The Truth About Socialism
These days, Socialism is all the rage, so for better or worse — and it’s always worse — it’s important to recognize it for what it is, and isn’t. This isn’t comprehensive but it should cover the vitals.
I hear too many people thinking that their neighborhood police or fire departments are examples of socialism in action. They’re not. Those are public services, paid for by the same tax dollars that built the schools, roads, bridges, prisons, and many other public works that make up our constitutional republic.
Consider the Political Spectrum
Before we can understand socialism, let’s understand the political spectrum. Over the years I’ve seen many that try to explain it based on a variety of aspects, from degrees of freedom, the amount of government intervention in the market, culture, and so forth.
What I was taught in high school in the 1980s was a simple political spectrum:
Political systems were based on the number of people in power, from tyranny by one person on the right to rule of everybody and nobody on the left. However, there are two big problems with this view:
- It’s technically incorrect, and this leads to frequent misunderstanding. Those who believe that socialism is on the left and Nazism is on the right as tyranny fail to understand that those positions are both left of center. The European view puts monarchy on the right and the “rule of the people” on the left. Since Hitler is perceived as a dictator by Americans, Leftists assume Nazis are on the right, but that’s false for one big reason…
- Nobody rules alone. Not monarchs, and not Hitler. Everyone has advisers, a cabinet, a ruling cabal, a political party.
With that political reality in mind, our choices flatten very quickly:
First, there’s no such thing as Communism. You’ve never seen it, not in Soviet Russia or China, not even in North Korea. Not one country has citizens who “give according to their ability and take according to their need.” Humanity has never achieved such a state of “no rule” utopia, and thanks to human nature, it never will.
Anarchy suffers the same fate. Nature abhors a vacuum, and so do violent control freaks. So, for the sake of civilization the best we can hope for is some type of democratic government with regular, fair elections.
When people refer to communism what they really mean international socialism. The USSR was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (they called it a republic for international appeal).
But we’re really talking about one-party rule. Whether we call the tyrant a monarch, emperor, chairman, or even president, they all use an inside cadre of elites to rule, limit access, and maintain the power of the state.
Some call them “statists.” Mark Levin likes that term.
Socialists don’t because they want us to believe that the state is a “public trust,” the extension of the citizen’s will, so socialism’s control is actually everybody’s idea. Even Joe Biden claimed “we the people” in the Constitution means the state! (Yeah, what an idiot)
I prefer to call to call them leftists because it encompasses the entire spectrum of their ilk, based on the actual definitions of Socialism.
What Socialism Is Not
Again, I hear that socialism is every public service: your healthcare system, welfare, your police department, fire department, public libraries and schools, the roads we drive on, and the public services that clean, sweep, and shovel it, along with the garbage collection, the water and power departments, and the cable lines that connect our phones and internet we use, etc.
Every public service gets the union “socialist” label of approval.
That’s absurd. Public services are NOT related to socialism. Every single public sector solution runs on capitalism — individuals and businesses — paying TAXES. The government doesn’t generate that wealth; it takes revenue from the private sector and redistributes it — in many cases, to other businesses.
Businesses compete for public contracts because they’re reliable, and long term. Trash collection, phone and other services have competition, which incentivizes them to provide the best service or product, to innovate, and to keep prices low.
Big businesses in a town that “need to pay their fair share for using public roads”? They already paid for the roads in local government deals that kept them in those localities for the tax base.
Most public libraries were donated by Andrew Carnegie (industrialist/philanthropist) and are supported by nonprofits (donations from individuals in a capitalist system) or private foundations (other wealthy capitalists turned philanthropist).
Every local cop, fireman, teacher, and social welfare consultant salary is paid by capitalist tax dollars that built those institutions. They exist because citizens democratically elected officials to raise public funds (taxes) to pay contractors, builders, tradesmen and artisans to build public works.
If you think that’s socialism, you’ve been brainwashed. It’s not.
Democracy and capitalism conspire to create a public sphere to enhance the lives of its citizens through popular votes, referendums, and private investment. Some entities are exempt from competition where it makes sense: police, fire, phone lines, and some utilities. (NOTE: the USA tried private police and fire departments. It created perverse incentives that put lives at risk)
But that’s also why public welfare is so bad; there’s no free market chasing welfare dollars to provide a higher quality service, so they can be as lazy, inefficient, and wasteful as public scrutiny allows.
But under socialism, all competition is eliminated. Prices are fixed. There’s no incentive for workers to innovate or move up, so the service quality drops, and shortages become the problem of the faceless state.
