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Socialism Still A Failure by: Kim Weissman To anyone not blinded to reality by their ideology, it is no secret that socialism, because of its inherent and essential nature, is, and must always be, an abject and disastrous failure. The failure of socialism and social engineering by "the best and brightest" of left-wing liberalism is once again being proven, the latest evidence coming from communist China, Canada, Britain, France, and Australia. Exhibit One Communist China's one- policy has long been a shining example to which the population control extremists in this country point, admiringly demanding that we should try to be as "enlightened" as those Chinese so we can "save the earth". As has been repeatedly demonstrated on this page and elsewhere, the very ideas that the world is overpopulated, and that population density leads to poverty and starvation, are totally erroneous; but the "save the earth" crowd simply isn't interested in facts. Now comes news from communist China that their one- policy isn't all it's cracked up to be, and has been, in fact, a disaster. Communist officials, "spurred on by a rash of student suicides, breakdowns and family murders", are "softening" their policy. The social engineers have been shocked by widespread female infanticides, illegal gender-selective abortions, and rampant official corruption and terrorism in enforcing the policy. Turns out that, no matter how hard the "enlightened" try, people simply can't be "engineered" like machines. Think that the Jane Fonda-Ted Turner-Hillary Clinton population controllers in this country will learn anything? Don't bet on it. Exhibit Two Socialized, government controlled medicine is a perennial favorite of the leftist social engineers in this country. Hillary Clinton has become most closely associated with that goal as a result of her disastrous nationalized health care scheme in 1993, and she has long touted Britain's National Health Service with envy. Former candidate Bill Bradley made nationalized health care a major plank of his failed campaign, and candidate Al Gore has cited Canada's health care system as a model to be emulated. Now from Canada comes a report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) that there are long waiting lists for surgical and diagnostic procedures (one report concludes that the median patient has to wait 70% longer than is medically reasonable); that some procedures, routine in the United States, are unavailable in Canada; that technical devices such as CT scanners and MRI machines are scarce; that cost controls on pharmaceuticals have actually led to deaths from the lack of available medicines; and most astonishing of all, in this era of increasing general world-wide health and lengthening life spans, Canadian life expectancy is actually declining. From Britain's National Health Service comes a report that perhaps one third of all terminally ill cancer patients are dying only because of delays in treatment or misdiagnoses. According to the London Times, "long delays between appointments were often blamed for a time lag when previously treatable cancers grew incurable". A leading British cancer specialist was quoted "It costs nothing to ensure that patients see a doctor within two weeks, as the government has insisted, but what is the point if they then have to wait about three months for treatment with a worn-out radiotherapy machine?" [Much more on the 'health care' issue] Think that the Hillary Clinton-Al Gore nationalized health care schemers in this country will learn anything? Don't bet on it. Exhibit Three France contains what is considered to be the last big communist party in Europe. But this week, France's communist party scheduled a party vote on a document condemning the history of communism, concluding that communism "did not liberate humanity", but rather led to the "oppression of the individual, a tendency to see different opinions as deviation or betrayal, and practices which in all too many cases bordered on the criminal". Sounds like political correctness in this country. One member of the party hierarchy in Paris said "It's time to move on and leave all those old ideas behind. They didn't do us any good." True, but those ideas did lead to mass imprisonment and the slaughter of millions. Typical of the usual reaction of brain-dead socialists (and leftists in this country), who never let reality intrude into their irrational fantasies, was the reaction of one old communist in France: "It's not the party that needs to change, it’s the rest of society." Typical of the egomaniacal thinking of all socialists: the rest of the world is wrong, only they are right. Think that the socialist left in this country, that is still trying to impose government regulation on everything in sight, will learn anything? Egomania isn't confined to leftists in France, so don't bet on it. Exhibit Four Socialism, by its very nature, is an inherently tyrannical ideology that uses force or the threat of force to take from those who produce and redistribute to those who don't (after the ruling elites take their cut). Under socialism, all power rests in the hands of the almighty State. One of the very first steps always taken by ascendant socialist governments, like their brethren totalitarian ideologies of fascism and naziism, is to make sure that the people they rule have no power to resist their mandates. That requires a disarmed population, a process that always starts with routine firearms registration, followed, when the totalitarians are ready, by universal confiscation. All in the name, of course, of a more peaceful, orderly, and crime-free