Socialism Is Slavery

Last week I posted about how Socialism was the result of runaway romanticism.  I looked at the history of the romantics who created the philosophy of Socialism.

One advantage of the internet is that easy access to material that once was kept in dusty old tomes in university libraries where the average people can’t actually read them. Like this.

http://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/all-socialism-involves-slavery

All socialism involves slavery.

What is essential to the idea of a slave? We primarily think of him as one who is owned by another. To be more than nominal, however, the ownership must be shown by control of the slave’s actions—a control which is habitually for the benefit of the controller. That which fundamentally distinguishes the slave is that he labours under coercion to satisfy another’s desires. The relation admits of sundry gradations. Remembering that originally the slave is a prisoner whose life is at the mercy of his captor, it suffices here to note that there is a harsh form of slavery in which, treated as an animal, he has to expend his entire effort for his owner’s advantage. Under a system less harsh, though occupied chiefly in working for his owner, he is allowed a short time in which to work for himself, and some ground on which to grow extra food. A further amelioration gives him power to sell the produce of his plot and keep the proceeds. Then we come to the still more moderated form which commonly arises where, having been a free man working on his own land, conquest turns him into what we distinguish as a serf; and he has to give to his owner each year a fixed amount of labour or produce, or both: retaining the rest himself. Finally, in some cases, as in Russia before serfdom was abolished, he is allowed to leave his owner’s estate and work or trade for himself elsewhere, under the condition that he shall pay an annual sum. What is it which, in these cases, leads us to qualify our conception of the slavery as more or less severe? Evidently the greater or smaller extent to which effort is compulsorily expended for the benefit of another instead of for self-benefit. If all the slave’s labour is for his owner the slavery is heavy, and if but little it is light. Take now a further step. Suppose an owner dies, and his estate with its slaves comes into the hands of trustees; or suppose the estate and everything on it to be bought by a company; is the condition of the slave any the better if the amount of his compulsory labour remains the same? Suppose that for a company we substitute the community; does it make any difference to the slave if the time he has to work for others is as great, and the time left for himself is as small, as before? The essential question is—How much is he compelled to labour for other benefit than his own, and how much can he labour for his own benefit? The degree of his slavery varies according to the ratio between that which he is forced to yield up and that which he is allowed to retain; and it matters not whether his master is a single person or a society. If, without option, he has to labour for the society, and receives from the general stock such portion as the society awards him, he becomes a slave to the society. Socialistic arrangements necessitate an enslavement of this kind; and towards such an enslavement many recent measures, and still more the measures advocated, are carrying us. Let us observe, first, their proximate effects, and then their ultimate effects.

And this from De Toqueville.

Yes, gentlemen, sooner or later, the question of socialism, which everyone seems to fear and which no one, up to now, has dared treat of, must be brought into the open, and this Assembly must decide it. We are duty-bound to clear up this issue, which lies heavy upon the breast of France. I confess that it is principally because of this that I mount the podium today, that the question of socialism might finally be settled. I must know, the National Assembly must know, all of France must know—is the February Revolution a socialist revolution or is it not? [“Excellent!”]

It is not my intention to examine here the different systems which can all be categorized as socialist. I want only to attempt to uncover those characteristics which are common to all of them and to see if the February Revolution can be said to have exhibited those traits.

Now, the first characteristic of all socialist ideologies is, I believe, an incessant, vigorous and extreme appeal to the material passions of man. [Signs of approval.]

Thus, some have said: “Let us rehabilitate the body”; others, that “work, even of the hardest kind, must be not only useful, but agreeable”; still others, that “man must be paid, not according to his merit, but according to his need”; while, finally, they have told us here that the object of the February Revolution, of socialism, is to procure unlimited wealth for all.

