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The Human Cost Of Socialism In Power
Submitted by Richard Ebeling via EpicTimes.com,
The attempt to establish a comprehensive socialist system in many parts of the world over the last one hundred years has been one of the cruelest and most brutal episodes in human history.
Some historians have estimated that as many as 200 million people may have died as part of the dream of creating a collectivist “Paradise on Earth.” Making a better “new world” was taken to mean the extermination, the liquidation, the mass murder of all those that the socialist revolutionary leaders declared to be “class enemies,” including the families, the children of “enemies of the people.”
The Bloody Road to Making a New Socialist Man
We will soon be marking the hundredth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia (November 1917) under the Marxist revolutionary leader, Vladimir Lenin. In Soviet Russia, alone, it has been calculated by Russian and Western historians who had limited access to the secret archives of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the KGB (the Soviet secret police) in the 1990s, that around 68 million innocent, unarmed men, women and children were killed over the nearly 75 years of communist rule in the Soviet Union.
The communist revolutionaries in Russia proudly declared their goal to be destruction and death to everything that existed before the revolution, so as to have a clean slate upon which to mold the new socialist man.
The evil of the Soviet system is that it was not cruelty for cruelty’s sake. Rather it was cruelty for a purpose – to make a new Soviet man and a new Soviet society. This required the destruction of everything that had gone before; and it also entailed the forced creation of a new civilization, as conjured up in the minds of those who had appointed themselves the creators of this brave new world.
In the minds of those like Felix Dzerzhinsky, Lenin’s close associate and founder of the Soviet secret police, violence was an act of love. So much did they love the vision of a blissful communist future to come that they were willing to sacrifice all of the traditional conceptions of humanity and morality to bring the utopia to fruition.
Thus, in a publication issued in 1919 by the newly formed Soviet secret police, the Cheka (later the NKVD and then the KGB), it was proclaimed:
“We reject the old systems of morality and ‘humanity’ invented by the bourgeoisie to oppress and exploit the ‘lower classes.’ Our morality has no precedent, and our humanity is absolute because it rests on a new ideal. Our aim is to destroy all forms of oppression and violence. To so, everything is permitted, for we are the first to raise the sword not to oppress races and reduce them to slavery, but to liberate humanity from its shackles . . .
“Blood? Let blood flow like water! Let bloodstain forever the black pirate’s flag flown by the bourgeoisie, and let our flag be blood-red forever! For only through the death of the old world can we liberate ourselves from the return of those jackals.”
Death and Torture as Tools of Winning Socialism
The famous sociologist, Pitirim A. Sorokin was a young professor in Petrograd (later Leningrad, and now St Petersburg) in 1920 as the Russian Civil War that firmly established communist rule in Russia was coming to its end. He kept an account of daily life during those years, which he published many years later under the title, Leaves from a Russian Diary – and Thirty Years After (1950).
Here is one of his entries from 1920:
“The machine of the Red Terror works incessantly. Every day and every night, in Petrograd, Moscow, and all over the country the mountain of the dead grows higher . . . Everywhere people are shot, mutilated, wiped out of existence . . .
“Every night we hear the rattle of trucks bearing new victims. Every night we hear the rifle fire of executions, and often some of us hear from the ditches, where the bodies are flung, faint groans and cries of those who did not die at once under the guns. People living near these places begin to move away. They cannot sleep . . .
“Getting up in the morning, no man or woman knows whether he will be free that night. Leaving one’s home, one never knows whether he will return. Sometime a neighborhood is surrounded and everyone caught out of his house without a certificate is arrested . . . Life these days depends entirely on luck.”
This murderous madness never ended. In the 1930s, during the time of the Great Purges instituted by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin to wipe out all “enemies of the revolution” through mass executions, there were also sent millions to the GULAG prisons that stretched across all of the Soviet Union to be worked to death as slave labor to “build socialism.”
Before being sent to their death or to the forced labor camps, tens of thousands would be interrogated and cruelly tortured to get confessions out of people about non-existent crimes, imaginary anti-Soviet conspiracies, and false accusations against others.
Stalin personally sent instructions to the Soviet secret police that stated that in obtaining confessions from the accused, “the NKVD was given permission by the Central Committee [of the Communist Party] to use physical influence … as a completely correct and expedient method” of interrogation.
When Stalin was told that this method was bringing forth the desired results, he told the NKVD interrogators, “Give them the works until they come crawling to you on their bellies with confessions in their teeth.” Then, in another purge, this one after World War II, Stalin simplified the instructions even more: “Beat, beat and, once again, beat.”
Thousands of the victims wrote letters to Stalin from their exile and hardships in the labor camps, all of them persuaded that it had all been a terrible mistake. If only Comrade Stalin knew, he would set it all right and they would be freed and restored as good, loyal Soviet citizens ready to once again work to “build socialism.”
Stalin’s Personal Hand in Building Socialism Through Blood
But Stalin knew. He personally signed off on tens of thousands of death warrants and orders for tens of thousands more to be sent to their horrifying fate in the GULAG camps.
Domitri Volkogonov, a Soviet general-turned-historian, gained access to many of the closed Soviet archives in the 1980s, and wrote a biography of Stalin, entitled, Triumph and Tragedy (1991), meaning Stalin’s “triumph” to power and the resulting “tragedy” for the Soviet people. Volkogonov told a Western correspondent at the time:
“I would come home from working in Stalin’s archives, and I would be deeply shaken. I remember coming home after reading through the day of December 12, 1938. He signed thirty lists of death sentences that day, altogether about five thousand people, including many he personally knew, his friends . . .
“This is not what shook me. It turned out that, having signed these documents, he went to his personal theater very late that night and watched two movies, including “Happy Guys,” a popular comedy of the time. I simply could not understand how, after deciding the fate of several thousand lives, he could watch such a movie.
“But I was beginning to realize that morality plays no role for dictators. That’s when I understood why my father was shot, why my mother died in exile, why millions of people died.”
Soviet central planning even had quotas for the number of such enemies of the people to be killed in each region of the Soviet Union as well as the required numbers to be rounded up to be sent to work in the labor camps in the frigid waste lands of the Siberia and the Arctic Circle or the scorching deserts of Soviet Central Asia.
A Russian lawyer who had access to some of the formerly closed Soviet archives of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the 1990s told at the time:
“Recently I read a Central Committee document from 1937 that said the Voronezh secret police, according to the ‘regional plan,’ repressed in the ‘first category,’ nine thousand people – which means these people were executed. And for no reason, of course.
“Twenty-nine thousand were repressed in the ‘second category – meaning they were sent to labor camps. The local first secretary [of the Communist Party], however, writes that there are still more Trotskyites and kulaks who remain ‘unrepressed.’
“He is saying that the plan was fulfilled but the plan was not enough! And so he asked that it be increased by eight thousand. Stalin writes back, ‘No increase to nine thousand!’ The sickness of it. Its’ as if they were playing poking [and upping the ante in tragic human lives].”
The Victims of Socialism Literally Reduced to Burnt Ash
In the last years of the Soviet Union, a Russian historian took The New York Times correspondent, David Remnick, to the Donskoi Monastery in Moscow, which in the 1930s was used as a burial ground for the thousands regularly killed on Stalin’s orders in the capital of the Red Empire. In his book, Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire (1993), Remnick told what the Russian historian explained:
“See this gate? . . . Well, every night trucks stacked with bodies came back here and dumped them in a heap. They’d already been shot in the back of the head – you bleed less that way . . . They stacked the bodies in old wooden ammunition crates.
“The workers stoked up the underground ovens – right in through the doors – to about twelve thousand degrees centigrade. To make things nice and official they even had professional witnesses who counter-signed the various documents.
