The lunacy of socialism…

In a recent discussion on one of the lifestyle message boards I frequent there was a thread waxing poetic about the many joys of socialism. It’s a fairly amusing read if only because it is a sort of fishbowl showing off every different kind of damp eyed “but what about the poor exploited workers” hand wringing you always see about it.

Given that the forum itself is basically over-run with anti-capitalists who spend a fair amount of their time fist bumping each other (now that Obama made it cool) in between blaming the US and capitalism for all the evils of the world any attempt to bring facts into the discussion were doomed. Posted this there anyway because I wanted to make some of the points here on Herdwatching and so it was a two socialists with one stone thing.

As always, I will not directly quote those I am responding to since it is a private forum.

I was going to jump into this thread – but then it became clear that this wasn’t a discussion of reality but one of religious faith. The faith in question is that despite all real world evidence there are those who will always believe that Socialism is a good idea.

Rather than try and argue the facts of socialisms failures, since the facts don’t seem to be important, let’s look at the core ethical concept underlying it. In any system of government where others get to determine by law (not market) how much you are allowed to earn, what you are allowed to charge and how much you are allowed to keep of what you earn there is forced servitude happening to that degree.

An yes, the US is included in this. The ridiculously unbalance tax system relies on the moral concept that if you happen to actually be successful the state has the right to disproportionately penalize you to the benefit of those who were less successful. In short the US tax system is currently based on the idea that the more you earn, the less right you have to keep it.

That this chafes at most people is a good sign for humanity. In fact, when the reality is plain, so many people realize this is unfair that those politicians who want to gain favor by forcibly redistributing wealth from those who earned it to those who did not have to also provide a obscuring mechanism to try and hide this fact. Thus we get the silliness in campaigns where someone will claim “the rich don’t pay their fair share” in a nation where the top 10% of “the rich” bear more than 50% of the total tax burden.

Anytime someone looks at you and presumes to decide when you have “too much” or when you have “enough” and feels that they then have the right to confiscate whatever part of your property or time they feel you have to “spare” they are proposing to enslave you. It is that simple, and that wrong.

Here was a quote to the effect that the driving force behind capitalism (greed) is not best described as “human nature” but rather as one of our “baser instincts”.

Demanding that you are allowed to keep the benefits of your own work and determine it’s value is not a “baser instinct” – it is common sense and the only way that has at it’s core a respect for human dignity. Anything less is, in a very real sense, slavery.

It isn’t advanced or forward thinking.

The rest of the thread is full of pointless name calling, until the attempt is made to raise up China as if it proves something useful.

Here was a quote to the effect that we cannot judge the failures of socialism as a mark against socialism because it is often infiltrated by greed

Are we defining greed here as “have the urge to benefit from their skills and efforts”? Because that seems to be the normal definition of “greedy” whenever this comes up.

Socialism fails, and fails spectacularly, the closer it is to being a "pure” socialism unless it is constantly fed with resources and capital from outside of itself. In short, a socialist state can live as a parasite embedded in a larger world economy that is actually producing wealth somewhere else, but it is not self driving.

Currently, for instance, China is “kicking our ass” not because their form of semi-socialist economy is stronger, but because they are without many of the legal barriers to worker and environmental exploitation that makes some forms of wealth creation impractical in the USA. Not because capitalism prevents them, but because we as a nation have decided we don’t want them.

Oh – and that huge ass population doesn’t hurt. When you have that many oxen pulling away, it doesn’t matter so much that the wheels are square.

I doubt I will be returning to this thread but it was amusing

Enjoy!

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