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The Socialist Pledge
Tag: socialism
“Any reporter who has covered Europe in the last decade has written a dozen articles or more,” The New York Times informs us, “about how one crisis or another has exposed the fundamental unsustainability of the European Union.”
I hadn’t noticed. Until recently, haven’t reporters and commentators been downplaying Europe’s looming crisis? But they cannot pretend “far right” separatist, decentralist and nationalist movements are marginal any longer, not after strong showings for Geert Wilders in The Netherlands and Marine Le Pen in France, and the Brexit vote.
Now everybody seems to be panicking.
Even the Times is half-predicting an end to what it calls the “European Experiment.”
The Times identifies the tension as arising from “calls for keeping out secondary migrants and demands to keep internal European borders open. It’s a version of the contradiction within the European Union itself: between an open union and a collection of sovereign states.”
Beneath all the brouhaha about freedom of movement across breached borders lies the real contradiction: between massive welfare states on the one hand and, on the other, freedom of movement, speech and all the rest.*
When governments offer freebies, they entice people into un-productive or at least sub-productive lifestyles. Which is not sustainable, especially when extensive. How many productive people must support how many unproductive people?
Then throw those domestic programs open to millions of migrants who lack even rudimentary language and First World skills? That’s how states subsidize their societies’ destruction.
Europe’s governments are way too big for their border breaches.
If you want traditional freedoms, you have to pare down government.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
*Between social democracy (socialism lite) and the old liberal order.
If I deliberately help somebody to do evil things — and nobody is holding a gun to my head — I am thereby doing evil myself.
A person should not let himself be in that position. Not even if he’s “just doing my job” and looking for a non-evil job would be demonstrably inconvenient. To have a motive for doing a bad thing is not by itself exculpatory.
What provokes this observation is a newly amplified assault by the Venezuelan government on the rights of its citizens. The government is seeking to violate the right to peacefully read stuff on the Web by blocking Tor software, which allows users to elude government surveillance and reach banned websites.
Venezuelan dictators Chavez, now dead, and Maduro, still there, have never hesitated to stomp freedom in the name of a spurious greater good. Somebody like Maduro is certainly unscrupulous enough to go after Tor for thwarting censorship. So he fulfills that requirement. I doubt that he possesses very extensive programming ability.
Tor may not be perfect, but it’s pretty robust. You need substantial resources, such as those at the disposal of a government, to stop it. You also need to know what you’re doing. The coders on Venezuela’s stop-Tor team are probably smart enough to grasp the purpose of their work.
They and all other such collaborators should defect to the other side: that of programmers working to protect innocent people from government-sponsored cyber-assault.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
The Chinese government has sought to honor the birth of Karl Marx (1818-1883) by giving a giant bronze statue of the social philosopher and pseudo-economist to the German city of Trier, his birthplace.
Agreeing that Trier and Marx should be thus honored, local officials shamefully accepted the donation.
Marx was a bad guy. His willfully destructive anti-capitalist theorizing and polemics have been enlisted to enslave and murder many millions of people in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, Cuba and elsewhere. The story is told in works like Modern Times and The Black Book of Communism. One effective critique of Marxian ideas may be found in the second volume of Murray Rothbard’s History of Economic Thought.
We often hear that Communist implementation of Marxian theory poorly translates “real” communism/socialism/collectivism. No government unswervingly enacts all the ideas and prescriptions of a single intellectual founding father. But there is much in Marx’s volumes that openly demands the razing of the division of labor, profit-seeking, and other requirements of civilization.
In one article, Marx scribbled that “there is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror.” There’s plenty more where this came from.
When a major nation-state gives a town a statue, it’s hard to say no. But one needn’t accept it at face value. Install it on a base that lists the separate bouts of Marx-inspired mass murder. Or use it as a target in paintball tournaments.
Or just place it in the local cemetery. Where deadly ideologies should go.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Does Bernie Sanders remind you of “Citizen Kang”?
Vermont’s [S]ocialist Senator is whipping up a new plan for America: to “guarantee a job with at least a $15-per-hour wage and health benefits to every adult American ‘who wants or needs one,’” we are told.