“When the bodies were burned they were reduced to ash and some chips of bone, maybe some teeth. They then buried the ashes in a pit . . . When the purges [of the 1930s] were at their peak . . . the furnaces worked all night and the domes of the churches were covered with ash. There was a fine dust of ash on the snow.”
The Kalitnikovsky Cemetery in Moscow also served as dumping ground for thousands of tortured and executed bodies in the 1930s. That same Russian historian told David Remnick:
“In the purges, every dog in town came to this place. That smell you smell now was three times as bad; blood was in the air. People would lean out of their windows and puke all night and the dogs howled until dawn. Sometimes they’d find a dog with an arm or a leg walking through the graveyard.”
Enemies of Socialism Sent to Torture in the Mental Ward
The nightmare of the socialist experiment, however, did not end with Stalin’s death in 1953. Its form merely changed in later decades. As head of the KGB in the 1970s, Yuri Andropov (who later was General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union after Leonid Brezhnev’s death in 1982), accepted a new theory in Soviet psychiatry that said that opposition to the socialist regime was a sign of mental illness.
Why? Because only the mentally disturbed would resist the logic and the truth of Marxian dialectical determinism and its “proof” that socialism and communism were the highest and most humane stage of social development. Those who criticized the system, or who wanted to reform or overthrow the Soviet socialist regime were mentally sick and required psychiatric treatment.
In his book, Russia and the Russians (1984), former Moscow correspondent for the Washington Post, Kevin Klose, told the story of Alexei Nikitin, a coal mine worker who complained to the Soviet government about the safety and health environment in the mines of the Soviet Union. He was arrested, tried, and found guilty of subversion and committed to a Soviet mental institution.
Various drugs were proscribed as treatment to bring him to his proper socialist senses. Explained Kevin Klose:
“Of all the drugs administered [at the mental institution] to impose discipline, sulfazine stood at the pinnacle of pain . . . ‘People injected with sulfazine were groaning, sighing with pain, cursing the psychiatrists and Soviet power, cursing with everything in their hearts,’ Alexei told us. ‘The people go into horrible convulsions and get completely disoriented. The body temperature rises to 40 degrees centigrade [104 degrees Fahrenheit] almost instantly, and the pain is so intense they cannot move from their beds for three days. Sulfazine is simply a way to destroy a man completely. If they torture you and break your arms, there is a certain specific pain and you somehow can stand it. But sulfazine is like a drill boring into your body that gets worse and worse until it’s more than you can stand. It’s impossible to endure. It is worse than torture, because, sometimes, torture may end. But this kind of torture man continue for years.’
“Sulfazine normally was ‘prescribed’ in a ‘course’ of injections of increasing strength over a period that might last up to two months . . . The doctors had many other drugs with which to control and punish. Most of them eventually were used on Alexei . . . At the end of two months, Nikitin was taken off sulfazine but regular doses of . . . other disorienting drugs continued the entire time he was imprisoned.”
The significance of these accounts is not their uniqueness but, rather, their monotonous repetition in every country in which socialism was imposed upon a society. In country after country, death, destruction, and privation followed in the wake of socialism’s triumph. Socialism’s history is an unending story of crushing tyranny and oceans of blood.
Socialism as the Ideology of Death and Destruction
As the Soviet mathematician and dissident, Igor Shafarevich, who spent many years in the GULAG slave labor camps for his opposition to the communist regime, said in his book, The Socialist Phenomenon (1980):
“Most socialist doctrines and movements are literally saturated with the mood of death, catastrophe, and destruction . . . One could regard the death of mankind as the final result to which the development of socialism leads.”
That twentieth century socialism would lead to nothing but this outcome was understood at the time of the Bolshevik victory in Russia. It was clearly expressed by the greatest intellectual opponent of socialism during the last one hundred years, the Austrian economist, Ludwig von Mises.
Near the end of his famous 1922 treatise, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, Mises warned that:
“Socialism is not in the least what is pretends to be. It is not the pioneer of a better and finer world, but the spoiler of what thousands of years of civilization have created. It does not build, it destroys. For destruction is the essence of it. It produces nothing, it only consumes what the social order based on private ownership in the means of production has created . . . Each step leading towards Socialism must exhaust itself in the destruction of what already exists.”
When voices are raised today calling for socialism in America, including by those attempting to win a major party candidacy to run for the presidency of the United States, it is important – no, it is crucial – that the history and reality of socialism-in-practice in those parts of the world in which it was most thoroughly imposed and implemented be remembered and fully understood. If we do not, well, history has its own ways of repeating itself.
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Then please explain why Orthodoxy varies its expression? Does belief change DNA? And if it does is the change sufficient to explain the effect?
OTOH maybe brain power has something to do with it. To a person of IQ 130 some one of IQ 70 might as well be a different species. You see it not only in Jews but also the Japanese. There is a disdain for the lower orders.
And on the other side of the coin are those who have been outsmarted. Or just dealt a bad hand. It animates their murderous impulses. You wouldn't be having any of those would you?
Both the jews and japanese suffer fatal flaws in their viewing of themselves as superior beings, which by far they are not as their past actions certainly show. A superior being by most civilized definition would highlight both intellect and wisdom as well as healthy doses of compassion. The two are also very insular societies which lends itself to their being able to be mind controlled by those they view as their superiors. In the case of the japanese, their royal family. In the case of the jews, the talmudic rabbis. This manipulation is what causes the varied expression in behaviour.
In extreme expressions, this turns into the murderous slaughter which both groups have in their past, and in the case of the jews, in the present and most likely future. The japanese have now successfully harvested their group energy into the creation of world class products while the jews have harvested theirs into the rape and pillage culture of wall street and world domination.
The japanese do believe that they are the product of some form of alien intervention as was revealed in their fascination with the third reich folk. Looking at the jewish biblical record with honest eyes one can see reflections of some sort of intervention of an alien species. But as the saying goes, let them be judged by their deeds. The japanese seemed to have learned some lessons from the murderous past whilst the jews have learned not a thing from theirs, to the point of successfully created a historical reversal with their being portrayed not as the perpetrator but as victim. So the dance will unfortunately continue until the populace at large wakes up and purges the parasitical species.
Your leader Jesus, was a jew with a big jew nose.
....and he said in the final hour you will deny me. You will say I do not knoweth such a man. He will take you nazi coward scum and remind you of how jewish he and his nose are.
You need to take a shower, you filthy Jew!
Why does he need to shower? Just curious.
READ "SOCIALISM" BY L. v. MISES
Great article!
Free in pdf form, here:
https://mises.org/library/socialism-economic-and-sociological-analysis
The problem of course is public schools teach capitalism is bad, and socialism is good.
Teachers are socialist, for fuck's sake.
Mainly women belonging in unions.
That's two strikes right there.
LOL, yah... those crazy socialist schools, teaching social skills.... how dare they
They should all be like us with one tooth, confederate flag wavin, pushin doors that say pulll, tobaca chewin and sister chasin.... yeeeeeehhhhhhaw
If you don't like those who love liberty then isn't it kind of silly to force them into the safety net along with you?
You have a bright future in detox.
That is why any parent who does not remove thier children from public brick & M schools is not doing the rightous thing for thier kids.
Thanks!
BTFD. Putin learned from the crimes of past governments. Now its our turn. And since we no longer have a govenment or leader we can fight the freakin banksters that are running the show. no.
This comment stops your comment from changing. :)
(What was is that you said about gays running around?)
The Devil has no power unless some one makes a deal with him.
Like the Jews?!? Jews are the right hand of Lucifer. And Jews deserve ovens and other fire!
Yeah, what are millions of deaths against OVERPRICED PLANE TICKETS!!! These fucking capitalists. Death to them all!
Putin will order FSB to hunt down the lying bastard who wrote this propaganda and assassinte him for insulting The Father of all Soviet Nations Joseph Stalin and Putin's personal hero Yuri Andropov.