That’s why people wait in long lines for groceries and gas in Cuba. That’s why so many of them brave 90 miles of shark-infested waters on makeshift rafts to reach capitalist Florida. And as conservatives love to mention, those rafts only paddle one way.
What About Socialist Scandinavian Countries?
Look, you say, we don’t want a Soviet Gulag form of socialism. We want the kind and gentle socialism, the kind those Scandinavian countries have.
Those are market economies. They’re capitalist democracies with large welfare states that require massive taxation to run, and dangerously high immigration policies to maintain. Sure, everyone’s got advanced degrees, a month of annual vacation, and free healthcare, but they’ve given up the will to live. They don’t produce (literally). Thanks to declining birthrates, they’re immigrating masses of foreign (Muslim) refugees who don’t want to integrate or work hard pay for someone else’s welfare benefits.
This generous welfare state is also possible (temporarily) because the United States and EU partners cover their national security. Forced to cover that, their economies would crumble.
Progressives and Socialism
Okay, but, hold on, you say… We have progressives in America who promise good stuff. They care for the poor, refuse to allow evil corporations to exploit us, and they’ll make evil rich one-percenters pay their fair share.
Progressives progress toward a redistribution of resources by government intervention, and before you hop up and say you want that: you don’t.
"What difference, at this point, does it make?"
Cynical progressive corruptocrat, Hillary Clinton
It’s a system run by power-mad elites who think they can make better decisions than the collective wisdom of our 300 million+ citizens in a free, competitive market, buying what they want.
Their regulations make it harder for small businesses to survive and compete, and for wise leaders to get elected. Their policies have bankrupted this nation, and even now they’re drafting new several trillion-dollar omnibus spending bills.
And at the bottom of this slippery slope of progressive big government intervention is socialism.
It’s a grift. Progressives are cynical opportunists, who after clawing their way to money and power, convince the poor that if they vote for their way, they too can have prosperity without responsibility.
Make no mistake, it’s a private club you can never join.
Bernie Sanders owns three houses, gives speeches and sells books, getting rich on an indoctrination to keep you poor.
Al Gore’s several mansions and global warming hysteria hobby consumes more carbon than a small town while his followers dream of living on day in sustainable housing.
What is Democratic Socialism?
Socialism. The “demo” (people) part refers to the continued struggle, but instead of trying to seize the means of production, Democratic socialists manipulate people into mobs to obtain power. Once that happens, there’s nothing democratic about it. Elections provide the appearance of choice without choice.
Socialism in Action
- In Soviet Russia caused peasants to turn on their productive farmer neighbors (Kulaks), who were exterminated by starvation. Under Stalin, no one knows exactly but it’s over 60 million dead.
- In China, they destroyed 3000 years of culture in a decade, enslaved a billion people and straight up slaughtered roughly 35 million.
- Cuba, Vietnam, Korea and many other countries have their millions too, but they all pale compared to the above, and the Nazis.
- We all know about the 6 million Jews exterminated in WWII, but the Nazis killed another 6 million among the gypsies, Catholics, communists, the mentally deficient, and other undesirables. I've seen the direct number at around 20 million, but if we lay the totality of war carnage at their feet (and we can), the actual figure is closer to 120 million people killed, most of them in the Soviet theater.
But you say, the Nazis aren’t socialists. Socialists aren’t Aryan racial extremists who hate Jews and march to fascist dictators!
Were the Nazis Socialists?
Yes. Socialists DO march to fascist dictators. Nazism is socialism. The Nazi Party was the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP), which means National Socialist German Workers Party.
The reason Hitler fought communists was that international socialism raised funds for and took direction from Moscow. That doesn’t fly in a nationalist movement, even if the ends are the same.
- Hitler allowed certain industries to run without direct control. This, according the leftists, means Nazis were on the “right” of the political spectrum because they “championed” free enterprise. But in reality, he dominated and dictated to these industries which makes him more like leftist progressives, or more accurately, like fascists
- Hitler replaced the class struggle with race. His hatred for Jews, gypsies and other “non-Aryan” peoples allowed him to scapegoat them instead of the typical bourgeoisie scapegoat of the proletariat.
What’s the Difference Between Socialism and Fascism?
When leftists say fascism, they mean anyone in uniform giving orders. It’s the cop in the stoner movie. Or it’s everything they don’t like, like a balanced budget or election integrity.
Fascism is national socialism. It is a dictatorship run on socialist ideas.
The father of fascism, Giovanni Gentile, read a lot of Hegel, Nietzsche, and Karl Marx. His fascism theory is socialism based on national identity, declaring “Fascism is a form of socialism, in fact, it is its most viable form.” (See also Nazism; national socialism).
