value of the target use approaches zero. After repeated exercise of external controls, purchase of the residual asset value concludes any remaining claim by an owner.
When a rival owner produces a competing or substitute good, the financial advantages of such tacit property acquisitions can be enormous. For example, if a developer funded public concerns about the negatively valued transformation products of farming to render the use of farmland non-economic and ripe for development, the land becomes less expensive to purchase.
This politically-sponsored dissolution of the Separation of Powers Principle, combines all three branches of government into one, that can derive power and funding by manufacturing claims on the use of property. The more externalities are regulated, the more power accrues to the agency to control the use of the producing asset to turn its use to corrupt purpose. When agency control is sufficient to alienate the interest of the agent from the democratic majority, the asset has then degenerated into a socialized commons.
The claims by which a commons is socialized are ironically often the same precedents as were used to extend the original democratic claim; i.e., by extending claims against the transformation products of the democratic use of the resource. With the legal precedents in place that were used to take control of the factors of production on individual property, the civic agent now has the legal tools to take control of ALL related private property. Control of the use of land is now in the hands of an agency that is alienated from accountability to the public claim for healthy ecosystem function. The agency instead serves the limited interests of the politically dominant, who use the power of government to gain de facto control of ALL factors of production.
History teaches that this is not a good thing.

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