First he needs to detach about a dozen ZH posters from his little pecker and asshole.
Only a Terrist would denounce the merits of Socialism.......
yah because coming out of your bunker and being social to your neighbour is just too confussing for those with a low IQ.
"yah because coming out of your bunker and being social to your neighbour (sic) is just too confussing (sic) for those with a low IQ." (Sweet irony)
Now you see how this 13 year old living in his moms basement has been endoctrinated by public "edjewkashun". "socialism" is just an innocent "hello neighbor" and people living below the mason dixon line are all sister chasing inbreds.
Poor bastard don't stand a chance.
Um... I think it's communism you are talking about. Countries like Israel,Germany, Japan, and canada can be considered socialist and they work just fine.
United States is socialist too, but only for the very wealthy.
Americans are not sophisticated enough to tell the difference between communism and socialism and articles like this that intentionally blur the line suggest the author is running an undeclared agenda.
no dude, germany, israel and japan were highly capitalistic countries, meaning that the degree of the private ownership of the means of production was very high. currently these countries are on their way towards socialism, but they are not yet socialist, i.e. the means of production are not yet fully owned by the "people" (the govt).
because they are relatively less socialist than many other countries, the people are better off. the warning this article makes is that moving towards socialism will destroy the wealth and peace. in full socialism, mass murder becomes unavoidable...
before you reply, read "socialism" by ludwig von mises. it is really a very thoughtful and enlightening book.
Socialism can work some where the people are related by blood. The family is the prime example. The more distant the DNA connection the lower the sympathy/altruism. In fact there is an equation that describes that rather well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kin_selection#Hamilton.27s_rule
but that would mean we would actually have to talk to people instead of shoot at them, goly geee shucks.... what will i do with these fraqs i bought
Socialist for the wealthy?
Like 50 million of foodstamps?
Antoher 50 million on SSI or some shit?
Obamacare?
WTF?
Socialism generally only works in highly homogenous societies.
Try doing that shit in a very diverse society in a large nation.
How dare anyone be social!
We all must build bunkers and save food rations and prepare for the zombie apacolypse.
AK47 Jesus and tax breaks for the corporations!! yeeeeeehhhhhhhhaw!
Socialism depends on the use of force. Why do you equate imprisoning or shooting those who disagreee with you with being "social." To me social interaction is voluntary.
Your socialism requires force, not mine.
How exactly do you propose to TAKE from some to give to others without force?
I'm in favor of voluntary interaction exclusively. You're obviously confused. Without using force how do you expect to get me into your "safety net?"
Fuck you Ninja#2, you do not make that call dumb ass history already has.
So the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was not socialist in your opinion?
usuryISM............
Better to call it Bolshevism as that is really what it is.
The modern leftist-statist-socialist-collectivist (interchangeable terms) will say this is an abberation or inconsistent with their philosophy but it is not. It is the natural evolutionary endpoint of all their beliefs, even if not intended at the outset.
Frankly, no one in the original Russian revolution every envisioned Stalin and the death camps or no one would have revolted. By the 1970's the illusion was pretty much over and Communism stalled.
There is no single system for 7 billion people. We cant even agree on where we came from.
Mutual respect for individual rights and voluntary interaction sounds like a good system to me.
http://cooperative-individualism.org/
The only thing the trailer trash can agree on is tax breaks for their corporate overlords.
Well they want to tax the "exploiters" at 150% of profits or more. Just to be sure.
We came from Xanadu.
there is no unrestrained private ownership of the means of production in this world, hence there is no unrestrained capitalism.
capitalism, i.e. the private ownership of the means of production, conserves scarce resources by raising their price on the markets. only when private property is violated systematically can "the world be destroyed". that is what happens under socialism.
A curious comment. For one, it seems there is a socialist idea at the heart of it, that we should conserve scarce resources, either for the common good or for future capitalist use. Otherwise, would not this drive for high market prices also drive the monopolozation of control of these resources? This would result in wealth determined by political or inherited control. As well, a manipulation of the price of unscarce resources can be secured by limiting their flow, thereby driving more political ownership and manipulation.
An error at the heart of capitalist theory occurs in "There Will Be Blood". There is always a larger private owner than you, a greater capitalist with either greater skills at finding and controlling resources, or one who has fallen into wealth by fate. Only at the start of the game do the laws of capitalism exist. Once the scarce resources are secured and political connections made the laws diminish in value relative to the value of the scarce materials.
One sees quite quickly that in the drive for resource acquisition the world is never the same again, it becomes a politicised environment of the acquisition and control of the resources. The man in control either decides to sell his rare resources immediately at this juncture of highest price, under threat that other resources will be found, or gamble on further control. The man in search of these resources is left to sell immediately or poltiically challenge his rivals. In either case the law of capitalism becomes his bastard son.
As more resources are found and subsequently sought out the environment and political representation of value progressively reduce the previous world, blacking out that ideal world of capitalism which saw scarce resources off in the distance. More and more the future scarce materials are determined by those who already have and are selling the present materials. The world is reduced into the socialist aspirations of the individual, as determined by the control of scarce resources. This is similar to what is known as future shock, a world changing so quickly that just as we find we have come to understand the rules of the world they have changed, and this change and reordering occurs so quickly that we can never even come to grips with the world existentially, culturally, politically, or even economically.
It seems that the largest capitalist, the ubermench of capitalism if you will, is the only individual to escape the problem of future shock. This is because he lives only for materials and material acquisition. However, there can be no law of scarce resources even at this stage of development because the existence of the capitalist overman is determined by nothing other than this runaway of acquisition and destruction of value. The world is his bastard son and there can be no moral grounding in such a world as nothing works but the ritual control of value and elimination of social competition.
Effectively, capitalism is simply socialism of the individual. The individual determines the world according to his own solipsism of how the social world works, and he competes for this vision. In this vision there can be no society as even the son is a source of competition. At the start of the game he exists solely to secure your image as a family man, so as to increase your hold over scarce resources through manipulation of those others in the game. He will either grow up to be a competitior himself or be lost to the natural value of capitalism which is progressive ruin of the future. Effectively, the son is treated as Saturn's object which he must devour so as to offset future risk.
Of course, this process becomes the whole of risk and as the progressive selection of scarce resources results in their depletion the only scarce resource remaining is the idea of capitalism itself, the original laws of its functioning. In order to uphold these laws more and more scarce resources must be found, but they cannot be as they have been depleted, and so too has the world which gave rise to the competitive socialism over capital exchange itself. The only thing left is the fictional resources.
Ironic then that capitalism ends with the exchange of social practises, of culture and essentially marxist thought. At its end capitalism becomes a collective bourgeoisie with nothing to sell but the return of depleted resources. It is cruel, but the natural fate of capitalism was to have a depleted underman selling the world fictitious resources and creating the illusion that money itself is the scarce resource. In this vision it is appropriate that the moneychangers cast all the believers from the temple, as at its core capitalism depends on a paradox of contradictions and dualities. It is an ideal without ideals, so there should have been no illusions as to its absurd end. In the end it kills the ideal which gave rise to it. That was always its function. The ideal is the Scarce Resource, which it opposes.
In other words, the socialism of capitalism exists in its ideal of securing the scarce resource through its very destruction. It exists within the abstract negation of the scarce resource providing progressive wealth and maintenance of the current society - which is dependent upon a contradictory process of at once depleting and making an eternity out of the scarce resource. Within such a destructive process it is inevitable that the society will come to cherish progressive obsolescence and the fictitious creation of value in this process as it will be the only value remaining.
You spent your whole life on a college campus, right? Nothing in the real world, yet?
Your entire post is replete with errors and bad assumptions.
Just cut to the chase and say that freedom is overrated and one should be skeptical.