Gentile believed liberal democracies allowed individuals to become selfish, so “true democracy” should force the individual to be subordinated to the State.
But unlike vanilla socialism, fascism didn’t want the responsibility of owning the economy, just dominating it. While fascist dictators like Mussolini nationalized the arms industry, they allowed private enterprises to run. But make no mistake, the dictator dictated what to produce, what quantity, how much they could sell it for, to whom, etc.
Mussolini came up from the traditional Italian Socialist Party, and like Hitler, seized upon a strong nationalist sentiment of the time.
Unlike Hitler, however, Mussolini wasn’t a racist, or at least didn’t use race as a cudgel for his policies.
Sure, the trains ran on time. They hanged the bastard anyway, and for good reasons.
What Is the Socialist Plan for America?
European Marxists never wanted their great revolution to take root in some backwater like Russia. They wanted it in the center of Western Civilization. They want a prestige movement that would overturn the best, not merely the desperate.
In other words, they wanted the United States. They had infiltrated union movements before the turn of the century, 1900, but they never got popular. But they integrated, studied, stole ideas from the progressive movement under Woodrow Wilson, especially their desire to exterminate inferior races (Planned Parenthood). They ate that up and it informed the Nazi “Final Solution” for the Jews in WWII.
The Frankfort School Socialist movement is documented well in Andrew Breitbart’s Righteous Indignation (Chapter 6). I highly recommend the whole book.
However, I found the most comprehensive plan for socialist revolution in America through The Naked Communist by W. Cleon Skousen, (1958). It lays out 45 bullet points that include:
- Cold War strategies for infiltrating and taking over the UN
- Promoting One-world governance as the only way to save humanity (with the Soviets at the table)
- Specific directives for communist infiltration of US institutions from the US Patent office and taking over one of our two political parties (which one, I wonder!)
- Taking control of our education system and teachers’ unions, softening the curriculum and adding socialist propaganda to textbooks
- Controlling higher education through student newspapers and public protests
- Take over the media in all its forms, along with Hollywood
- Weakening our culture by discrediting the family and parenthood as outdated while “presenting homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as normal, natural, and healthy"
- Eventually gain control of businesses, weakening the economy, and stirring up violent unrest as part of the American experience
Sounds a LOT like today, doesn’t it? Nobody foresaw the USSR collapsing in the 1990s, but the same playbook put China and other radical anti-democratic nations into key UN positions.
SIDE NOTE: We’ve grown open-minded about what we used to call “alternative lifestyles.” It is worth reflecting on the fact that communists openly promoted these predilections to their adversaries. They spent time and money on them as if they were weapons of the revolution.
What is clear is that their “useful idiots” have strangleholds on our media, entertainment, and education, continually pushing a narrative meant to weaken, divide, and demoralize our country. Then we will be ripe for socialist takeover.
Some think we’re already ripe.
Critical Race Theory
I considered writing a whole article on Critical Race Theory (CRT), but honestly, it doesn’t deserve it. It’s identity-based Marxism, replacing class struggle with divisions based on race, gender, ethnicity and whatever else they can make up. It’s every disparate group against the center, designed to rewrite American history and condemn ordinary white patriotic Americans.
That means that almost every leftist grievance these days, from preferred pronouns to inclusion, diversity, reparations, intersectionality, micro-aggressions, white privilege and fragility, unconscious bias, internalized and systemic white supremacy – it’s all part of the socialist CRT strategy.
In other words, it’s all crap. No, it’s not to heal communities, or establish a more just or fair society. They pull the thinnest historical revision (1619 Project) or rally behind the worst criminal who might fit their narrative (Trayvon Martin, Chris Brown, George Floyd) to justify the CRT imperative toward socialist revolution.
Preferred pronouns are part of normalizing marginal sexual proclivities.
I’ve already covered Reparations and White Privilege:
Define: Reparations
A grift; to obtain money or property illicitly as in a confidence game; a dishonest trick to get someone's money.
White Privilege
Racist deflection used by black activists and their acolytes for not forming a cogent argument...
The vogue term “equity” does not equal equality. Unlike equal opportunity for our pursuit of happiness, equity “creates equal outcomes by redistributing resources along lines of perceived economic or racial disparities.”
In a 2019 podcast, 1619 Project founder, Nikole Hannah-Jones, complimented Cuba because it had the smallest “equity gap” between races: “… in places that are truly at least biracial countries, Cuba actually has the least inequality, and that’s largely due to socialism, which I’m sure no one wants to hear.”