A second trait, always present, is an attack, either direct or indirect, on the principle of private property. From the first socialist who said, fifty years ago, that “property is the origin of all the ills of the world,” to the socialist who spoke from this podium and who, less charitable than the first, passing from property to the property-holder, exclaimed that “property is theft,” all socialists, all, I insist, attack, either in a direct or indirect manner, private property. [“True, true.”] I do not pretend to hold that all who do so, assault it in the frank and brutal manner which one of our colleagues has adopted. But I say that all socialists, by more or less roundabout means, if they do not destroy the principle upon which it is based, transform it, diminish it, obstruct it, limit it, and mold it into something completely foreign to what we know and have been familiar with since the beginning of time as private property. [Excited signs of assent.]

Now, a third and final trait, one which, in my eyes, best describes socialists of all schools and shades, is a profound opposition to personal liberty and scorn for individual reason, a complete contempt for the individual. They unceasingly attempt to mutilate, to curtail, to obstruct personal freedom in any and all ways. They hold that the State must not only act as the director of society, but must further be master of each man, and not only master, but keeper and trainer. [“Excellent.”] For fear of allowing him to err, the State must place itself forever by his side, above him, around him, better to guide him, to maintain him, in a word, to confine him. They call, in fact, for the forfeiture, to a greater or less degree, of human liberty, [Further signs of assent.] to the point where, were I to attempt to sum up what socialism is, I would say that it was simply a new system of serfdom. [Lively assent.]

I have not entered into a discussion of the details of these systems. I have indicated what socialism is by pointing out its universal characteristics. They suffice to allow an understanding of it. Everywhere you might find them, you will be sure to find socialism, and wherever socialism is, these characteristics are met.

IS SOCIALISM, gentlemen, as so many have told us, the continuation, the legitimate completion, the perfecting of the French Revolution? Is it, as it has been pretended to be, the natural development of democracy? No, neither one or the other. Remember the Revolution! Re-examine the awesome and glorious origin of our modern history. Was it by appealing to the material needs of man, as a speaker of yesterday insisted, that the French Revolution accomplished those great deeds that the whole world marvelled at? Do you believe that it spoke of wages, of well-being, of unlimited wealth, of the satisfaction of physical needs?

Citizen Mathieu: I said nothing of the kind.

Citizen de Tocqueville: Do you believe that by speaking of such things it could have aroused a whole generation of men to fight for it at its borders, to risk the hazards of war, to face death? No, gentlemen, it was by speaking of greater things, of love of country, of the honor of France, of virtue, generosity, selflessness, glory, that it accomplished what it did. Be certain, gentlemen, that it is only by appealing to man’s noblest sentiments that one can move them to attain such heights. [“Excellent, excellent.”]

And as for property, gentlemen: it is true that the French Revolution resulted in a hard and cruel war against certain property-holders. But, concerning the very principle of private property, the Revolution always respected it. It placed it in its constitutions at the top of the list. No people treated this principle with greater respect. It was engraved on the very frontispiece of its laws.

The French Revolution did more. Not only did it consecrate private property, it universalized it. It saw that still a greater number of citizens participated in it. [Varied exclamations. “Exactly what we want!”]

It is thanks to this, gentlemen, that today we need not fear the deadly consequences of socialist ideas which are spread throughout the land. It is because the French Revolution peopled the land of France with ten million property-owners that we can, without danger, allow these doctrines to appear before us. They can, without doubt, destroy society, but thanks to the French Revolution, they will not prevail against it and will not harm us. [“Excellent.”]

And finally, gentlemen, liberty. There is one thing which strikes me above all. It is that the Old Regime, which doubtless differed in many respects from that system of government which the socialists call for (and we must realize this) was, in its political philosophy, far less distant from socialism than we had believed. It is far closer to that system than we. The Old Regime, in fact, held that wisdom lay only in the State and that the citizens were weak and feeble beings who must forever be guided by the hand, for fear they harm themselves. It held that it was necessary to obstruct, thwart, restrain individual freedom, that to secure an abundance of material goods it was imperative to regiment industry and impede free competition. The Old Regime believed, on this point, exactly as the socialists of today do. It was the French Revolution which denied this.