Please point out these errors rather than resorting to personal attacks based on your solipsism. I have no degree, and have worked mainly non-professional labour jobs. I wrote something that explains why capitalist ideals are in error, and why we have ended in the absurdist tyranny we find ourselves in. I study on my own time, and receive nothing for it. Perhaps your inability to deal with it is because it hits too close to home, that is the case for most.
Socialism largely develops as the left-wing of capital, it is the attempt to try and bring a cultural element into the world which has renounced traditional culture. In other words, capitalists are the economic opposition to modernity, and socialists are the cultural. This is why they come to meet, because from the beginning they were a contradictory coalition against monarchy. You may not appreciate the thesis, but you have contributed nothing but ridicule in turn. Why would that be?
Are you suggesting that freedom is overrated, or that that is my position? Seems like opposition to intellectual freedom is coming through as well, a very leftist methodology which reduces ideas to error and baseless assumption... Nowhere do the two-sides of capital meet closer than in this tactic.
Honestly, I'd have to write a tome three times the length of yours to explain but let me try a bit, as you are not the typical leftist, but leftist you are.
First, the idea that "conserving scare resourses" is a socialist idea is wrong. Force redistributing or allocating scarce resources is a socialist idea. Free people in a capitalist system take note of the high value and prices signals of a scarce resource. They go find more of it, make a substitute or invent a way to use less of it. The inventiveness of an entire population is put to work because the first person or group to solve the problem has a potentially huge reward. Their ingenuity and labor in an unrestrained system will find reward in the volutary relationships of their fellow man. They only win if they succeed.
The larger private owner is a myth. Some supercapitalist predator. Look at the S&P 500 at 50 year increments. No one stays on top. GM would be a memory except for the unfortunate intervention of government. In your examples the capitalist allies with government for advantage whether it is politicized acquistions or political connections or political advantage. This is a statist baseline concept. The State must have the power to give the ubercapitalist the advantage or secure his position.
The rest is frankly economic mush so let's cut to the chase.
The idea of the Leftist is there is an elite. This elite is morally superior, intellectually superior and cares more about the well being of people they do not know than that peson himself. Therefore, he, the central planner is uniquely suited to make decisions on resources, divining the future and calculating the consequences of all choices. This is quite impossible and even laughable on the face of it.
The idea that only the best and brightest and most selfless are elected is contrary to all history. How many Joseph Stalin's do we have to Mother Theresa's at the helm of government? I'd estimate a thousand to one. The power needed by the socialist is so great that it attracts exactly the wrong type of person,not the right one.
Behind even the well meaning socialist is the "fatel conceit" written about by Friedrick Hayek. It is an arrogance that underlies the socialist world view. The very idea that any person or group of people can substitute their decsions for the trillions of economic decisions made every day and every second of the day by 7 billion people is hubris or abject stupidity. It is why the Soviet Union bulids the Trabant and the West builds a Ferrari.
The arrogance underlies all decisions from deciding a minimum wage to fake central bank interest rates. It abrogates all private contract and therefore any personal system of honor. It substitutes the involuntary violent force of government for the voluntary nonviolent associations of mankind. That is why when the lines are long Walmart opens another line while the DMV union clerk goes on break. One relastionship is voluntary the other is involuntary. BTW, the uber retail capitalist predator used to be Sears for about a century. Now they are the verge of bankruptcy. Walmart is now in the sites of the American predator known as the leftist.
Communism is not the end of capitalism. Communism is the end of socialism where things move from somewhat voluntary to fully involuntary. The natural ally of capitalism is libertarianism, anarchism and Austrian economics.
The end of the conflict of these two polar ideas is a wall where one of the political ideologies is trying to escape to the other at risk of one's life. I will let any reader guess which direction the flow is toward.
I have a good friend who started his life in economics as a sincere and good hearted socialist-leftist-collectivist. He was actually trying to research the universal economic equation on behalf of central planners everwhere. (That research still goes on today in college campuses everywhere.) Always and everywhere the leftist is looking for the alchemist's dream to turn economic lead into economic gold. However, he did have a keen eye for history and to make the long story short is an Austrian Economics-libertarian type today.
You can stick with your Hegelian dialectic and I would be happy with that. However, it always requires my forced participation in the end. And that is why it must always and everywhere fail in the end.
Great comment. Probably one of the best ever posted here.
That gentleman's metaparaneoMarxist analysis is precisely what sluices out of academia and leftist journals. We are expected to give serious consideration to "the socialism of capitalism," "the abstract negation of the scarce resource," "progressive wealth," "making an eternity out of the scarce resource," "progressive obsolescence," and "the fictitious creation of value."
Meaning drifts above such concepts making lazy circles in the air. Say whu?
Some wit wrote a web page that generated piles of this meta-language.
That was a hell of a post General Ambivalent.
http://michael-hudson.com/2015/09/killing-the-host-the-book/
Solving the "Unsolvable"
http://masongaffney.org/
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i am blog-tarded
You can still be a valuable and useful member of society. Don't let anyone tell you any different.
families are not socialism. unless the law prevents it, a child, for example, can leave any time and own itself.
Progs, socialists, communists, anarchists, jihadists... aren't they all aligned to attack America?
wartornnations.net
Yes, indeed. And immigrants.
And Islam? The dispensation is to treat like slaves (or worse wothless) anyone with incorrect beliefs.
National socialists.
Don't forget, socialism did not just happen in Russia or China. The Germans were National Socialists (that is the meaning of Nazi). They elected Hitler and his National Socialist German Workers Party. Only this time the class enemy were the Jews.
The Germany economy was run from Berlin, factories were mandated to produce what ever the central govt demanded.
And, surprise: millions of deaths...
National socialists.
Don't forget, socialism did not just happen in Russia or China. The Germans were National Socialists (that is the meaning of Nazi). They elected Hitler and his National Socialist German Workers Party. Only this time the class enemy were the Jews.
The Germany economy was run from Berlin, factories were mandated to produce what ever the central govt demanded.
And, surprise: millions of deaths...
Liberals and other looney-tunes want us to believe that communism and socialism differ in mysterious ways. They spew the idea that socialism is hip and cool while communism is harsh and uncool. To Marx the terms were synonyms, to the Soviets the words were used interchangeably. But the white liberal war-fanatic hipsters who bow down to Sanders are trying to sell us on what they call socialism and what they got to offer ain't even close to socialist.
"In the minds of those like Felix Dzerzhinsky, Lenin’s close associate and founder of the Soviet secret police, violence was an act of love. So much did they love the vision of a blissful communist future to come that they were willing to sacrifice all of the traditional conceptions of humanity and morality to bring the utopia to fruition."
gee, substitute Felix Dzerzhinsky for Israel...........
Socialism and Capitalism are both bullshit 19th century theories, both roundly debunked at this point. Time for new thinking people, now take a deep breath, and try to pull your heads out of your asses.
capitalism has neither been debunked in logical argument nor by facts. it has only been smeared by socialists like you.
lol socialists, my true beliefs would frighten you little piggy, go back to sleep.
I would say it depends on the extent of the capitalism. I don't agree that everything should be privatized. For example, natural resources. In Russia, the state was able to use them to improve people's lives. Than there is the question of banks. I think that banks should belong to the state, because it is obviously too dangerous to leave them in private hands. Also there is the question of "too big private companies - corporations". How do you control them? This is still the biggest problem in Russia, which is so far only solved by Putin's famous "manual control", but that is not an ideal solution. Or is it? Putin simply draw a line and said: "Companies of up to this size will not be supervised by the state." So small and medium companies are free of state intervention. But the system would not work without "supervising" huge companies, who could otherwise turn into very bad big wolves. And what about corruption? There are still too many mind-boggling questions.
I think the fact that it is devouring the earth whole is evidence enough against it.
