Kurt Huber

The political left attempts to persuade people that what determines whether one is a slave is one’s standard of living. The left insist that the standard of living under a market system is generally low, and that thus most people would be slaves. The left insist that the standard of living under their envisioned technocratic order would be generally much higher, and that thus most people would not be slaves.

But slavery is the condition of not having ownership of one’s capacities. Under a collectivist social order, one’s capacities belong to the community as a whole. Even under a democratic collectivist social order, one gets merely a vote about how one’s capacities are to be used, which vote will not have any force except in the weird case that all other votes are tied.

Socialism — be it internationalist, egalitarian, and direct; or nationalistic, hierarchic, and indirect — is an order of slavery. A mixed system is no better than limited slavery.