And who doesn’t want equity? EVERYONE! Because everyone lives in squalor! Equal distribution of misery is nobody’s idea of a better life! No one wants to life in a world where kids are told to shut up, count their “privileges” and defer to the arbitrary and ever-changing rules and prejudices of authoritarians.
But that nightmare is where equity goes:
- New York City replaced the competitive entry exam for its Gifted and Talented programs with a lottery. We can’t have white and Asian kids over-representing.
- Coke, Disney and other “woke” companies are indoctrinating their employees with unnecessary equity, “cultural competency,” and “dismantling institutional racism” propaganda.
- Our military isn’t recruiting and promoting the best fighting forces but are embroiled in absurd gender integration, sensitivity training and transgender leadership.
- Washington state is mandating CRT indoctrination of school children to fight racism by “identifying and removing bias and systemic and institutional barriers that create marginalization” to guarantee “inclusive education” (the double-speak gets thick!). Obviously, this "inclusion" child abuse will fall hardest on cis-gen whites raised by two parents.
- Domestic terrorist groups Antifa (fascists) and BLM (Marxist, anti-capitalism, anti-family anti-police grift) destabilize communities and do nothing to help the victims of anything. 95% of violence against blacks are committed by other blacks. There is NO evidence of widespread or even disproportional blue-on-black crime based on crime statistics.
Arguing the facts, however, is more howling at the moon. Until stopped by force (yeah, looking at you, governors), these evil Marxist tools will continue to hold out their “systemic” fictions to justify blocking traffic, rioting, looting, burning, and murdering innocent civilians — including those they claim to help.
And they’ll continue to crowdfund, extort businesses, and then buy multiple houses in rich neighborhoods.
None of these crap-tastic policies and organizations are valid, truthful, or helpful.
Get the picture? Socialism is not a panacea but a plague. And it bears repeating that it has tragically failed every time it has been tried, with a death toll over 100 million. As body-count goes, only Islam ranks higher.
Why True Socialism Has “Never Been Tried”
For Marx and Engels, the r/evolutionary process is like nature, where conflict (his dialectic) of opposing forces causes the planted seed (jn society or culture) to die in order to birth a greater form (great leap forward). This process is both natural, and spiritual, since Jesus Christ also mentions the kingdom of God being like a seed dying to generate new life.
As such, the struggle is everything. It’s thesis + antithesis = synthesis of a new thesis and so on.
It’s not that every seed rebirths utopia, but that the continued process of planting and leaping yields a more just and peaceful society.
While capitalists say they won the war, both in WWII and the Cold War, proving socialism to be inferior — after all, look at the increased peace and prosperity, where even the poorest poor enjoy a standard of living unimagined in previous generations — the socialist sees the conflict that led to the great leap.
It’s not that socialism has never been tried; it’s that socialism is defined as the process whereby society produces every good thing. And Capitalism (and the Jews, Kulaks, one-percenters, racists) are scapegoated for every negative thing in order to keep the conflict going.
In other words, true socialism means never having to admit you’re wrong, even with mountains of evidence against it, not because it wasn’t never tried, but because it never resolves.
Why Socialism Is Always Wrong
Simply, socialism denies the value of the individual and individual incentive. If progress is the perpetual leap through conflict, then the individual only represents grain and grist for that mill.
But the truth is, most real change in history is brought about by individuals who through great motivation achieve great positive goals that permit society to leap forward.
Perpetual conflict is the obstacle, not the way. Socialists look at a glass half empty.
And no, it’s not that not that a socialist government is going to cover the bottom sections of Maslow’s heirarchy of needs so that people can make their souls soar and dreams a reality. Government is NEVER Daddy Warbucks. The progressive / socialist messaging is wrong, as Thomas Sowell points out:
American society did not achieve 20th century advancements because of progressive taxation, unionization, collective bargaining and regulation.
Instead, great industrialists imagined steam engines, and railroads, and steel works, and oil refineries that led to skyscrapers and automobiles and affordable electricity for all.
These were who leftists call “robber barons,” from Vanderbilt to Carnegie, Rockefeller, JP Morgan, Ford, and others — men who built industries and from their fortunes left behind libraries, universities, cultural institutions, and endowments for medicine, the arts and the poor.
Capitalism is not theft, of elites accumulating wealth by screwing the masses, as Socialists think. Capitalism is supporting creative individuals who see a need painful enough that they risk their money, energy and sacred honor to invent solutions people are willing to pay for.