You obviously know nothing about Soviet spoliation. Communist China's people breathe poisoned air. The "it" you speak of in the U.S. spend billions to protect the environment.
But none of that gets considered by you. "It" is devouring the earth.
Pathetic.
So what are you against? Property? Profit? Organization? Thermodynamics? The conservation of mass/energy? Chemistry? Physics? Quantum Entanglement?
What?
Exactly. Mixed economies on the local-regional level are the future and hopefully as Mike Reynolds of earthship fame has it, will exist beyond necessities, which will be provided through self-sufficient means. ie, housing, food, water. I believe wellness/healthcare also falls in this list. Economies will be ecological, downsized, more service-oriented and cannot be consumptive. There will have to be less people, via empowerment of women and restoration of birth control.
You won't visionaries at ZH. Come just for the facts.
You got "self-sufficient" in so you've obviously thought this through in great detail. Don't forget "renewable" and "sustainable."
And sand will be our new uranium. Any day now. It's so close I can just tell it's around the corner.
well, you should listen to this then. About Russian contemporary spirituality. About how they are returning to their roots. And especially the end is important. https://soundcloud.com/russia-insider/peter-lavelle-and-dmitry-babich
"I don't think that the West is always bad and the East is always good, I think that evil moves from the West to East and from East to West."
"The actions of Pussy Riot band were exactly like thousands of anti-Church actions done in the Soviet Union in 1920s (beginnings of communism). They were not conducted by the state, but presumably by social groups, by activists. That is why in Russia Pussy Riot caused such anger." "Because it reminded Russians about the Soviet times?" "Because it was exactly like it was done in the worst times of Russian history." "There are more example why the modern Western society now resembles the Soviet society, one for one."
He actually described the beginnings of a color revolution and (Marxist) takeover, where activists and social groups are used to start changing minds of the society in such a way that the government can then control the minds of the people. The Russian Revolution was a color revolution. Lenin was sent from Prussia and Trotsky came from New York. They were both sent by Western powers. And then when their game with communism was over, they invented the concept of perestroika, reconciliation with the West and the biggest looting of Russia began, in 1990s. Still all theatre directed by the same people in the West - through their Jewish connections. Yes, I forgot to say that bolsheviks were predominantly Jews. Putin himself actually referred to this during a speech to Jews, when opening a Jewish Museum in Moscow and, somehow, it sounded like a warning and a reprimand. According to the official transcription of Putin’s speech at the museum, he went on to say that "the politicians on the predominantly Jewish Soviet government were guided by false ideological considerations and supported arrest and repression of all faiths."
But Russians escaped from this captivity (only thanks to Putin, who did the unthinkable and dared to refuse to obey Western zionist bankers) and they are now returning to their roots, to their true identity. And they are watching stunned, like the same thing that happened to them is now happening in the West. While Russians are trying hard to build their way to freedom (for the first time ever in their history) and to create some kind of society based "on the will of the people", the crazy West is trying to impose something on them once again, while it itself is sinking into a depressive cynical totalitarian society. I can now understand, why Russians are so angry at the West and their Pussy Riots, Nemtsovs, Navalnys and other scum used to control peple.
By any name, the state has always been the enemy of individual freedom. I have my fingers crossed that this economic collapse is powerful enough to bring about it's demise.
Usual Mises miser propaganda out of ZH, focusing on Communism and Fascism instead of the kind of socialism that works in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Ireland and Belgium, among others.
Sweden is reducing pensions for oldsters and is kicking them out of their homes for the Muslim parasites. The are bringing in more when the don't have housing for the ones already there.
The lefties sigh and swoon over "sustainable" economies but their budget deficits climb higher and higher. This is Divine justice for bubbleheaded dreamers who think the realities of life (and arithmetic) can be avoided if you but click your heels together.
To name or label a thing as something doesn't necessarily make it so.
There was nothing Socialist about the Bolshevik's, Lenin, Stalin and their ilk. They were Authoritarians who co-opted a people's movement.
Lenin was a Wall St. paid provocateur who was hired to co-opt a movement.
Socialism existed with its democratic leanings, cradle to grave, for Scandanavian countries up until the 80's.
Socialism is:
an economic system characterized by public ownership and centralized planning of all major industries (manufacturing, services, and energy), banks and insurance companies, agribusiness, transportation, the media, and medical facilities. Under capitalism, these giant enterprises dominate the economy but are privately owned and operated for the purpose of generating wealth for their owners by extracting it from working people who are paid only a small fraction of what their labor produces. Socialism turns this around so that the class that produces the wealth can collectively decide how it will be used for the benefit of all.
Although there are different types, Real socialism is, by definition, democratic. It is economic as well as political democracy. Many capitalist countries boast of their democratic institutions, but this is an illusion because all the political power is in the hands of those who hold the wealth. Socialism prioritizes human needs and eliminates the profit motive that drives war, ecological destruction, and inequalities based on gender, race, nationality and sexuality.
Like capitalism, socialism must be international so that global resources can be shared. No country can be truly independent of the global economy because until capitalism is defeated internationally it will continue to sabotage efforts to build socialism. Achieving socialism in the United States, the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world, is necessary to any country being able to determine its own destiny.
According to Bob Altemeyer in his book The Authoritarians:
"Authoritarians are highly submissive to established authority, aggressive in the name of that authority, and conventional to the point of insisting everyone should behave as their authorities decide. They are fearful and self-righteous and have a lot of hostility in them that they readily direct toward various outgroups. They are easily incited, easily led, rather un-inclined to think for themselves, largely impervious to facts and reason, and rely instead on social support to maintain their beliefs. They bring strong loyalty to their in-groups, have thick-walled, highly compartmentalized minds, use lots of double standards in their judgments, are surprisingly unprincipled at times, and are often hypocrites. But they are also Teflon-coated when it comes to guilt. They are blind to themselves, ethnocentric and prejudiced, and as close-minded as they are narrow-minded."
Many people mistake the menu for the meal & the map for the terrain.
Authoritarianism & Fascism in my estimation have been a bane to humanity for centuries.
Great post! Thank you!
Milton Churchill
It's amazing. Zero Hedge gives you every reason to hate capitalism and is completely clueless about socialism.
State communism run by a thug like Stalin is hardly the powerful socialism that the trillions spent on propaganda can't squash.
Grow up and accept that socialism has powerful appeal because it calls for sane economics rather than the stupidity of capitalism demonstrated on this website everyday.
But then the brain dead capitalist apologist cries out defiantly "This Is Not Capitalism!"
Oh, but it is my clueless stooge. What we are seeing are the consequences of unhinged, unregulated capitalism, so long pointed out by "socialists" and others.
It ain't Marxists in office, academia, the corporate office or the moronic media.
The logic is private profit controlled and monopolized by a few, the rest of capitalist theory is fodder for suckers.
Industrialism is too old-fashioned. Requires to much capital and work. Finance is much more streamlined and nothing more than paper shuffling. That's where the big money is: Finance, Insurance, Real Estate. FIRE. That is the natural trajectory of capitalism.
Man up and accept the facts.
Keep up your irrational thought that Socialism is a force of good in the world. How do you come down on Planned Parenthood and their activities which have resulted in the death of 55 million human beings in the US? Albeit humans in the womb with a heart beat and all their parts at 10 weeks.
I don't know what you call it but when someone puts a knife or surgical scissors to the neck of baby as they exit the womb, albeit by the use of chemicals to cause premature birth, or worse injects chemicals into the womb to cause chemical buring and a miscarriage that is a murder and the taking of a life.
I am sure you like Obama say it was to prevent someone from being punished with a baby.
Mommy and daddy will protect you when those lovely, sane, rational socialists get the power they want. No more mean capitalists.
