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Quote of the Day: Nazis and Communists
Difference between Nazi and Communist is when you say how horrible Nazis have been, they don’t say “Well, real Nazism has never been tried.” – Frank J. Fleming
I heard another round of “real socialism has never been tried” over the weekend. I am tired of hearing it. Of course “real socialism” can never be tried because it is completely unworkable. And whether we are talking about national socialism or international socialism, it is still socialism.
For those unaware of Frank J. Fleming, he is one of the gems of the Internet, running the IMAO satire site (advertised as “Unfair. Unbalanced. Unmedicated.” with it’s “Nuke the Moon” logo). It is worth checking out, although I suspect the bien pensants will find it over the top.
Published in Politics
Right on.
Real free markets have never been tried either.
Yep.
Socialism only works in two places: Heaven where they don’t need it and hell where they already have it. – Ronald Reagan
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New Zealand, Singapore, Sweden in the 19th and early 20th century. Close enough in horse shoes.
There is also this on free market/representative nations vs. command controlled/authoritarian nations (and socialism requires both command controlled economies and authoritarian government). It is not the absolutes that matter so much as the trends.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_Code_(Singapore)
One of the greatest tragedies of the twentieth century occurred as a result of Mao’s Great Leap Forward. He and his fellow communists thought they could simply order people to work without paying them. The deaths of somewhere between 30 and 55 million people should have been sufficient to kill socialism and communism forever.
To completely kill socialism and communism forever, we would first have to permanently rid ourselves of foolishness.
Yes they were harsh on behavioral stuff going on in the west they didn’t want to get started in Singapore, but they have one of the freest markets in the world, or did when I served there in the early 70s. They fined people for chewing gum or wouldn’t serve men with long hair, even had posters showing what was acceptable, I still have one of those posters some place. They didn’t like messy unruly, littering, drugs but their city management, which in a city state is everything, was wholly market based. Not as free as Hong Kong which I would have mentioned if I had served there but at that point very much free market based.
Also Britain in an earlier era and the USA in an earlier era, right? Close enough.
Neither extreme has been tried, but we do have plenty of cases to the Smith side and plenty of cases to the Marx side of things. It’s enough to know that the Smith side is better, whether or not we ever want to go all the way to total liberty.
I’m not sure anyone does. Even Hong Kong has a government healthcare system and a government transportation system, and big subsidies for research grants in the universities.
It’s an important point that the freest market in the world is the one with the best public transportation system, and a healthcare system that works quite well from our experience (and we just had a baby in it!).
Why is that? Maybe because its freedom gives it enough money to run it; also because it’s a fairly well ordered society where people know how to queue and that sort of thing; honest civil service; and other reasons perhaps.
But free-ish markets work pretty well – far better than have the “not-really-Socialist” Socialist societies thus far created.
So, close works for capitalism as well as for horseshoes and hand grenades, but fails miserably for Socialism.
That doesn’t make for a great slogan. “Socialism: Get it perfect or die trying.”
Just ask them if they want a real socialist approach to their child’s grades in school—where points are taken from the high scoring students and given to the low scoring students, turning A’s into B’s and D’s into C’s.
Then ask if they want medical schools to use that approach.
Communism has been tried lots of times. It’s just that it has a reallllllly short half-life.
Indeed, that queueing business broadly applied is very much a key to whether freedom works, but it’s also something that long exposure to freedom develops and an honest civil service is easy when the government is limited to essential public goods. Once government starts allocating resources, licenses, permits etc. corruption follows. Our cities had those kinds of power and became corrupt, and now that our Federal government has them, they are too. Socialism in fascist and communist forms is total corruption of everyone everywhere. Administrative states are also always deeply corrupt. It’s instructive to hear the left’s take on Venezuela, if the left must discuss Venezuela, and they try to avoid it, the entire problem is caused by corruption, not socialism. I wish we’d draw the corruption connections more often especially when we have the Obama administration’s example right in front of us. Moreover, prosperity also corrupts in a way so the fact that free markets create and spread prosperity was a narrow answer to the false notion that socialism spread material goods, but it’s not our strongest argument. Freedom is but it seems that’s harder to articulate and distinguish from license.
