Over at Amazon.com there’s a discussion of Oscar Wilde’s essay “The Soul of Man Under Socialism.”
Some visitors decry the horrors of socialism enabled by such wishful thinking. Others say, “Hey, be fair! The calamitous ‘socialist’ regimes of the 20th century aren’t what Wilde was talking about!”
But not many volunteer for Wilde’s “voluntary” socialism. To impose such utopian dreams society-wide can only be done by force.
If an unrepentant socialist admits the track record, he must insist that his own ideas of perfect, magically blissful equality have been ignored or misappropriated. What he proposes is the socialism in which the incentives and demands of human life in society have disappeared, in which men and women are disembodied spirits, in which wishes are all-powerful fairy dust.
In the real world, socialism quickly devolves into the looting of the better-off and transferring a portion of said loot to the lesser-off — at the point of a gun. The more consistently socialists work to equalize everyone’s economic condition, the more rampantly and brutally they must deploy coercion. And so, under socialism, comes death to individual hopes, dreams, options … and souls.
The unbridgeable gulf between socialist fantasies and inconvenient facts explains much about recent health care reform. ObamaCare won’t be the socialist medical nirvana anybody was proposing. But it never could have been.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
7 replies on “Impossible Dream, Real Nightmare”
You cannot redistribute the wealth, but you can redistribute the poverty.
Same thing works with the progressives, except for the self-anointed who manage to scramble to a position of being in charge
I have been on Medicare for some years and pay my premiums through deductions from my Social Security check. I didn’t know this was socialism. I thought it was government insurance like my GI life
insurance. Your diatribe against the Health Care Bill seems written by the insurance companies who do not want
the government to be in competition with them. My GI life insurance is
much cheaper than what private insurance companies want. Socialism
or competition?
What seems to have NOT been printed-and rarely mentioned- a prime beneficiary of Obamacare was to be one (or more) relatives of mr. Axelrod, who is one of Obama’s top people.
As to Mr. Stark’s comment-re Medicare- yes, it is insurance that the gvernment pays, and the reasons the premiums are less- the rest of us subsidize it. And, the insurance companies run it, to some extent-usually on a contract basis. And under Obamacare, and it being forced- the insurance companies would have raked in billions more. That is why they went alng with it. Socialism for the rich (see Goldmans Sachs; GM, Chrysler, etc).
Like Bruce Stark, my own parents have Medicare insurance. I don’t begrudge him or them the benefits, which are subsidized by all of us taxpayers, including Mr. Stark and my parents. It is certainly not welfare, mind you, but it But it is socialism.
Government’s proper role is to set the rules for a free enterprise system, not to jump in and compete with private business. That’s not fair competition because the government can lose money forever and stay in business through confiscatory taxation.
Mr. Bridgeman’s comment is right on the mark.
One more thing: I suspect the GI Insurance Bruce mentions is cheaper in part because the government has a large pool, thus spreading and depressing the risk. Also, it is subsidized, I strongly suspect, by the government. Of course, this subsidy is not “bad,” rather it is an earned benefit.
Although I find your post quite hard to understand I do get the general jist of what it is you are
trying to communicate. Just not sure if I 100% agree with you, but its always nice to hear anothers
point of view, thanks