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Socialism is when government's taking care of you, you send all your money to the government, the government decides how to spend it instead of letting the people spend it and make all those decisions. – Bob Latta
Socialism never works. Not on the scale of a government, even just a city. Never has. Never will. Those in charge inevitably siphon off the best part for themselves and dole out the leavings to everyone else. It kills individual initiative and innovation. Why work hard when there is no reward except a warm feeling in your loins? The same warm feeling you get when you wet your pants.
Yet socialism is enormously popular among a specific segment of the population: the young who came from truly privileged upbringings but are downwardly mobile after leaving the family nest. They love socialism.
Did you ever wonder why?
There is one environment where socialism works and works well: the family. Father and mother run the family in a socialist form of government. From which according to their abilities, to each according to their needs. The resources of a family go into a pool, regardless of who earns them, and are distributed as needed among the family members.
If there is a surplus, some might be allocated to individual family members. Dad has his beer money, Mom her pin money/household account, the kids are encouraged to have savings for the future. That comes from the main pool after necessities are dealt with.
In the middle class on up, and even the upper working classes, there is generally a surplus from what Dad brings home or Mom and Dad between them. In those families the children, at least in the last 100-odd years, are not expected to contribute to the resource pool. That is Mom and Dad's job. Mom and Dad, between them, divvy up the take. They pay the bills and look after the needs of the children.
It is a sweet ride for the kids. Especially if Mom and Dad choose to shelter them from the harsher aspects of life, reasoning that the kids will be adults soon enough and only a child once. And the higher up the economic pole the family is, the more there is to distribute to the kids. (This is where trust-fund babies spring from.) Good things come from the politburo running the family. Innovation, hard work and enterprise (the foundations of capitalism) are abstract concepts to them.
Not as much for the kids at the other end of the economic spectrum. Historically, they have to be put out to work because if they do not work, there is no family surplus, and sometimes not even enough to cover the necessities. They have the benefits of innovation, hard work, and enterprise drilled into them as they grow. They profit from them.
What happens when the two sets of children become adults? For the rich kids, adulting is unpleasant. They have to make their own way, they have to work hard to succeed. Worse still, they have to work hard at stuff that doesn't interest them. They cannot wander off pursuing their dreams unless those dreams bring in money. It's unfair. They want Mommy and Daddy back taking care of them again. So they seek Mommy and Daddy in the form of a benevolent socialist government.
For the poor kids or the ones raised to value capitalism, being an adult is an opportunity. Work hard, make money. Work hard enough, save money, invest and get rich. They sure as hell don't want to share their hard work with those they view as indolent, ungrateful drones. They hate freeloaders. They are usually charitable, but generally have finely-tuned antennae that differentiate between those in distress through misfortune and those who are freeloading.
This describes the current split in the US. The socialist impulse comes from the privileged, who wish to maintain their privilege without having to work for it. The prominent socialists all come from wealthy families. Flyover America has figured out that socialism is a mug's game, especially for the productive class.
The thing to remember is that the productive class is larger than the socialist class. The socialist class is also concentrated in the big cities and university towns, where you can thrive without being productive. Socialists may look threatening, but then again so did the Iranian government in January of this year. Socialists cannot seize the levers of production - except in the short term - without the consent of the productive class.
Discussion (11)
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You ignore the lessons of history. The Iranian government is doing just fine, thank you. And the Soviets and the Chinese effectively socialized their economies for decades. It failed in the USSR but they have not clawed their way out of misery. China may have its problems but is a world player despite being socialist. So don’t write them off. They will be back, and gunning for us.
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Proceeding as the Prophet Orwell foretold:
Ingsoc [English Socialism], which grew out of the earlier Socialist movement and inherited its phraseology, has in fact carried out the main item in the Socialist programme; with the result, foreseen and intended beforehand, that economic inequality has been made permanent.
But the problems of perpetuating a hierarchical society go deeper than this. There are only four ways in which a ruling group can fall from power. Either it is conquered from without, or it governs so inefficiently that the masses are stirred to revolt, or it allows a strong and discontented Middle group to come into being, or it loses its own self-confidence and willingness to govern. These causes do not operate singly, and as a rule all four of them are present in some degree. A ruling class which could guard against all of them would remain in power permanently. Ultimately the determining factor is the mental attitude of the ruling class itself.
1984, Part 2, Chap 9.
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Socialism assumes that government people know better than you do how to meet your needs and bests interests, and are prepared to do what is truly consistent with your needs, and in your best interests.
This might be a reasonable assumption in a small unit (such as a family with parents committed to each other and their biological children) in which mutual love can be assumed, and parents with experience and who truly know and love each other and their inexperienced children are prepared to help those children achieve their apparent potential.
And maybe in a very small society of homogeneous peoples.
I cannot imagine entrusting all the decisions of my life to someone I don't know who likely had a very different background from me, likely lives in an environment very different from where I live, and who has no idea what my interests, wants, and desires are.
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I am impressed with the number of advocates of socialism who assume that they will be among the rulers in the socialist paradise. They never seem to have considered that the actual rulers might consign them to the gulag or worse.
CONTRIBUTOR
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Well . . . Trotsky.
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