How Socialism Destroys
The promise that is supposed to assuage this dissatisfaction is “free stuff for everyone”, particularly those that are deemed to have been culturally denied in the past. This includes free health care, free abortion, free education and a myriad of other free social services, including a guaranteed job and an arbitrarily high minimum wage.
All of this seems very altruistic in nature. What could be more beneficent than those who have more helping those who have less? That’s a Christian principle. The altruistic features of Marxism/socialism/communism have been taught in our schools and universities over the past 50 years, and avidly absorbed by naïve young minds. Of course, only the “nice”, humanistic, features of these ideologies are taught. The “nasty”, inevitable descent into brutal totalitarianism is glossed over by academia.
How is all this “free stuff” to be paid for? Why, by increased taxation, of course, coupled with a redistribution of wealth from the capitalist “fat cats”. In other words, socialism proposes to penalize the wealthy innovators to provide “free stuff” to everybody else, including those who are truly idlers in society.
Obviously, this does not come naturally in a capitalist-oriented society or economy, so other means are necessary to implement such change. It is absolutely essential to take the guns away and disarm everyone. Speech disagreeing with “politically correct” social justice mundanity must be curtailed and termed as fascist or “white supremacist”. Laws against emigration and movement by wealthy people and companies need to be enacted. Stronger government and erosion/cancellation of individual and civil rights must lead the body politic toward totalitarianism and away from any remnants of democracy.
These drastic measures are necessary because taxation can only go so far. Confiscation requires a strong, dictatorial government. Both socialism & communism require a commitment to the use of force. You cannot decide what to do with the other person’s or company’s money unless you are committed to use force to take that money from them. All socialist programs are mandatory. This is the reality of socialism — a pseudo-religion grounded in pseudo-science and enforced by political tyranny.
And in order to effect such draconian changes, the trappings and remembrances of the original society and culture must be destroyed and erased. Statues and monuments need to be destroyed or removed. Law enforcement and the judicial system, emasculated. Basically, according to Trotskyite socialism/communism, and as detailed by Saul Alinsky, the existing civilization must be destroyed and replaced by a “Jacobin” or “peoples” society, really an oligarchy of the emergent powerful.
So, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see why socialism never works in the long term, and always leads to the Maduros, Stalins, Maos, Castros and other dictatorial butchers, and to the deaths of over 100 million of their own people in the 20th century.
Alternatively, socialism/communism morphs into market-oriented dictatorships like China, Vietnam and Laos, where the communist dictatorship remains, but western style market economies are necessary to attain any modicum of prosperity.
And yet socialism is no longer a parlor game for academics but a political alternative taken seriously by millennials and other thinkers, who don’t recognize that much of what they enjoy in life is a result of free market capitalism and would disappear if socialism were to be implemented. We can maybe excuse AOC’s and some young types their naiveté because of youth and inexperience. How do we excuse experienced politicians like Bernie, Markey, Krugman, Reich and increasingly most of the democrat party, who certainly should know better?
Ray Gruszecki
September 9, 2020