society. We are currently undergoing one of those increasingly frequent paroxysms of irrationality from left-wing extremists in this country over firearms, claiming that criminal violence is caused by the mere existence of guns, and ridiculously proclaiming that violent crime would be reduced ‒ if not eliminated entirely ‒ if we could only get rid of guns. Or at least register them. After all, what's the harm in that, they ask? Left-wing irrationality over guns isn't confined to this country, and that irrationality has made great headway in countries like Britain and Australia. But unlike those countries, the United States has a Constitution that provides some protection to the individual right to keep and bear arms in this country. Because of our Constitution, Australia and Britain are further along than the U.S. in their attempts to rid their societies of guns, so that anyone interested in studying the effect of gun control ‒ that is, anyone interested in facts, which excludes most left-wing liberals ‒ can study those societies and observe whether the gun-ban-as-crime-control schemes have any merit. They don't. Which of course won't stop the gun banners in this country from lying through their teeth to achieve their goals of disarming our population. Here are some facts from abroad. Australia has historically had a low crime rate, and a reputation as a quiet, peaceful country. Then in 1996, a criminal went on a shooting rampage. Anti-gun propaganda was cranked up (as it is following every similar incident in this country), and gun bans were swiftly enacted, encompassing not only handguns, but many hunting rifles and shotguns as well. Leftist politicians promised that the crime rate would probably "drop by up to 20%" once they got rid of all those nasty guns. That didn't happen. In just the one year following the gun bans, homicide rates INCREASED (in one Australian state increasing by a staggering 300  , armed robberies (note that: armed robberies, by criminals who still had and always will have guns) INCREASED, assaults INCREASED, and the burglary rate in the United States, which had been higher, is now lower than that in Australia, Canada, and Britain (the other western democracies that recently enacted or had draconian gun ownership restrictions). Prior to the gun bans, there had been a steady decline in the rate of armed robberies and burglaries in Australia; following the bans there has been a dramatic increase in both. The rate of violent crime in Britain is now higher than in the U.S. Think that left-wing gun banners in this country like Bill Clinton and Sarah Brady will learn anything? Don't bet on it. [Much more on crime, guns, and The 2nd Amendment] ~o~ Socialism is collectivism, in which the independent decisions of individuals are replaced by the collective decisions of the State. Free, unfettered choice by individuals is hateful to socialists. One bastion of freedom in our society is the election process. But beyond the right to vote, as free people protected by a Constitution, we have the right to publicly speak and write in support of candidates we like, and in opposition to candidates we dislike ("Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech"). When we have neither the time nor the skill to personally speak or write, we have the right to join other like-minded citizens in support of, or opposition to, candidates for office. ("Congress shall make no law…abridging…the right of the people peaceably to assemble"), and the right to contribute ‒ it takes money to spread a message in our society ‒ to support those who advocate for us and those candidates we want to represent us. We cannot morally be forced to contribute to causes or candidates we dislike ("...to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves, is sinful and tyrannical..." – Thomas Jefferson) ‒ although it happens all the time, through mandatory union dues, and taxpayer matching funds to political campaigns. But campaign "reformer" Al Gore is trying to destroy those freedoms. Here's his latest scheme: "So I propose the creation of a non-partisan Democracy Endowment…. The Democracy Endowment will raise more than $7 billion over seven years, and then, with the interest and the returns on investment, finance Senate and House general election campaigns ‒ with no other contributions allowed to candidates who accept the funding. Let me be clear: this is a non-partisan endowment for our common democracy. You can’t give to any one party; you can’t give to any one candidate. Every qualified candidate will have access to these funds according to a formula that is based on the district or state in which they are running. … To raise the funds for the Endowment, there will be a 100 percent tax deduction for any individual or corporation that contributes…". (emphasis added) You cannot contribute to candidates you support. You will be forced to contribute to those you oppose. If you give to Gore's fund, your money will be given by government bureaucrats to everyone, even to candidates whose beliefs are hateful to you. Even if you don't contribute a dime to Gore's fund, as a taxpayer you will be forced, by the tax deductibility of the contributions of others, to subsidize candidates who want to destroy everything you believe in. Leftists, who loudly support freedom of choice when it comes to killing unborn babies, want to deprive you of the choice of who you support to represent you. They'll decide for you. If insufficient money is raised, Gore will force broadcasters to donate air time. But not so you can find out what candidates believe, because Gore promises "a crackdown on issue advocacy ads". Gore benefits from voter ignorance. He