What was it that the slavering alien Kang promised* in The Simpsons’ eighth season opening episode? Well, we know how that episode ended, with Homer Simpson revealing the ’90s’-era presidential candidates to be aliens in disguise, Kang being elected, humanity enslaved, and Homer uttering the immortal words “Don’t blame me, I voted for Kodos.”
And then Kodos, in cahoots with Kang, cracking the whip on Homer.
One shouldn’t have to read George Fitzhugh, the antebellum sociologist who attacked the very idea of free markets and free labor, insisting that slavery is a good thing and the very best form of socialism, to know that socialism and slavery go together hand in glove, whip in hand.
In an age of handouts for nothing, at least Sanders’ socialist proposal suggests productivity. But paying for it by nixing corporate “tax breaks”** is absurd. “Republicans have long opposed a federal jobs guarantee,” Fox News tells us, “saying such a plan would be too expensive and impractical.” And it’s productive people who would pay for it, making them de facto slaves to the system . . . even more than they are now.
But when socialists talk about “jobs,” worry about a more direct form of slavery.
And yes, I can imagine Bernie, with his four houses, flicking the whip.
I won’t be voting for him, if he runs.
Or for Kodos.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Actually, Kang was known not for a promise but for his campaign speech (as Bill Clinton), saying, “[W]e must move forward, not backward; upward, not forward; and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom!”
** The only funding source mentioned in the reports I read.
How easy is it to mix freedom with just the right amount of slavery?
New York Times reporter Azam Ahmed regards the attempt to mingle political opposites as noble or at least understandable. He doesn’t call Cuban Communism and its destructive effects “bad” — it’s a “unique tapestry.”
He wonders, instead, to what extent the Cuban government can fine-tune the contradiction.
According to the article, Cuba’s newest Dear Leader “will have to foster the growing private sector . . . while guarding against the income inequality it often brings. . . . Move too slowly and it risks economic collapse and widespread discontent. . . . Move too fast, and it risks unstitching the unique tapestry of Cuba’s social project.”
“Unique”? With or without cigars and salsa, the “social project” of repressing a hapless populace is as old as civilization. And as a “tapestry,” we’ve seen this warp and weft before.
Under freedom, inequalities are unavoidable.* On the other hand, nothing is wrong with inequality per se. Nature, human beings and economic outcomes are inherently unequal. Equality arrives only with the grave.
A government working to phase out slavery and phase in freedom may have legitimate problems in transition. But it is wrongheaded to seek just the right “balance” of both. How can any degree of freedom and markets fail to threaten a revolution, the purpose of which is a thoroughgoing assault on freedom and markets?
My advice to Cuban social engineers? Abandon Communism altogether and embrace prosperity and freedom instead.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Speaking of inequality, Cuba’s head commies certainly have not lived like the masses they’ve kept down.
“Political leaders prefer to project a noble history, sometimes by turning complicity in atrocities into claims of victimhood,” the New York Times informed us last Sunday. “In Russia, Mr. Putin and many of his lieutenants came from the K.G.B. and resisted fully confronting its repressive history. And they, like many of their countrymen, prefer to portray Stalin not only as the architect of the Gulag but also as the leader who built Russia’s industrial might and led it to victory in the Great Patriotic War.”
The Gray Lady here marks the passing of Arseny Roginsky, an organizer and activist who kept alive the memory of state mass murder in his homeland. The Times quotes the late hero as insisting that common talk of “victims of repression” is nowhere near enough. The repression did not merely descend upon the people as “a plague.”
The victims were targets of “state terror.”
But there was something missing in this too-brief notice. Though the Nazis were mentioned, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics wasn’t.
Communism was not.*
State terror did not infect its perpetrators biologically, like the world’s worst case of x-oplasmosis. It neither descended from the heavens nor ascended from the swamps. The infection was ideological — the result of Marxian socialism, of unworkable communism.
By not mentioning socialism or communism or even the USSR, the New York Times carries on its sad history of leftist apologetics. The case of the lying propagandist Walter Duranty — the Times’ award-winning foreign correspondent and author of Mission to Moscow — should have been the last of that.
It isn’t, apparently. The Times still protects its safe-space socialist readers.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* The omissions were also present in the Times’ initial obituary.
There is a common sense element to economics. We ignore it at our peril. So let’s take a cue from the Democratic Party’s current and de facto leader, Bernie Sanders.
