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Quote of the Day: Receipts = Rope
“The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them” — Unknown (attributed variously to Lenin, Stalin, and Marx)
As quotable as some of these old communists may be, it turns out that this quote cannot be definitively sourced to any of them. The meaning, nevertheless, is clear. People acting in their own short-term interest will fall into the hands of those with the will to power. While both the White Russian liberal reformers and the majority “moderate” wing of the Reds, the Mensheviks, dithered and acted as if they were in normal political space, the Bolsheviks acted decisively, initiating a 70-year reign.
Today, we see the left, supposedly defeated when the Soviet empire fell, controlling the commanding heights of American culture, including the new mountains of social media. The long march through the institutions has even led to dominance in corporate America, the capitalists who would supposedly sell the left the rope to hang the capitalists. Yet, the truth is that communism has translated to corporatism, with economic elites holding much of the agenda of the left, especially in their mutual contempt and hatred of “bitter clingers,” “Bible thumpers,” and a written constitution that may thwart illiberal elite desires.
Today, with corporate elites almost universally hostile to the “deplorables” and “bitter clingers,” the aphorism needs revision:
Published in Group WritingThe deplorable bitter clingers will buy the rope with which we hang them, one receipt at a time.
Receipts = Rope
And now that they’ve infected the boardrooms of America, when they fail they’ll blame it on “the corporations.”
Thanks, good post.
Herr von Mises pointed out another way, less direct but perhaps as powerful, in which capitalists kept the Bolsheviks in power: they made it impossible for the Russian socialists to implement socialism, which would have wiped them out much faster than their interventionist economy did.
I won’t go into the details here because economics is pretty boring to most folks, but those who are interested can find the explanation in his pivotal 1920 paper “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth.”
Basically, socialism must rapidly self-destruct because it deprives the planners of production (capitalists under capitalism, government planners under socialism) of the information they need to choose between competing production processes.
As long as the West had markets for commodities, the Soviet planners had access to market prices for many capital goods. Not for consumer goods, but some prices are better than no prices.
I noticed a sale on lampposts at Rural King the other day.
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I think you meant to write “hang” the capitalists.
Good post, btw.
September is Ruger month at Rural King, featuring those scary handguns the Walmart CEO doesn’t want us to have.
There are already gun stores with signs that say “We Welcome Walmart Customers”
Yes, AND, with Walmart signalling that guns are bad and socially responsible businesses do not trade in them, the de-funding of all gun businesses is now green-lighted. The handful of major banks backing credit cards, thanks to Dodd-Frank predictably favoring mega-banks and crushing smaller banks, are in position to negate the Second Amendment.
This has to be stopped right now.