will "appoint commissioners who…believe the public interest must be protected in new ways". Beware of leftists who propose "new ways" to define your freedom. So why is it, despite overwhelming evidence gleaned from repeated examples played out over decades and continents, that the left in this country refuses to learn that socialism is an abject failure? They aren't dumb, why can't they recognize reality when it stares them in the face? The fact is, they do. They know full well that for the vast majority of the people in any society burdened by socialism, life becomes a nightmare of poverty and slavery in service to ruling party apparatchiks. The leftists in this country know all that, and they don't care. Why? Because in their delusions of superiority, they believe that they will constitute those ruling party apparatchiks. As the French kings before the revolution, socialist ideologues really don't care how dismal a life is lived by their subjects, so long as they rule, and by virtue of their rule, live the good life themselves. As bad as life was for most people in the Soviet Union, the ruling elites lived the good life. And even better, those ruling elites get to impose their crack-brained schemes on their suffering populations without having to overcome the annoying roadblocks put in their way by democratic institutions, without any need to establish a consensus of opinion, without any requirement of showing that their schemes make any sense or stand any likelihood of success, and most important, without any of the constraints imposed by a Constitution. True nirvana for the tin-pot tyrants who populate the left in this country, who call themselves "liberals". |
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12/5/2008 3:23 am |
Looking at what is happening in much of the world today .. Capitalism isn't doing much better! All systems which depend on human compassion, human trust, human motives will fail, usually by the ones that push the ideas to the extreme. Until God renews the world all the different systems are doomed to fail. Regards Bob
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Capitalism thives Bob when left alone. It is proven. by Hernando de Soto Hernando de Soto is president of Institute for Liberty and Democracy and winner of the 2004 Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty. You have just put yourself into the life of a developing country or former Communist nation. More precisely, you have imagined life for 80 percent of the population, which is marked off as sharply from the country's Westernized elite as black and white South Africans were once separated by apartheid. Hernando de Soto is president of Institute for Liberty and Democracy and winner of the 2004 Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty. This 80 percent majority is not, as Westerners often imagine, desperately impoverished. In spite of their obvious poverty, even those who live under the most grossly unequal regimes possess far more than anybody has ever suspected. Five years ago my research organization, Instituto Libertad y Democracia, and hundreds of professionals from various countries went into the streets of developing and former Communist nations to learn what real people are achieving inside and outside the underground economy. We closed our books and opened our eyes, and the results of our findings have been dramatic. The data we have collected demonstrate that the world's poor and lower middle classes have accumulated all the assets needed for successful capitalism. The value of their savings is immense - many times all the foreign aid and investment received since 1945. In Egypt alone the assets of the poor are 55 times greater than all foreign investment ever recorded, including the funding of the Suez Canal and the Aswan Dam. Why then are these people so underdeveloped? Why can't they turn their assets into liquid capital, the kind that generates new wealth by increasing production and productivity? For a very simple reason: To be useful in an expanded market, capital must first be represented in a property document where it can then be assigned a status that allows it to produce additional value. What most people possess outside the West is not "paperized" in such a way as to produce capital. When you step into an airplane in New York to fly to Jakarta, what you are leaving behind is not the high-tech world of fax machines and ice makers, television and antibiotics; many people in the Third World also have those. What you are leaving behind is the world of enforceable legal representations. Assets outside the West are held in defective forms: houses built on land whose ownership rights are not adequately recorded, unincorporated businesses with undefined liability, industries located where financiers and investors cannot see them. Because the rights to these possessions are not adequately documented, these assets cannot readily be turned into capital, cannot be traded outside of narrow local circles where people know and trust each other, cannot be used as collateral for a loan and cannot be used as a share against an investment. In the West, every parcel of land, every building, every piece of equipment or store of inventories is represented in a property document that is the visible sign of a vast hidden process which connects all these assets to the rest of the economy. Thanks to this representational process, assets can lead an invisible, parallel life alongside their material existence. They can be used as collateral for credit. The single most important source of funds for new businesses in the United States is a mortgage on the entrepreneur's house. These assets can