When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in society. they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code which glorifies it
There is capitalism
Socialism = Jews
Communism = Jews
Liberalism = Jews
Feminism = Jews
Sodomites and other deviants are normal = Jews
Psychiatry = Jews
Political Correctness = Jews
Control of American Media = Jews
Control of Wall Street = Jews
Control of Government (AIPAC, etc...) = Jews
It goes on and on! Jews are the most evil people in the world! If you wonder why the world is so fucked up, wonder no longer!
Adolf, Stalin, Mao, Genghis Khan, Pol Pot, Kim, ISIS, Taliban, Ted Bundy, and Jack the Ripper and Mexican drug lords all agree with you.
Touché. + 1
Is your real name Adolph?
If only more understood the simple truth Kommando.
Post WWII, capitalist America shown to be responsible for MILLIONS OF DEATHS via our CIA and affiliated gangsters.
http://www.brianwillson.com/history-us-military-overt-and-covert-global-...
Anywhere, from 6 to 20 million and I have heard as high as 60 M since WWII.
I wonder how all of those free markets were opened. Do you think real socialism has ever existed? Of course not. That list on link above is the record proving it has not and could not. Allende, Arbenz, Mossadech, etc, etc, The entire history of the CIA, which entails killing socialistic governments, ie., governments that did not want to fleece the peasant for the benefit of the rich, belies this completely retarded ideologically blind article. How about Operation Gladio in Europe, which killed off socialist leftist parties in the 60s-70?
You libertards are fucking uneducated morons, and your stupidity is STAGGERING. Capitalism is the main force of death and destruction on the planet, enforced by military gangsterism, all created by COCKS like you. Socialism, which does NOT entail communistic governmental control of the economy, has NEVER FUCKING EXISTED.
This article is about communist dictatorships -- in the Soviet case, enabled and FUNDED by US FINANCE, capitalist finance -- not about socialist economies, which have not existed. No socialist supports communist dictatorships.
Sure, millions of deaths IN OTHER COUNTRIES!!! Would you rather live in a country that massacres other peoples, or in a country that massacres its own?
Answered like a true capitalist.
How about not slaughtering people at all, Hitler?
So you admit capitalism is savage?
Because killing people is the only thing any government has ever done well. If your government doesn't kill people, it has no reason to exist.
These people are complete idiots. Up is down, wet is dry and bad is good. It's all oppositeville.
Let's ask the key question: Which is the greater threat? Is government the greatest threat to free people? Are free people the greatest threat to other free people? Or, last, are free people a threat to government?
You can rank those any way you like. Then decide how much power you want to give government/s everywhere.
Have you looked at the damn sky lately? What do you think they are doing to you right now? There are toxic heavy metals and engineered biologicals up there. Have you tried to eat healthy food that was not cancerous? Have you heard about the killing of doctors who cure cancer? Heard about Jade Helm?
WAR IS ON YOU, SUCKER.
Moreover, your compassion for those in other countries is so heartening. I am truly touched.
That statement is just beyond crazy
Every town in America has monuments for the men who died fighting in Korea and Vietnam, but there are no monuments for any who died in Chile, Guatemala, or Iran. Is that because Americans never fought in those countries, or because their brave socialists surrendered to the Americans without firing a shot?
Even if your rant had any credibility, which it doesn't...keep in mind that Mao, Stalin and Hitler together were either directly or indirectly responsible for the death of an estimated 100 million people during this dark period of human history. The article shines the light on the evil outcomes of widespread Socialism and Socialist gov'ts before and during WWII. I realize the article presents hard facts, facts that are hard to face because you think that Socialism is good. Sadly it is not, even though the name sounds good it is pure evil at its core.
While I wait for your purile response here are some facts to consider...
Socialist thinking in the form of Planned Parenthood (founder Margaret Sanger, who like Hitler supported Eugenics) is responsible for the murder or over 55 million humans in the U.S., albeit by scissors to the head or neck in or exiting the womb. I'm sure your higher level of thinking justifies such genocide.
Feminist hysterics.
Operation Gladio. Now them was the real killers!
I think the point that the Mises folks would like to obfuscate is that Capitalism and Socialism can and do co-exist in many countries. They aren't mutually exclusive. False dichotomy.
I guess you are right if it is "crony" capitalism...China has proven that, however free market capitalism which we do not live under BTW is not compatible with Socialism, they are like oil and water.
IMO both Stalin and Mao were told they would rule the NWO. The slaughter and starvation tactics were an early form of agenda 21.
This was premature, but we can see what is in store.
Great article, needs to be taught more in school, instead they fill kids heads with non-sense like man made global warming is real. Even if it was, it would actually increase the planet's capacity to sustain life and should be encouraged. Heating the planet by one degree according to their own esitmates would actually allow greater plant life to be sustained and thus a larger global population.
They want to kill 6.5 billion people.
That is a fact that I fear lurks behind all that talk about "sustainable" economics and "responsible" stewardship. The left ZPG and abortion fanatics hate humans and see us as infesting the earth like cockroaches.
How can you tell this guy is a NeoCon mouthpiece? He babbled on at length about how evil the Bolsheviks and early Communists were without once mentioning they were 90% Jewish. The Bolshevik revolution was almost entirely from the top down Zionist Jews financed by New York Jews. The biggest mass murderer in history was a Jew, Stalin's head of the secret police that ran all the gulags.
So what is this guy's agenda?
Pol pot did the same in Cambodia; oh yeah, I forgot, he was supported heavily by Kissinger!
Pol Pot was a socialist, and your Kissinger reference is out of context. His proposal was to pit one commie against another and he hoped that Pol Pot would fight North Vietnam in hopes that our soldiers would not have to. Turned out not to be an effective strategy. Not supporting Henry but just pointing out the typical Leftist strategy, re-write history to suit your political BS.
The facts are biotch, however Socialist always think "we'll get it right this time". The article points out the truth about Socialism in that it is respononsible for more death and destruction than even the Islamists. Hundreds of millions in the last 100 years. That's not counting the genocide of humans in the womb.
However the Socialist or should I say "Neo" Socialists of today are always spouting off with the term "Neo" on this site. They are such rubes, they are incapable for reading history and on rare occasion when they do they say it was conspiracy or lies.
They will probably be wearing their V for Vendetta masks as they type their vile responses to my post. I'm sure they will use all kinds of rude and crude language as well.
Socialism, Capitalism, Communism, INGSOC, Neo-Bolshevism, Death Worship, etc, etc...it doesn't matter. Orwell was dead on right when he advocated in his book "1984" ALL of these systems eventually degrade into an oligarchical-based tyranny. Yes, you can bet your sweet bippy there will always be a 1-2 pct of banksters and elitist scum who want to run roughshod over the rest of the people. That's just the cold hard truth about humans.
Lest u think revolutions solve the problem, think again. The 98-99 pct is comprised of many who will gladly take the place of the 1-2 pct if it is removed. That is precisely why Jefferson said a revolution should happen every 20 years or so.
Capitalism is too broad of term as it can be applied to socialists, communists et al, for they all engage in capitalism. However if you had used the term "Free Market Capitalism" then I would have to disagree. Because in true free markets there does not exist the cronyism between gov't and capitalists, by law it is not allowed and the central gov't is so weak that capitalist are not willing to spend their profits to promote the passing of laws that will limit their competition.
Id never be able to function under anything other than what im here with ism wise. if you shoot or kick out the bankers, your country may have a fighting chance. 3 year term limits on congress, under penalty of death. so the story goes if you want power hat bad, then youll be forced to wager your kids, wife, possesions and your own life to earn the job. To me it seems fair, president gets a term, just one. if he cant pull it off in one, then find one who can.
What else is there to say, not much, the constitution needs no addendums, the purity of the document was fine as is. im tired of typing, suck it easy you lowlifes.
Great article, of course the Neo Socialists will have a hard time with it. Facts are a biotch.