Gentlemen, what is it that has broken the fetters which, from all sides, had arrested the free movement of men, goods and ideas? What has restored to man his individuality, which is his real greatness? The French Revolution! [Approval and clamor.] It was the French Revolution which abolished all those impediments, which broke the chains which you would refashion under a different name. And it is not only the members of that immortal assembly—the Constituent Assembly, that assembly which founded liberty not only in France but throughout the world—which rejected the ideas of the Old Regime. It is the eminent men of all the assemblies which followed it!

AND AFTER this great Revolution, is the result to be that society which the socialists offer us, a formal, regimented and closed society where the State has charge of all, where the individual counts for nothing, where the community masses to itself all power, all life, where the end assigned to man is solely his material welfare—this society where the very air is stifling and where light barely penetrates? Is it to be for this society of bees and beavers, for this society, more for skilled animals than for free and civilized men, that the French Revolution took place? Is it for this that so many great men died on the field of battle and on the gallows, that so much noble blood watered the earth? Is it for this that so many passions were inflamed, that so much genius, so much virtue walked the earth?

No! I swear it by those men who died for this great cause! It is not for this that they died. It is for something far greater, far more sacred, far more deserving of them and of humanity. [“Excellent.”] If it had been but to create such a system, the Revolution was a horrible waste. A perfected Old Regime would have served adequately. [Prolonged clamor.]

I mentioned a while ago that socialism pretended to be the legitimate continuation of democracy. I myself will not search, as some of my colleagues have done, for the real etymology of this word, democracy. I will not, as was done yesterday, rummage around in the garden of Greek roots to find from whence comes this word. [Laughter.] I look for democracy where I have seen it, alive, active, triumphant, in the only country on earth where it exists, where it could possibly have been established as something durable in the modern world—in America. [Whispers.]

There you will find a society where social conditions are even more equal than among us; where the social order, the customs, the laws are all democratic; where all varieties of people have entered, and where each individual still has complete independence, more freedom than has been known in any other time or place; a country essentially democratic, the only completely democratic republics the world has ever known. And in these republics you will search in vain for socialism. Not only have socialist theories not captured public opinion there, but they play such an insignificant role in the intellectual and political life of this great nation that they cannot even rightfully boast that people fear them.

America today is the one country in the world where democracy is totally sovereign. It is, besides, a country where socialist ideas, which you presume to be in accord with democracy, have held least sway, the country where those who support the socialist cause are certainly in the worst position to advance them I personally would not find it inconvenient if they were to go there and propagate their philosophy, but in their own interests, I would advise them not to. [Laughter.]

A Member: Their goods are being sold right now.

Citizen de Tocqueville: No, gentlemen. Democracy and socialism are not interdependent concepts. They are not only different, but opposing philosophies. Is it consistent with democracy to institute the most meddlesome, all-encompassing and restrictive government, provided that it be publicly chosen and that it act in the name of the people? Would the result not be tyranny, under the guise of legitimate government and, by appropriating this legitimacy assuring to itself the power and omnipotence which it would otherwise assuredly lack? Democracy extends the sphere of personal independence; socialism confines it. Democracy values each man at his highest; socialism makes of each man an agent, an instrument, a number. Democracy and socialism have but one thing in common—equality. But note well the difference. Democracy aims at equality in liberty. Socialism desires equality in constraint and in servitude. [“Excellent, excellent.”]

THE FEBRUARY REVOLUTION, accordingly, must not be a “social” one, and if it must not be then we must have the courage to say so. If it must not be then we must have the energy to loudly proclaim that it should not be, as I am doing here. When one is opposed to the ends, he must be opposed to the means by which one arrives at those ends. When one has no desire for the goal he must not enter onto the path which necessarily leads him there. It has been proposed today that we enter down that very path.

We must not follow that political philosophy which Baboeuf so ardently embraced [cries of approval]—Baboeuf, the grand-father of all modern socialists. We must not fall into the trap he himself indicated, or, better, suggested by his friend, pupil and biographer, Buonarotti. Listen to Buonarotti’s words. They merit attention, even after fifty years.

A Member: There are no Babovists here.

