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.