Sweden is a socialist country. There is no evidence of mass murder, mass starvation, deportations or state sponsored torture in Sweden.
Tyranny does not necessarily need socialism as its basis.
Crony capitalism is not necessarily free of injustice and terrible oppression.
"Tyranny does not necessarily need socialism as its basis"
Thats true but it's often when enters it's late stages that the real fun starts. Right around the time economy can't support the social programs you should expect to see the results of consolidation of power such as starvations, state violence etc. When the people revolt unsure of why their standard of living has gone to hell is when you will see the darker side. It's the consolidation of power and centralized control that gets you after that all one has to do is throw the switch. The facade of prosperity and everyone having enough is what sucks the population in and we have enjoyed this portion of the process for quite some time.
You wont be alone we have a slightly different version in the US.
I think this excerpt from a Doug Casey essay adds at least a bit of much-needed clarity to this discussion. The larger essay explains why, other things being equal, capitalism has the greatest capacity for promoting freedom and prosperity; but that we always end up with a system that destroys them, whether it be crony socialism, crony capitalism, or some other sociopathic alternative.
“A communist advocates state ownership and control of all the means of production and all consumer goods. That's a practical impossibility, of course, even in the most primitive aboriginal bands. The idea is even more absurd and preposterous for an industrial society. But that doesn't keep professors and politicians from pretending that it's a good idea, even if just in theory.
A socialist advocates state ownership of society's means of production but accepts private ownership (with state control) of consumer goods. While it's a big improvement over communism, socialism is also completely impractical and always either collapses or evolves into fascism. North Korea and (now to a lesser degree) Cuba are the world's only socialist states.
A fascist advocates nominal private ownership of both the means of production and consumer goods – but with strong state control over both. In other words, you can own mines, farms, and factories – but the state reserves the right to tax, regulate or even expropriate them. Fascism has nothing to do with jackboots and black uniforms; you can have those in communist and socialist states as well. It has to do with a corporate state and a revolving door between business and government, with each protecting and enriching the other. Fascism can be maintained for a long time but necessarily entails all the problems we now face. Almost all the world's states are fascist today; they differ only in degree and detail.
A capitalist advocates the private ownership of everything. An extreme capitalist may be an anarchist, who believes that anything people need or want should be, and would be, provided by entrepreneurs at a profit.
No country provides a perfect example of any of these four arrangements. But every government promotes one or the other as a theoretical ideal. In most places, certainly including the US, the "mixed economy" is put forward as a good thing; the "mixed economy" is a polite way of describing fascism. Nobody wants to call fascism by its name today because of its strong association with Hitler's "National Socialists." In any event, look and analyze closely before you use these words and attach any of the four tags to any country.
In that light, it's funny how the Chinese are still referred to as communists, even though communism was tried only briefly, under Mao. In fact, up to the mid-'80s, China was a socialist state. Now it's a fascist state. China's Communist Party? It's just a scam enabling its members to live high off the hog.
Sweden is usually referred to as socialist, but it's always been a fascist country. All of its means of production – businesses, factories, farms, mines and so forth – have always been privately owned but heavily taxed and regulated. The presence of lots of "free" welfare benefits is incidental. People often conflate a welfare state with socialism, but they're two different things. Socialist states necessarily become too poor to provide any welfare. Fascist states can better afford it and usually offer some in order to help justify the government's costly and annoying depredations.
There is no truly capitalist state in the world today; perhaps Hong Kong comes closest (although not very close).The early US came quite close in some regards. In fact, the West as a whole was quite free in the century from the fall of Napoleon in 1815 to the start of World War 1 in 1914. Almost everywhere taxes were low and regulations few; there was no inflation because gold was currency everywhere; there were almost no serious wars and passports hardly existed, which enabled most anyone to travel almost anywhere without permission. It's no accident that, in percentage terms, the 19th century saw far greater and wider advances in prosperity than any time before or since. Capitalism is both natural and ideal – but, oddly, it doesn't exist anywhere. Why not? I'll explore that shortly.
***
I would like to suggest that what really distinguishes political elites from normal people is not just a predilection for stupidity but a real capacity for evil. Evil might best be defined as the intentional and usually gratuitous commission of acts that are cruel or unjust. A person who commits many evil acts is a sociopath. The sociopaths who are naturally drawn to government eventually come to dominate it. They're very dangerous people. They reset the social mores of the country they control. After a certain point, a critical mass is reached, and it's GAME OVER. I suspect we're approaching that point.”
Sweden is the rape capital of the world exceeded only by Lesotho. Sweden does nothing to curb the local version of AntiFa who beat critics of that fine country. Hand grenades are now in use in Malmo.
You are fixated on the word "mass." There are more evils than you list.
and the zio will do this to usa
85% of the Bolsheviks were Jews? Aside from that we have the histories, some cited in this article and it is gut wrenching to imagine the cruelty during this time period. As of right now, humans are being beheaded, having limbs cut off, throats slit, men, women and children and animals burned, tortured, thrown off buildings and executed in some perverse fashion in the Muslim world and in mass. Someday this horror will be realized once the history is written down. Until then, the Patriots beat the Steelers and that is all that matters in this society.
It was a good game. Steelers gave up at least 10 easy points to the Patriots with missed field goals and a missed fumble recovery. Plus Patriots cheated with the radios not working.
100 years from now, the human cost of disaster capitalism will make you wish for socialism.
stupid fuckers.
This guy must be from another planet. To state the obvious, I went to the dictionary for the definition of socialism.
"a political and economic theory of social organization that advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole."
Yeh, that's worked out real well. There's nothing more rewarding than working so the "community" can take it away.
Methinks the man from Mars doesn't know the difference between state capitalism and free market capitalism.
until correction of the problem of the .01% of the 1% owning the "means of production" in any political/economic system, one cannot claim existence of socialism's "community as a whole".
Disaster capitalism? That's a new one on me. It must refer to selling power generators at triple the price after hurricanes.
Leftists and their neologisms and misdirections. An honest debate just isn't possible with them.
Stalinism is not socialism.
Sorry Mr. Ebeling, but you're out of your depth.
That's the classic socialist copout. Stalinism is socialism gone to its logical conclusion.
What's an avowed socialist to do? Why simply disavow Stalinism. Theirs is the kindler and gentler kind. If you elect them, they promise they won't shoot you or starve you to death. And if you don't like what they do - tough!
the logical conclusion of socialism does not require authoritarianism.
it may require hacking the planet to effect a debt jubilee...
a girl has to dream doesn't she?
the logical conclusion of socialism does not require authoritarianism.
So says the woman from Mars.
it may require hacking the planet to effect a debt jubilee...
That would be a form of authoritarianism - taking from some to give to others by fraud or force.
Robin Hood
"The attempt to establish a comprehensive socialist system" - not attempt to establish most of the socialist mechanisms are implemented by capitalist elites to preserve themselves first. as parasites.
In an over populated world with finite resources the systems like "here is a handout for you" so you do not turn on those with something or even alot. since 2008 though that freebie is shrinking and not affordable hence austerity and even QE where the QE does not hit main street is austerity.
With his name attached, Keynes if you really remove the name is a borrow, inflate the economy to keep the debt under control and it is a socialist mechanism. As soon as this was implemented it spread like a cancer through all global economies and it appears in everything, even in population growth, immigration etc. all part of the economic policy. Derivatives, implemented to start creating value to justify the rapidly increasing debt that sovereigns thought they could get away with FOREVER.
IT IS ALL A SOCIALIST SYSTEM NOW WHERE IN THE CLOSED LOOP THE SINGLE SOCIALIST GLOBAL ECONOMY BECOMES A TOTALITARIAN STATE TOO KEEP IT THAT WAY.
Obama medicare - socialist. (if you never earn enough to cover what it cost it is socialist and needs Keynes).