Citizen de Tocqueville: “The abolition of individual property and the establishment of the Great National Economy was the final goal of his (Baboeuf’s) labors. But he well realized that such an order could not be established immediately following victory. He thought it essential that [the State] conduct itself in such manner that the whole people would do away with private property through a realization of their own needs and interests.” Here are the principal methods by which he thought to realize his dream. (Mind you, it is his own panegyrist I am quoting.) “To establish, by laws, a public order in which property-holders, provisionally allowed to keep their goods, would find that they possessed neither wealth, pleasure, or consideration, where, forced to spend the greater part of their income on investment or taxes, crushed under the weight of a progressive tax, removed from public affairs, deprived of all influence, forming, within the State, nothing but a class of suspect foreigners, they would be forced to leave the country, abandoning their goods, or reduced to accepting the establishment of the Universal Economy.”

A Representative: We’re there already!

Citizen de Tocqueville: There, gentlemen, is Baboeuf’s program. I sincerely hope that it is not that of the February republic. No, the February republic must be democratic, but it must not be socialist—

A Voice from the Left: Yes! [“No! No!” (interruption)]

Citizen de Tocqueville: And if it is not to be socialist, what then will it be?

A Member from the Left: Royalist!

Citizen de Tocqueville (turning toward the left): It might, perhaps become so, if you allow it to happen, [much approval] but it will not.

If the February Revolution is not socialist, what, then, is it? Is it, as many people say and believe, a mere accident? Does it not necessarily entail a complete change of government and laws? I don’t think so.

When, last January, I spoke in the Chamber of Deputies, in the presence of most of the delegates, who murmured at their desks, albeit because of different reasons, but in the same manner in which you murmured at yours a while ago—[“Excellent, excellent.”]

(The speaker turns towards the left)

—I told them: Take care. Revolution is in the air. Can’t you feel it? Revolution is approaching. Don’t you see it? We are sitting on a volcano. The record will bear out that I said this. And why?—[Interruption from the left.]

Did I have the weakness of mind to suppose that revolution was coming because this or that man was in power, or because this or that incident excited the political anger of the nation? No, gentlemen. What made me believe that revolution was approaching, what actually produced the revolution, was this: I saw a basic denial of the most sacred principles which the French Revolution had spread throughout the world. Power, influence, honors, one might say, life itself, were being confined to the narrow limits of one class, such that no country in the world presented a like example.

That is what made me believe that revolution was at our door. I saw what would happen to this privileged class, that which always happens when there exists small, exclusive aristocracies. The role of the statesman no longer existed. Corruption increased every day. Intrigue took the place of public virtue, and all deteriorated.

Thus, the upper class.

And among the lower classes, what was happening? Increasingly detaching themselves both intellectually and emotionally from those whose function it was to lead them, the people at large found themselves naturally inclining towards those who were well-disposed towards them, among whom were dangerous demagogues and ineffectual utopians of the type we ourselves have been occupied with here.

Because I saw these two classes, one small, the other numerous, separating themselves little by little from each other, the one reckless, insensible and selfish, the other filled with jealousy, defiance and anger, because I saw these two classes isolated and proceeding in opposite directions, I said—and was justified in saying—that revolution was rearing its head and would soon be upon us. [“Excellent.”]

Was it to establish something similar to this that the February Revolution took place? No, gentlemen, I refuse to believe it. As much as any of you, I believe the opposite. I want the opposite, not only in the interests of liberty but also for the sake of public security.

I ADMIT that I did not work for the February Revolution, but, given it, I want it to be a dedicated and earnest revolution because I want it to be the last. I know that only dedicated revolutions endure. A revolution which stands for nothing, which is stricken with sterility from its birth, which destroys without building, does nothing but give birth to subsequent revolutions. [Approval.]

I wish, then, that the February revolution have a meaning, clear, precise and great enough for all to see.

And what is this meaning? In brief, the February Revolution must be the real continuation, the honest and sincere execution of that which the French Revolution stood for, it must be the actualization of that which our fathers dared but dream of. [Much assent.]

Citizen Ledru-Rollin: I demand the floor.