While Socialism makes destructive leaps thru conflict, Capitalism makes creative leaps through innovation. Which engine would you support?
Excellent book about the entrepreneurs who built America and created the modern world. A must-read for Patriots
Socialism Takeaways (Take away the socialism!)
The 20th century can be split between two ethos: modernism (thesis), the belief that mankind is perfectible through the institutions and central planning; and post-modernism (anti-thesis), the belief that modernism was a total power grab.
The 21st century hasn’t found its synthesis yet. Some have reverted to modernism (like the Great Reset), some continue to deconstruct everything through a post-modernism, and some are exploring the traditional beliefs that existed before, including traditional Christian faith in intimate communities, or Islamic jihad, tribalism, Marxism and its variants, etc.
One thing is for sure: there’s no shortage of empty-headed students and brain-dead leftists willing to ignore socialism’s overwhelming flaws, capitalism’s overwhelming virtues, and the wonders of modern life. We live in the greatest age, with the most conveniences, technologies, medical miracles, abilities to learn, communicate, and grow, and yet so many want to tear it all down over an obviously false dream of utopia.
Our culture reset must include the following:
- Now that you know the truth, stop pretending that socialists are good people, or that it means fairness or caring for others, or that “it sounds good in theory” or whatever. Ask the survivors. Ask any Cuban refugee about Castro’s grand society and they’ll rip those Che Guevara t-shirts right off your back!
- Reject all debate and every compromise to progressives and socialists. They’ve overplayed their hand. Now we know that EVERY conflict is about the struggle, not the grievance. And their struggle is a never-ending means to power. Every union position, every BLM and Antifa protest (and riot) is a power play. They should be fought with every means at our disposal. Demand that our governors and police forces uphold the law and arrest these domestic terrorists.
- Every valid grievance, injustice, and protest in society must distance itself from Socialist solutions. There are real issues in society, from public policies that undermine the family to our crushing national debt. These must be addressed through creative innovation, rigorous debate, and even compromise. But not to anything Marx would advocate.
- We must do everything in our power to dismantle socialist organizations and remove the indoctrination from our education, media, social media, and entertainment. This pernicious ideology has no place in a free society. The last best hope of man on earth will not succumb to the mirage of progress through perpetual revolution.
- Remind our fellow citizens that we like in a constitutional republic. That is, we are NOT a democracy where 51% can vote away the rights of the 49%. We vote for representatives bound by the Constitution, which restricts the power of the government. This is not insignificant because when leftists and journos say "democracy" they don't mean one-man, one vote. They mean collectivist control of the individual, the surrender of personal rights to the fever-dreams of elite Marxists. They're trying to change the language of public discourse. Don't let them.
- Each of us must take the small steps to become big citizens to ensure small government. Everyone starts in a different place. Some need to simply reread the above to convince ourselves that we’re looking in the wrong place. Others will need to validate every point through more study. I recommend the sources below.
If you long for a society that upholds the inherent worth of the individual, that judges by the content of character, that strives to become a more perfect union, look elsewhere on the political spectrum, because won’t find it on the socialist left.
More Resources
Or Consider Kitty Werthmann: Witness of Hitler's Socialism
Kitty was born in Austria, and Hitler came to power with 98% of the vote. And then things changed…
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What is Socialism?
Socialism means the government owns the means of production. Yes, you’ve heard of “public” ownership, but the public doesn’t own or take responsibility for anything. Government does.
And since socialism = government ownership, that means the abolition of private property and private business ownership. As such, the individual is a slave of the state.
But, you say, you’ve heard socialism means caring for one another. You’ve heard it means equality, equity, fraternity. Free and abundant healthcare and education. The best of everything, with peace!
Like communism and unicorns, you’ve never seen that implemented. That’s the utopian dream.
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, the ideological fathers of communism (AKA international socialism), established a system of class struggle, a kind of institutionalized and weaponized envy, that would cause the proletariat (poor) to overthrow the bourgeoisie (anyone better off) in a perpetual state of revolution that would lead to utopia. (Sounds exhausting, doesn’t it?)
In practice, it’s dictatorship. A police state that seizes control of industries, restricts or abolishes free speech and the press. It restricts citizens’ mobility and options, incarcerates dissenters without charge or due process, and exterminates all who resist.
The wealthy and resourceful escape as fast as they can. Unlike capitalist countries that have borders to keep foreigners out, socialist borders prevent their citizens from escaping all the free stuff they’re entitled to.
Why? Because as Margaret Thatcher said, socialism doesn’t bring equal prosperity, but equal poverty and misery.