Actually, Communism lives on. It’s the people under Communism whose half-life is short
The thing that makes Communism so attractive is that everyone has lived in a Communist society. A family – especially when the children are growing up – is a communism. Resources are pooled and allocated according to need. It works well on the family level, especially monogamistic family. It scales badly beyond that, even with small scale increases. (In polygamistic or polyandristic families the multiple spouses begin competing for resources.)
When your earliest childhood memories are warm and fuzzy remembrances of a communistic society, it is hardly a wonder people get sucked in by socialism.
The other way it’s often put is “Socialism would work if the right people were in charge.”
Of course, leftists consider themselves “the right people”.
And I’m tired of hearing it too . . .
This is a profound teaching.
To fail to understand this analogy–between (a) relationships between individuals in a family and (b) relations between individuals in socialism–is to fail to understand the counterfeit-religious impetus behind the main progressivist movements, national and international socialism (communism).[1]
There is another half of the teaching, however.
A political economic theory addresses consumption and production, because an economy comprises both. You can’t have either without the other.
Seawriter’s note emphasizes that the consumption half of the communist model is like that of a family
The production side of the analogy is false. Ludwig von Mises once reflected on this falsehood as contained in socialism itself. He said that socialism is only a theory of consumption. It is not a theory of production.
In a normal, free, developed society, production is capitalist, not communist. All of the family’s production resources (the mother and father, their labor, their intellectual capital, their vehicles, their workshoes…) are voluntarily given and directed to specific production processes by markets, not involuntary and directed by the political elite.
[1] The terms “socialism” and “communism” were originally synonyms, in the 1820’s. I use them that way here. They were redefined as separate theories first by Lenin (for propaganda reasons related to failures of the theory of socialism/capitalism which by his time could no longer be ignored by the Useful Idiots) and again by Stalin: different failure, same reason. The current popular usage is that invented by Stalin. Most of us are unaware whose purposes we are serving in sticking with it.
And on the family level there are term limits.
I agree, but kids are not into sophistication. (That comes with maturity.) My point is a desire for socialism is fueled by the most primitive and earliest memories of childhood, and becomes especially attractive when an individual is under stress and wants daddy to make everything right. And daddy being gone or too old to make things right the daddy substitute manifests itself as the government. As Red Green would put it, it’s not smart, and it’s not right, but that’s the way it is. And true believers in socialism cannot believe any right-thinking individual would not want to voluntarily give all production resources for the greater good as assigned by the Great Daddy (the government). (And the greedy [CoC]s who insinuate themselves into the elites to “decide” how resources are best distributed encourage that illusion.)
If you are lucky – under Edison’s definition of luck (the harder I work, the luckier I get). When my kids were growing up I kept telling them their mother and I had not succeeded if they liked home so much they were still hanging around with us in their late 30s. We had succeeded when they were on their own, with good jobs, and starting families of their own. They knew that was their goal from the time they were 10. So far, they all have good careers, one is married and expecting his first child, one is engaged, and the youngest is looking for a bride.
Now, one of my brothers and his wife raised their kids with no survival skills and no goals, and that family is a dumpster fire. Three kids, two in their 30s, dependent on mommy and daddy. (The third got straightened out by his father-in-law.)
Leftists remain fuzzy, but quickly lose the warm quality.
I dunno. A lot of them manage a furnace temperature whenever they are conscious.
A variation of this happened circa 2002 to my daughter in Junior High. Being very introverted, after other students chose their own group of 3 students, my daughter was stuck with 2 other inner city students as “study buddies.” After the next test, she got an A, but ended with a C because the other two students had lower scores. She still graduated as the top student in the school, but I didn’t find out about this until after she went to high school.