Citizen de Tocqueville: That is what the February Revolution must be, neither more nor less. The French Revolution stood for the idea that, in the social order, there might be no classes. It never sanctioned the categorizing of citizens into property-holders and proletarians. You will find these words, charged with hate and war, in none of the great documents of the French Revolution. On the contrary, it was grounded in the philosophy that, politically, no classes must exist; the Restoration, the July Monarchy, stood for the opposite. We must stand with our fathers.

The French Revolution, as I have already said, did not have the absurd pretension of creating a social order which placed into the hands of the State control over the fortunes, the well-being, the affluence of each citizen, which substituted the highly questionable “wisdom” of the State for the practical and interested wisdom of the governed. It believed that its task was big enough, to grant to each citizen enlightenment and liberty. [“Excellent.”]

The Revolution had this firm, this noble, this proud belief which you seem to lack, that it sufficed for a courageous and honest man to have these two things, enlightenment and liberty, and to ask nothing more from those who govern him.

The Revolution was founded in this belief. It had neither the time nor the means to bring it about. It is our duty to stand with it and, this time, to see that it is accomplished.

Finally, the French Revolution wished—and it is this which made it not only beatified but sainted in the eyes of the people—to introduce charity into politics. It conceived the notion of duty towards the poor, towards the suffering, something more extended, more universal than had ever preceded it. It is this idea that must be recaptured, not, I repeat, by substituting the prudence of the State for individual wisdom, but by effectively coming to the aid of those in need, to those who, after having exhausted their resources, would be reduced to misery if not offered help, through those means which the State already has at its disposal.

http://oll.libertyfund.org/pages/tocqueville-s-critique-of-socialism-1848

The fact is that Socialism involves taking. Has anybody ever heard any Socialist talking about what they have to give?  All the rhetoric you hear from Socialists is how others should give up what they have.  For the more deserving, which somehow always seems to involve the Socialists

Not just taking people’s property, but their souls as well. There is a word for that.  That word is slavery.  For something that has existed since the beginning of time and still exists in parts of the world, it’s amazing that almost nothing good can ever be said about it.  When  a socialist talks about people It’s always about how the Socialist is the best equipped to make decisions for them. Even when those decisions turn out so consistently bad.

We Americans have spent a generation’s treasure, an amount so huge that it boggles the mind on the poor and they remain in the same place. In fact, the people that spend the money want it to remain so.  But that money has been stolen from the productive and more importantly, from the future and there is nothing to show for it. This is what Socialist thinking and romanticism creates.

Unlike even hardcore leftists like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, Sanders comes out openly for the redistribution of wealth. “It’s not your money. It’s society’s.” That’s it. We hear a lot about how the redistribution of wealth is bad for the economy, and of course it is. When you take wealth out of the hands of people who competently created it, and put it into the hands of those who could never have made an honest $10 (see Sanders’ personal history), then you’re asking for trouble, economically. It would be like turning your bank account or IRA over to a ten-year-old, telling him, “Spend it as you like.”

We hear less about how redistribution of wealth is morally wrong. Yet it is. Ayn Rand, in her novel Atlas Shrugged and elsewhere, had the gumption and honesty to point out what should have been obvious. When you steal from a person, you violate his individual rights. It doesn’t become “not theft” simply because the person makes over $250,000 a year, or over a billion a year, just because you choose to arbitrarily violate his individual and property rights at that point.

What about the effect of wealth redistribution on those to whom it’s redistributed? We almost never hear anything about that. It’s taken for granted that the person receiving the wealth redistribution is better off. But how can that be?

For one thing, government is inefficient, and often corrupt. Government is not a private charity. An honest charity has a rational interest in seeing to it that the charity’s beneficiary will get the intended benefit. Sometimes charities are corrupt, but usually they are not. When they are, they are exposed and shamed, even prosecuted. When a government charity is proven corrupt, they usually end up with more tax money and anyone who criticizes this will be labeled a racist. Bottom line? Private charities can go out of business; government programs almost never do.

If you’re really in need of charity, then you’re far better off with a private charity, than with a red-tape laden, paperwork-drowning government-run one. Look at the fiasco that’s Obamacare. This is what happens when you try to turn charity into a government-run program.