Turn to Denmark for a model.
The Nordic state has what Bernie wants: higher education “free for all.” But there are . . . costs involved.
It turns out that “some Danes, especially older citizens already in the labor force,” explains Business Insider, “say the extra freedom can eliminate a crucial sense of urgency for 20-somethings to become adults. The country now deals with ‘eternity students’ — people who stick around at college for six years or more [not to mention advanced degree work] without any plans of graduating, solely because they don’t have any financial incentive to leave.”
Hardly a shock. Young Danes would not be the first to see in college life what satirist Tom Lehrer identified as the prolongation of “adolescence beyond all previous limits.”
Give young people an incentive to suck up resources year after year, and some will certainly take you up on that.
It’s hard to counter, too. The Danish “eternity student” problem remains even after taking policy steps to discourage it.
Business Insider ends its report by quoting an expert who insists that “motivation to succeed in your studies is in no way linked to whether you’re paying for your tuition or not.”
Yup, that’s what proponents of “free” education keep telling us. But there is more at play here.
Responsibility is on the line. Adulthood is about responsibility. Free tuition is about postponing responsibility.
Do we really want to go further in that direction?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Venezuelans are starving. The country’s children are malnourished and — if something is not done soon — “it will be very difficult for these children ever to get back onto their nutritional growth curve.”
That is the testimony of the director of Caritas Venezuela.
Clearly, “Bolivarian” socialism has failed.
And yet, dictator Nicolas Maduro blames American “sanctions” for “exacerbating” the situation.
And offers up a “Rabbit Plan” to feed the people.
Yes, Maduro has called upon his countrymen to raise rabbits . . . and eat them.
But the source of the dark comedy isn’t just a dictator waxing eloquent on bunnies. “There is a cultural problem because we have been taught that rabbits are cute pets,” said the agriculture czar . . . whose first name is “Freddy.”
Holding a televised press conference with Maduro himself, last week, he insisted that “a rabbit is not a pet; it’s two-and-a-half kilos of meat that is high in protein, with no cholesterol.”
The funny part — the gallows humor, here — is this is what the grand planning of socialism has come to: not mass collaboration and an extended division of labor, but the people feeding themselves on small plots of land.
The Inca had developed a more effective mode of socialism.*
Just as humiliating for Bolivarians must be the trade embargo charge. Socialism is all about how superior government control is to the “anarchy in production” of market life. To blame their problems even a little on a capitalist country >not trading with them doesn’t merely admit defeat, it evades the last shred of responsibility.
I have a better “Rabbit Plan”: the tyrants should hop on down the bunny trail . . . freeing Venezuelans to recover.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* It depended upon radical inegalitarianism, subordination, drudgery, servility, and lack of any meaningful freedom.
Today is Labor Day. But it is worth remembering, “Labor Day” in most other countries is May 1 — also called “International Workers’ Day.”
One thing to be thankful for on our American Labor Day is that we can celebrate labor — perhaps, like me, you will celebrate it by working! — and not have it serve as a celebration of communism.
For yes, it was the socialists and communists who cooked up the original May Day labor celebration, in part to commemorate 1886’s workers’ protest gone horribly wrong, the Haymarket debacle. In the 19th century, much of the impetus for collectivism came from workers themselves, under the impression that they could do better if they rebelled and expropriated the capitalists’ holdings and “worked for themselves.”
For some reason these activists rarely struck out on their own, becoming entrepreneurs.
Nowadays, alas, many top-level entrepreneurs lean toward socialism, and it is the non-government working people who resist more government, and thereby the socialist program. Indeed, the most enthusiastic clade of socialists in America today seem to be in the ranks of the unemployed.*
Oregon was the first of these United States to make an early September celebration an official Labor holiday, in 1887. Seven years later, the federal government got on board. President Grover Cleveland signed it into law soon after the disastrous Pullman strike, to promote a more rule-of-law friendly celebration of workers, and avoid thinking about rioting and murder and police violence.
So, even folks like me, who labor in the vineyards of the people’s politics while still supporting private property and freedom of contract, can celebrate.
Or take a last summer nap.
Without any communists hiding under the hammock.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* In less than two centuries, socialism went from proletarian to Lumpenproletarian. Karl Marx? Rolling over in his grave.
