In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die“.
— From “The Gods of the Copybook Headings” by Rudyard Kipoling
It seems that, no matter how many times we as a race go through the experience of a socialist Utopia, we always and everywhere fail to learn the brutal, bloody, and terrible lessons of our failed experiments to try to build a “fair” and “equal” world.
It is not actually particularly difficult to understand why socialism does not work: it is a violation of the laws of Nature, and therefore of Nature’s God. There is a reason why the Tenth Commandment states unequivocally: “Thou shalt not covet”.
Christians – real Christians – understand this instinctively. Covetousness is at the very heart of socialism, for the entire philosophy is fundamentally about taking from those who have, to give to those who have not. The proponents of socialism can dress up their disastrous ideas in any manner of absurd disguises, but they cannot get away from the hard fact that the very basis of their philosophy is the idea that the fruits of others belong to those who did not put in the work to attain them.
In theory this should be self-explanatory. In practice, it is not, because the entire argument in favour of socialism is always couched in emotional language, and therefore is highly attractive to emotionally incontinent young people. My generation, and the one after it, have been thoroughly failed by our betters, for on the whole we were never taught the basic tools of critical thinking and philosophy, which we could have used ourselves to dissect and dismantle such absurdities.
This is why young folk in colleges and universities, and for years after graduating from both, fall for the monumentally stupid lies of socialists everywhere.
The point is illustrated rather easily in the following thought experiment:
Now, here the conscientious socialist might object: “But that is merely a hypothetical story! It has nothing to say about how socialism works in real life!!”
Oh, really?
Leaving aside the fact that socialists seem congenitally incapable of understanding basic concepts of logical deduction and induction, let us now take a look at actual examples of socialism in practice.
First, let’s look at Venezuela:
And now let’s take a look at another South American nation that fell prey to the Gospel of Social Justice – Brazil:
Now these are, of course, recent examples, occurring only within the last twenty years or so. The reality is that socialism reaches MUCH farther back in history, and the horrors that it inflicted upon Mankind are still being counted.
In the 20th Century alone, socialism in its two most virulent forms – Communism and Fascism – killed at least 100 MILLION people. Socialists tried to deny the apocalyptic results of their own ideology for years – until the publication of The Black Book of Communism, a copy of which occupies pride of place on my own bookshelf, swiftly and comprehensively put those objections to the sword.
No matter where you look, the track record of socialism is one of abject failure, misery, impoverishment, violence, malnutrition, disease, and utter horror.
In India, for instance, the country suffered for forty years under a peculiarly Indian form of socialism which saw hundreds of millions of people born into crushing poverty from which they could never be freed. It was normal for queues to stretch out for hours for basic staples such as rice, milk, and bread – and the “License Raj” which replaced the autocratic but highly efficient rule of the British in India was a system that favoured cronies of the government over private enterprise in every aspect of life.
The result was the slow destruction of the Indian economy, until things reached a crisis point in the early 90s and liberalisation became the only possible course of action. Since then, India’s economy has grown at a pretty phenomenal pace, and many more hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty and squalor and into the dignity and decency of the large and growing middle class of the country.
And, of course, the United States of America and pretty much the entire Western world embarked on decades-long experiments in socialism during much of the 20th Century. Those experiments either have collapsed outright, or are causing crisis-level blowouts of their nations’ national budgets.
In the United States, the welfare program sold to the country as an “insurance scheme” that you call “Social Security” has anywhere from $11-32 trillion – that’s a number with 12 zeroes to its right – in unfunded liabilities, depending on how you do the accounting. If you add in Medicare – which no matter how you look at it was essentially a giant vote-buying wealth-transfer scheme – the unfunded liabilities caused by America’s 20th Century experiments in Utopian socialism and covetousness will blow out to over $100 trillion over the course of the 21st Century.
I have written before about the truly catastrophic state of Britain’s supposed “crown jewel” of social welfare policy, the National Health Service. The motivating idea behind the NHS is purely socialistic in intent and design. The goal was to have the best healthcare in the world for the individual, funded by taxes on everyone. Never mind that this is a completely contradictory set of ideas – by definition, the moment that one removes the cost of a good or service from the thought process of an individual, the individual therefore loses any and all interest in keeping his costs low and his satisfaction high, which inevitably drives that individual to over-consume what he thinks is a freely available public good.
The ardent defender of socialist principles will search in desperation for an example of a single successful socialist society in history that extended out in size and scope beyond that of a village. The only way to make socialism work at the grassroots level is to ensure that everyone involved in a socialist community trusts everyone else as though each individual is like family – and anyone who has a big family knows damned well that once one goes beyond about 10-12 individuals, those bonds of trust are EXTREMELY hard to maintain.
Even one of the very few supposedly “successful” examples of a socialist society was, in fact, built on decidedly non-Utopian principles. We of the Manosphere greatly admire the Spartans for their unbreakable will and relentless quest to be the very best professional citizen-soldiers possible – but we also readily acknowledge the fact that their system of effectively national socialism was built on the backs of slaves.
At the peak of their power, the Spartan populated of Spartiate citizens numbered between 10,000-25,000 homoioi, or “peers”, equal in every way before the law and dedicated at all times to the defence of Sparta and the Lakonian state – but they were supported by a population of 300,000 or so enslaved helots who worked the land and maintained the agricultural base that allowed Sparta to field arguably the most feared and effective military force in the ancient world.
The inevitable end point of socialism at the level of a nation-state is always and everywhere exactly the same: poverty, malnutrition, slavery, social fragmentation and collapse, and national bankruptcy, dishonour, and disgrace. There is not one single redeeming feature to be found within socialism.
That is why the Hard Right is resolutely and avowedly opposed to socialism. It does not work. It is anti-scientific. It is anti-freedom. It is anti-Christian. It is a nonsense philosophy created and supported by highly overrated intellectual lightweights who, by and large, never had to suffer under the systems that they tried to impose on everyone else. And if, centuries from now, historians are able to look back upon the great Utopian socialist experiments of the 20th and 21st Century, they will surely judge our follies to be vast and calamitous indeed.
1 Comment
There are a series of exceptions to that rule. Sort of. And the exceptions tend to prove the rule, actually.
Oil socialism: If you have a natural resource that can pay for everything your own people might desire, and can pay to import competent foreigners to do the bulk of the productive work, socialism can work. For. A. While.
And what's the cost? Not only will your resource eventually run out, but at the end you will have paid for a massive increase in your population, barely a one of whom has the faintest concept of work, with a ruling class of incredible corruption, and nothing else and nowhere else to turn.
And then you are well and truly fucked.