Redistribution of wealth changes the nature of charity. Instead of the recipient thinking, “Somebody, out of the kindness of his or her heart, wanted me to be better off,” the recipient knows full well that the donations were taken by force. This changes the psychology. It changes the whole dynamic. The psychology shifts from benevolence and appreciation to entitlement, even nastiness or defensiveness. “Well of course I’m getting this help. I need it, and I deserve it.” People obtaining assistance and benefits from the government often complain about the poor treatment they receive from government welfare officers. But what else can they expect? There’s no mutual respect or benevolence in a context where force rules.

Redistribution of wealth takes the rational judgment of the donor out of charity. This means the beneficiary gets the benefit as an entitlement, as a right, not as a favor. The moment this happens, it’s no longer charity. Government, while much less efficient than private charity, is better at ensuring that those who do not deserve charity nevertheless get it. It’s so easy to lie, cheat and manipulate your way through a government system, since “judgment” consists of looking right on paper more than a donor making any kind of intelligent judgment. Who deserves charity, and who does not? Rationally speaking, a person deserves help if (1) the help is temporary, i.e. a hand up and not a handout; and (2) the person suffers through no fault of his or her own. The help, of course, must always be voluntary. While a person has every legal right to give charity to someone not deserving by this definition, it’s appalling tyranny to watch the government impose it as an entitlement. (This applies to corporations no less than individuals, by the way.)

Government does not give hands up, as most people—Donald Trump included, in his defense of the so-called social safety net—mistakenly assume. Government provides toxic incentives to stay on the benefit. I cannot tell you the number of people I have known, through my work, who reluctantly get dependent on a government handout (e.g. Social Security disability), a meager income to be sure, and then feel an incentive not to work lest they lose the benefit. It shatters their spirit, their self-confidence, and any rational incentive to make themselves into capable, self-sustaining individuals, even on a modest scale. And this misery happens in the context of a stagnant, minimal income.

Entitlement and redistribution of wealth shatter lives. I am so sick of people against these things being on the defensive. We give the moral high ground to the likes of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, whose beliefs and policies are responsible not only for progressive destruction of the economy, but also for sacrificing the lives and souls of millions of people who become dependent on this permanent form of help.

https://drhurd.com/2016/01/30/57843/

 

 

One thing to remember is that like our current Democrat candidates for President, Socialist don’t see you as anything other than things to be used.  How that is different than any of the societies that have existed since the dawn of time is beyond me.

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/430898/hillary-talks-about-americans-theyre-peasants

Venezuela, for example, is marching into the socialist future by marching into the socialist past. The latest news is that the entire population of the country is now subject to being drafted as agricultural laborers.

Venezuela said private and public companies will be obliged to let their workers be reassigned to grow crops, in a dramatic move in the middle of the country’s crippling economic crisis. The Labor Ministry announced the measure as part of the economic emergency already in effect; it will require all employers in Venezuela to let the state have their workers ‘to strengthen production’ of food.

This was announced in Venezuela more than a week ago, but the first reports showed up in English in the American press just a few days ago, and it is still being ignored by many mainstream outlets. It would have been a shame, after all, to upset all those dead-end Bernie supporters at the Democratic convention with disquieting news from utopia.

Anyone who knows much about the history of the twentieth century (which is to say, appallingly few of us) will experience a little shock of recognition from that report. This is precisely what the Soviets used to do, dragooning white-collar professionals—engineers, lawyers, playwrights, college professors—to trudge out to the fields at harvest time every year in a flailing attempt to squeeze production out of a disastrous system of “collectivized” agriculture.

I doubt it ever made much difference, and I’ve always suspected its real purpose was not to aid in the harvest but to remind the rank-and-file of the Soviet intelligentsia how easily the state could ship them off to do forced manual labor.

This is what used to be known as “universal labor conscription,” which was imposed by the Soviets in 1918, in which “all those capable of working, regardless of their regular jobs, were subject to being called upon to carry out various labor tasks”—a system pretty much identical to the Medieval institution of serfdom. The measure under which this system was imposed was called the “Declaration of the Rights of the Toiling Masses and Exploited People.” George Orwell never had to make anything up.