also provide a link to the owner's credit history, an accountable address for the collection of debts and taxes, the basis for the creation of reliable and universal public utilities and a foundation for the creation of securities (like mortgage-backed bonds) that can then be rediscounted and sold in secondary markets. Third World and former Communist nations have been unable to give the overwhelming majority of their citizens access to this representational process. The inhabitants of these nations do have things, but they lack the process to represent their property and create capital. They have houses but not titles, crops but not deeds, businesses but not statutes of incorporation. It is the unavailability of these essential legal representations that explains why people who have adapted every other Western invention, from the paper clip to the nuclear reactor, have not been able to produce sufficient capital to make their domestic capitalism work. One of the greatest challenges to the human mind is to comprehend those things which we know exist but cannot see. Time, for example, is real, but it can be efficiently managed only when it is represented by a clock or a calendar. Throughout history, human beings have invented representational systems - writing, musical notation, double-entry bookkeeping - to grasp with the mind what human hands could never touch. In the same way, the great practitioners of capitalism were able to reveal and extract capital by devising new ways to represent the invisible potential locked up in the assets we accumulate. The absence of this process in the poorer regions of the world - where five-sixths of humanity lives - is not the consequence of some Western monopolistic conspiracy. It is rather that Westerners take this mechanism so completely for granted that they have lost all awareness of its existence. Although it is huge, nobody sees it, including the Americans, Europeans and Japanese who owe all their wealth to their ability to use it. It is an implicit legal infrastructure hidden deep within their property systems, of which ownership is but the tip of the iceberg. The rest of the iceberg is an intricate man-made process that can transform assets and labor into capital. This process was not created from a blueprint and is not described in a glossy brochure. Its origins are obscure and its significance buried in the economic subconscious of Western capitalist nations. The challenge to leaders in developing and former Communist nations, from Russia's President Vladimir Putin to South Africa's President Thabo Mbeki, is to address the fact that most of the citizens they govern do not have property rights. They have to face the fact that macroeconomic stabilization programs that their governments have carried out have performed only a fraction of the work required to create a democratic market economy. The fundamental shortcoming of these macroeconomic programs is that they forgot to focus on the poor. The time has come to take the issue of the poor away from the charitable agendas of the first ladies and insert it into the working agendas of the heads of state. As capitalism falters in five sixths of the world, the time is ripe to take the subject of property away from conservative legal establishments and put it in the hands of politicians committed to progress.
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But Capitalism Works Most Christians today (with the exception of a few small groups of Amish, the Quakers, and those in Bruderhof communities and Catholic Worker houses) would probably write off this history of antipathy between Christianity and capitalism as irrelevant leftovers from a very different world. After all, experience has shown that people are much better off under capitalism. The standard of living is higher. People are freer. Capitalism works. We won the Cold War not just because of our military might, but because our system is better. Everybody knows that. Yes, everybody knows that. But is it true? People today know lots of things that aren’t true. Maybe we should examine this common knowledge a little more closely. In essence, Christians have discarded all the Biblical, theological, and spiritual arguments against capitalism, and opted for pragmatism. They have embraced capitalism because it works. After all, look at how much better life is in capitalist America than it was in the communist Soviet Union. (At least, that’s what we’ve been told.) Actually, it’s not at all clear that life here is "better" than it was in the Soviet Union under communism. More affluent, but not necessarily better. But that’s hardly a fair comparison. Look at the different starting points. The U.S. in 1917 was rich, powerful, awash with resources. Russia was still a feudal society. In 1945, we had as much wealth as the rest of the world put together, and were unscathed by the war. The Soviet Union was in ruins. A fairer comparison would be the communist Soviet Union of the 1980s compared to capitalist Russia in the 1990s. In the old Soviet Union, there were few signs of affluence. Yet, at the same time, there were no signs of abject poverty. There were no homeless, no jobless, no bag ladies, no muggings, no carjackings, Medical care (such as it was) and higher education were free. Food was highly subsidized. With all the inefficiencies of their system, they were still able to provide for the basic needs of their people. The capitalist Russia of today is something else altogether. A handful of "entrepreneurs" and crooks ride around in luxury limousines, while the vast majority of Russians are much worse off than before. Devaluation of the ruble has wiped out savings and made