Category: Socialism/Communism

The Intoxicating Effects of Socialist Benevolence

These folks mean well. They seek to boost all mankind up to their own plane of enlightenment. Inequality outrages their sense of justice. They regard conventional habits of behavior as so many obstacles to be overcome on the path to perfection. They see tradition as the enemy of innovation, which they embrace as a lifeline to moral progress. They cannot encounter a wrong without seeking to right it. The idea that some evils may be ineradicable is anathema. The notion that the best is the enemy of the good, that many choices are to some extent choices among evils—such proverbial wisdom seems quaintly out of date. The result is a campaign to legislate virtue, to curtail eccentricity, to smother individuality, to barter truth for the current moral or political enthusiasm.

For centuries, prudent political philosophers have understood that the lust for equality is the enemy of freedom.

The Constitution was written to ‘secure the blessings of liberty’ not equality. That’s why Democrats hate the Constitution.

Source: The Intoxicating Effects of Socialist Benevolence

Yes, it Is a Virtue to Reject Charity – Jeffrey Tucker – Liberty.me

Once you accept the largesse, you have a political investment in continuing it. Your loyalties gradually change.People justify this based on observing how much they are paying into the system. It pillages them with every paycheck, so they might as well get something back. No matter how much welfare they pay in, they can never take enough out to make the bargain work out equally. For most people, this is surely true.

Once you accept the largesse, you have a political investment in continuing it. Your loyalties gradually change. The state becomes your benefactor. Your sense of self reliance is compromised.

Do you see the vicious cycle? You are forced to pay in, so you have no moral resistance about taking out when the time arises. Pretty soon you find yourself part of the Bastiatian calculus: the state becomes the great fiction by which everyone tries to live at everyone else’s expense.

I see this in my aunt who is a staunch conservative in most things but still refuses to realize that Social Security is government theft — robbing others to give to her.

Source: Yes, it Is a Virtue to Reject Charity – Jeffrey Tucker – Liberty.me

Justin Welby reimagines a poorer and less free Britain

Economic mistakes permeate Welby’s ideas, but they stem from a deeper philosophical omission: Forced actions do not have the same moral value as actions which are freely chosen. It is more valuable for an individual to freely decide to pay for healthcare for someone who cannot afford it than for that same individual to be forced by the government to provide that care.

Exactly.

The United States Constitution was adopted to “…provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty…”. Note it is Liberty, not force, that is to be established. Force is evil and is to be used sparingly.

Source: Justin Welby reimagines a poorer and less free Britain

Actually, Socialism Does Work

Socialism worked for Mao. It worked for Fidel Castro. It worked for Erich Honecker and Nicolae Ceaușescu, until the very end. It worked for Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, again with sad ends that didn’t inflict anywhere near enough pain to negate the years of glory and power that went before. It worked for Hugo Chavez, who like Castro, parlayed socialism into a multi-billion dollar fortune, and it has worked so far for Nicolas Maduro. All of these psychopaths, and many others, got exactly what they wanted out of socialism. From their point of view, it is a successful ideology.

Source: Actually, Socialism Does Work

Campus Leftists Attack Free Speech

“Do we believe in objective reality?” she replied. “These students … are among the most privileged human beings in human history. To be at an American college with educational resources available to them that the Renaissance humanists would have killed for. (Yet they) think of themselves as victims. That, to me, is a very sad state of delusion.”

It’s not just on campus anymore. Elected Democrat leaders are advocating violence and oppression everywhere.

Source: Campus Leftists Attack Free Speech

Solzhenitsyn’s Prophecy | Robert P. George

What Solzhenitsyn faulted America (and the West more generally) for was its abandonment of its own moral and, especially, spiritual ideals and identity.

As a survivor of the Communist Holocaust I am horrified to witness how my beloved America, my adopted country, is gradually being transformed into a secularist and atheistic utopia, where communist ideals are glorified and promoted, while Judeo-Christian values and morality are ridiculed and increasingly eradicated from the public and social consciousness of our nation. Under the decades-long assault and militant radicalism of many so-called “liberal” and “progressive” elites, God has been progressively erased from our public and educational institutions, to be replaced with all manner of delusion, perversion, corruption, violence, decadence, and insanity

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1983

Source: Solzhenitsyn’s Prophecy | Robert P. George

What Happens When Socialists Run Out of Other People’s Money

Is Venezuela’s finance minister out of his mind? No, he’s a leftist. So he believes inflation doesn’t exist.

Luis Salas is the perfect man to head up the economies of Venezuela or California. He’s a sociologist who claims that, “Inflation does not exist in real life.”

Venezuela’s economy also doesn’t exist in real life.

Minister Salas claims that inflation isn’t caused by printing infinite amounts of money, but by corporate conspiracies.

Why is liberal California the poverty capital of America?

Apparently content with futile poverty policies, Sacramento lawmakers can turn their attention to what historian Victor Davis Hanson aptly describes as a fixation on “remaking the world.” The political class wants to build a costly and needless high-speed rail system; talks of secession from a United States presided over by Donald Trump; hired former attorney general Eric H. Holder Jr. to “resist” Trump’s agenda; enacted the first state-level cap-and-trade regime; established California as a “sanctuary state” for illegal immigrants; banned plastic bags, threatening the jobs of thousands of workers involved in their manufacture; and is consumed by its dedication to “California values.” All this only reinforces the rest of America’s perception of an out-of-touch Left Coast, to the disservice of millions of Californians whose values are more traditional, including many of the state’s poor residents.

Obvious. See Venezuela. Liberalism/socialism always ends badly.

Source: Los Angeles Times