Now we’re seeing this again in Venezuela. As in the Soviet Union, Venezuela has specifically targeted agriculture and food production and distribution to reshape according to socialist ideals. For the Soviets, the big targets were the kulaks, prosperous free-holding farmers, who were viewed as dangerously independent and had to be replaced by collective farms. For Venezuela, it was the supermarkets and shop-owners who were targeted as exploiters and enemies of the regime. The result is the same: a chronic shortage of food that has people scavenging in dumpsters and raiding zoos to slaughter animals for their meat.

This is a revealing story about the actual meaning of socialism and what it really does for “the worker.” It ends in an “economic emergency” being used as an excuse for the state “giving itself authority to order individuals from one job to another.” So the advanced economic system of the future ends up being, in practice, a throwback to the primitive economic system of the barbaric past.

 

In Venezuela’s Socialist Paradise, Workers Report To Labor Camps

The end is near for Venezuela.  It takes real genius to create endemic poverty in a state where you can pump resources out of the ground and famine where the growing season is year around.  Yet that is what Venezuela has managed.  So they no longer can no longer even afford the ink to print the fake money.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/point/261711/socialism-works-until-you-run-out-money-pay-paper-daniel-greenfield#.VrTqOjpQQqg.facebook

This probably not going to end well for Venezuela.  Which is what happens when romantic nostalgia meets harsh realities.  The fact is that once things become involuntary, the blood will inevitably start to flow. If the what happened in the last century is any indication there will be lots of blood, but very little food and none of the prosperity that the Progressives always promise.

China has perhaps the bloodiest history.  Here is slavery and Socialism run amuck. Far from being a paradise China was turned into hell on earth.   All common sense and internal knowledge was sacrificed to the romantic vision and in the end there was nothing to show for it.  The irony is that if Mao had gone to Hong Kong and talked Mr. Cowperthwaite, all his goals would have been achieved.  Instead he wanted to let the country starve.  The problem is that if you starve the countryside one year or so, the cities aren’t going to have anything to eat the next year.

http://www.historytoday.com/frank-dik%C3%B6tter/looking-back-great-leap-forward

The video  makes the sickness almost seem like a good thing. The results speak for themselves. by enslaving everyone to the gods of production, the Chinese Communists drained away the souls and possibilities of all those people. they also laid the trap in the network of lies that were inevitable as the people in charge desired to prove that the fantasy was real.  But the fantasy was impossible and  Mao was not a messenger of god.

About the same time that the Great Leap Backward, the US invented the supermarket. At the same time that the Chinese were literally eating themselves food was so abundant that produce was piled up for people to buy.  The advocates of Socialism here in the states have always had supermarkets.  They cannot seem to wrap their heads around the fact that in a Socialist society there are  no extras like supermarkets stuffed with food.

https://theartsmechanical.wordpress.com/2016/01/21/the-supermarket-index-francis-turner/

I’ve had the honor of knowing many who have escaped from the Socialist East of the Soviet Empire.  I’ve heard the stories of privation and inequality from people with first hand experience.  Socialism is not an abstract to them, but something they endured and overcame.  I do know one thing, that almost all of them would do just about anything to prevent the same things from happening here. We should learn from that.

The idea that Socialism results in a more equitable and efficient society has never been proven as a fact. Rather the opposite in fact.  Every attempt to create a Socialist utopia has resulted in a bloody corrupt massively totalitarian society with the people on top soaking off the wealth and the rest of the populace barely surviving.  Every single one.  It’s time to ask if this is who we want to be.

https://theartsmechanical.wordpress.com/2016/03/22/who-are-you/

As I’ve pointed out before the reality is that Socialism and a modern technological cannot coexist.  A society that has the benefit of technology has to be antifragile so the society can absorb the disruptions and changes the new technologies bring.  A Socialist society is inherently fragile, fragile as the feudal societies that the Socialists draw inspiration from.  Socialism cannot survive in a society that requires change or progress.  So that is the choice we make, move forward with Liberty or back with Socialism. Which do you choose?

 

 

 

 

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