pensions worthless. Millions have been made destitute. Military officers, unpaid for months, drive taxis trying to feed their families. Crime, corruption, homelessness, hunger, unemployment, hopelessness, pornography, and despair – these are the fruits of capitalism in Russia today. Ask a Russian how well capitalism is working for her or him. So what about Cuba? Isn’t Cuba another example of the failure of socialism? And isn’t Nicaragua another communist failure? Actually, the quality of life in these countries improved enormously under communism. Education became available. Literacy rates soared. Health care improved. (In some ways, it is still better in Cuba than in Florida.) Even the standard of living in these countries rose – at least until opposition, aggression, and boycott by the United States began to take its economic toll. The subsequent economic decline of Nicaragua and Cuba is less indicative of the failure of socialism than it is of the success of the bullying tactics of U.S.-based multinational corporations and their wholly-owned subsidiaries in the CIA, the Pentagon, the State Department, and the White House basement. The truth of the matter is that communism has not succeeded because the global power elite are determined not to let it succeed. Another myth that needs dispelling is that communism is intrinsically atheistic. It was officially so in the Soviet Union only because the church was a strident supporter of the economic and political status quo under the czars. In Nicaragua, the Sandinista government in the 1980s was communist and yet thoroughly Christian, both in official policy and in practice. There is absolutely nothing incompatible between Christianity and socialism. In the Book of Acts we learn that the early Christians practiced a purer, more radical form of communism than can be found in any country today. Traces still exist in the Bruderhofs and other small Christian communities. (You won’t find groups of atheists living that way.) A criticism at this point might go like this: "So maybe communism never got a fair trial. So what? It couldn’t possibly work as well as what we have right now. Why play around with socialist experiments when we already know capitalism works?" But does it really? Let’s take a look at capitalism’s record here in the United States. It had its ups and downs in our first century and a half. By the 1920s it was really roaring. "The business of America is business." Remember? Then came the crash. Right behind it, fortunately, came Franklin D. Roosevelt. First, Roosevelt recognized the problem. Listen to excerpts from his second inaugural address. "I see millions of families trying to live on incomes so meager that the pall of family disaster hangs over them day by day. I see one third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-fed." Next, Roosevelt identified the source of the problem. " We have begun to bring private, autocratic powers into their proper subordination to the public’s government. A legend that they were invincible, above and beyond the processes of democracy, has been shattered. They have been challenged and beaten." He was talking about corporations. Roosevelt knew that only the power of the government could protect the people from the power of "Private, autocratic powers" (corporations). No talk from him about government not being the solution! "We’re going to find through government the instrument of our united purpose." "Repeated attempts at solution without the aid of government have left us baffled and bewildered, ... we must find practical controls over blind economic forces and blindly selfish men." Roosevelt did find the way. Through a combination of social security, government jobs, and other socialist measures, he overcame the power of the Standard Oil trust and other conglomerates and raised the people out of poverty and despair. After the war, the government went further into debt to fund the GI Bill. It turned out to be the best investment yet. The 1950s (which conservatives always want to take us back to) saw top tax brackets of 90% – and saw the emergence of a true middle class. Of course, it wasn’t just the wealthy individuals that financed the boom. Corporations paid 39% of all income taxes back then. By 1991 their share was down to 9%. (This in spite of the fact that corporations were getting a much larger share of the nation’s wealth.) By the early 70s, poverty in the United States was way down, the result not of unbridled capitalism, but of its combination with socialist policies. But then people forgot that government was their only protection from corporate power. Government disgraced itself with the Vietnam War, and the corporations geared up for a comeback. They learned how to manipulate public opinion through the media. They also learned how to control politicians through campaign donations. The result was the election in 1980 of Ronald Reagan and the beginning of the Reagan revolution. During the Reagan years, government controls on corporate power were dismantled, the unions were emasculated, corporate greed was deregulated, top tax rates were slashed, government protection for workers and the environment was weakened, and social programs were squeezed out by Pentagon spending. The end result was a purer form of capitalism. Was this a good thing? Is capitalism working for us? The best we can do in our attempt to answer these questions is to look at statistics. Unfortunately, relevant or consistent statistics are not always easy to come by. But what is available tells a pretty clear story.
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good posts 
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