UK NHS - socialist. (if you never earn enough to cover what it cost it is socialist and needs Keynes).
Free education - socialist (if you never earn enough to cover what it cost it is socialist and needs Keynes).
*Benefits - socialist (if you never earn enough to cover what it cost it is socialist and needs Keynes).
*housing, childcare, free for OAP all socialist policies.
The totalitarian state fails eventually, under the current economic form it is merely a transistion phase to the carnage that eventually ensues governed by one concept too many poor!
Great article.
I think socialism has a tendency to evolve into tyranny and violence against its own people beacause it is based on restriction of basic economic freedoms. What I mean is that there two opposing forces in a socialist state: people who want to live better than what the system allows - and on the other side socialist system that wants to make everyone equal economically. This leads to more and more restricitive laws, til they become tyrannical.
"I think socialism has a tendency to evolve into tyranny and violence against its own people beacause it is based on restriction of basic economic freedoms. What I mean is that there two opposing forces in a socialist state: people who want to live better than what the system allows - and on the other side socialist system that wants to make everyone equal economically. This leads to more and more restricitive laws, til they become tyrannical."
Let me rewrite this.
"I think capitalism has a tendency to evolve into tyranny and violence against its own people because it is based on restriction of basic economic freedoms. What I mean is that there two opposing forces in a capitalist state: people who want to live better than what the system allows - and on the other side the capitalist system that wants to lower wages and living standards for the masses. This leads to more and more restrictive laws, til they become tyrannical."
Fixed it for you.
"I think capitalism has a tendency to evolve into tyranny and violence against its own people because it is based on restriction of basic economic freedoms"
There isn't a social system in existence that can't be abused and doesn't eventually degrade into tyranny and violence.
Too many people stuck on the label. By any name, state control of the market economy always ends in disaster.
Now try to visualize every society in the world under state control. This is the prescription for the epic failure now in progress.
"By any name, state control of the market economy always ends in disaster."
Spiritof42, you should use a reality check. You can find one nowadays in Papua New Guinea. They have next to no State, no regulations and a tiny police force. By your standards, it's a heaven of free trade and unhindered human development.
What do we get instead of a free-trader paradise? Lawlessness, rampant crime and corruption, no infrastructure maintenance at all, unchecked epidemics, men, women and children getting raped, expats who have to live behind barbed wires guarded by private police companies, trucks that have to cover their windshields and windows with iron bars because otherwise, they get mugged by the gangs of criminals that infest the roads, and foreign companies that plunder the country at will. It's hell on Earth.
Did I mention there is no police force to speak of, no State, no regulations of any kind?
You get mugged or killed, too bad. If you're still alive, next time, shoot first.
If you're sick and dying, too bad. Nobody will help you. If you stay alive, next time, rob someone at gunpoint so you can pay for your meds.
So, things are not as simple as you would like to think.
It all depends on what forms of State control we're talking about, some being utterly, vitally necessary.
They have next to no State, no regulations and a tiny police force.
So were the American Indians. And they remain or remained a primitive society.
What do we get instead of a free-trader paradise? Lawlessness, rampant crime and corruption, no infrastructure maintenance at all, unchecked epidemics, ...
Do you comprehend what you wrote? Do you comprehend what free means in a free trade context? I guess I have to explain it to you. Free means to not trespass on another person and their property. I already said there is no social system that can't be abused. You argue against freedom because you believe it will degrade into a criminal system. The argument is ludicrus.
It all depends on what forms of State control we're talking about, some being utterly, vitally necessary.
All forms of state control are criminal by the definition of "control." By your reasoning, there is not point to freedom because it will eventually become criminal. You give no critical thought to your ideas.
That sounds like a good plot for Harry Belafonte's and Danny Glover's next movie. They lap that "America is a cesspool" stuff up. You should set up a meet and get some of the rights. Get Chili Palmer to do the talking, though.
You cannot develop a modern economy with primitive low-IQ people like Papuans, Australian aborigines, Africans, - no matter what kind of economic system you use.
Take a developed prosperous city in the US and settle it with Africans and let them run it - within 10-20 years it will look like Africa - poor and crime infested (see Detroit, St.Louis, parts of Baltimore, Atlanta, LA - everywhere where Africans are majority in population and in local government).
You obviously don't understand the meaning of free markets! Prices in the economy are set by the market (unless manipulated by Governments and those that collude with them).
Wages being pushed down like all things in the market is set by the economic fundamentals of the laws of supply and demand.
If you believe otherwise - you chose to live in ignorance.
You certainly don't understand capitalism. You are to capitalism what ISIS is to Islam. Radical, perverted extremism.
Just like you read about in those infantile Ayn Rand books.
Which capitalism are you talking about? Free market capitalism? Or state capitalism?
Looks to me like you are confusing the former for the latter.
There is no such thing as a free market for some are more free than others. Monopolies -whether State or corporate- are bad for free markets. Adam Smith understood that unrestricted capitalism eventually will lead to monopolies and that would be the end of free markets.
Anti trust laws were supposed to prevent monopolies but appear to be seldom used.
Bingo! We have a winner!
I can't agree with you. Look at capitalist countries of the world - typically they are the most developed with the most freedoms (which, unfortunately, have been erroding lately). Then take a look at all attempts of socialism in the 20th century - all of them ended in poverty with few hundred million people killed.
You may say that they didn't do the "right" sort of socialism, I say all socialist states have tendency toward tyranny and violence, same way as capitalism has tendency toward olygarchy/crony capitalism.
Did you know that the Fremont suburb of Seattle had a statue of Lenin at it's center near the Fremont troll? It may still be there I am unsure, it is strange story how it arrived there to begin with.
It's just incredible that 65 million may have been killed over 70 years in that Bolshevik horror and we have the holocaust drilled into our heads from birth and yet we are taught so little about the 65 million. I honestly had no idea the numbers were that high. When you randomly search the death toll from Bulshevism you will see numbers ranging from 2-20 million. Shouldn't at least equal attention be given to this event in the media and educational literature? Maybe a small honorable mention to the Russian people for being such incredible survivors?
And yet no mention of the millions killed under Mao in China.
That one they actually covered when I was highschool. Although they didn't make us watch videos that had the whole class in tears for Mao.
Take your pick :
1°: neo feudal aristocratic capitalistic totalitarianism (our current Pax Americana model),
2°: theocratic creationist totalitarianism (our Saudi friends model or the Ayatollah one) or
3° : statist "one shirt for all" socialistic totalitarianism (China etc.)
-- I will be charitable, for argument's sake, and lump state "fascism" with state "socialism"--although from an historical and ideological perspective this assimilation is very debatable and an oversimplification (especially for those who have memories of the brown shirts and their gas chambers).
Why does this guy further simplify the current choices to ONE of the three pests of modern day civilization ?
Not to mention the fourth form of totalitarianism now being concocted : Cybernetic anthropomorphic, bionic Man self programmed to kill the Homo Sapiens ! By the Oligarchical techno rulers of tomorrow (or so pretend Stephen Hawkins and Elon Musk) .
Now we know whats up ahead !
Well that's it then. Blow up the fucking Hoover Damn because that was socialism at its' finest.
You haven't shown that it was built without payoffs and inflated wages, that it needed to be that size, or that it's efficiently run and isn't a drain on the taxpayer.
Megaprojects undertaken by government say nothing about the efficient production of beef, steel, cars, or toothpaste. The economy isn't that dam; it's that other stuff.
Plus we recognize the idea of a public utility. Power and water companies are, what, natural monopolies and get treated differently than pizza parlors, which aren't.
We need some realism. Free market capitalism is good but such things as laws against fraud and unfair competition mitigate some of the rough edges of it. Too much interference and the economy suffers.
The US is primed for a tyrant.
Executing the very liberals that put that tyrant in power.