Monday, June 15, 2015

Socialism Is as Destructive as Ever

I typically think everybody remembers the collapse of the Soviet Union as vividly as I do, but the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall this month reminded me otherwise. People who weren’t yet teenagers - people under the age of 37 - have no personal memory of seeing how destructive socialism is. They don’t realize the debate between capitalism and socialism was decisively won by capitalism 25 years ago.
Months before the fall of the wall, Hans Hermann-Hoppe used Berlin to highlight the failures inherent in socialism because Berliners shared a common language, culture, history and work ethic. The only difference between East and West Berlin was the west was relatively capitalist and the east thoroughly socialist. Hoppe wrote, “The standard of living in the West is so much higher and has become relatively more so over time, that despite the transfer of considerable amounts of money from West to East by government as well as private citizens and increasingly socialist policies in the West, the visitor going from West to East is simply stunned as he enters an almost completely different, impoverished world.”
Hoppe continued, “With language differences, traditionally the most severe natural barrier for emigrants, nonexistent, the difference in living standards between the two Germanys proved to be so great and emigration from East to West took on such proportions, that in 1961 the socialist regime in East Germany, in a last desperate step, finally had to close its borders to the West completely. To keep the population in, it had to build a system the likes of which the world had never seen of walls, barbed wire, electrified fences, mine fields, automatic shooting devices, watchtowers, etc., almost 900 miles long, for the sole purpose of preventing its people from running away from the consequences of Russian-type socialism.”
Unlike capitalism, which benefits everybody, any honest, rational evaluation shows socialism, because it is based on the theft of property of others, can only benefit the few - rulers and their cronies - at the expense of everybody else. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union though, the socialist propagandists who controlled western media, and still do, like The New York Times’s Walter Duranty, blatantly lied to people about socialism in the Soviet Union, keeping the debate alive. But when the wall came down, the propagandists couldn’t cover up the fantastic poverty socialism had wrought on whole nations of prisoners in communist countries. Capitalism won the debate, and the hardworking supporters of capitalism went back to work producing goods that improved the lives of everybody.
But instead of embracing capitalism - the system that lifted billions of people out of poverty -  socialists in the west advanced socialism - the system that imprisoned billions in poverty - through their control of government, media and government schools, faster than ever. By the time supporters of capitalism re-engaged in the debate in earnest, our country had declined to the verge of collapse greater than the Soviet Union’s. Our socialist rulers and their cronies keep getting richer, even the gap between the rich and our super-rich rulers is growing, and the rest of us keep getting poorer.
The media today still hides the truth about socialism. Despite outrageous failures of the socialist Secret Service including prostitution scandals and allowing people to climb the White House fence and enter the White House, this is a minor story in the media. The role of the inherent failures of socialism in producing such gross errors is never mentioned.
The Times was recently forced to describe the failures of socialism in managing the US nuclear arsenal. It wrote, “For example, while inspectors obsessed over whether every checklist and review of individual medical records was completed, they ignored huge problems, including aging blast doors over 60-year-old silos that would not seal shut and, in one case, the discovery that the crews that maintain the nation’s 450 intercontinental ballistic missiles had only a single wrench that could attach the nuclear warheads.
“‘They started FedExing the one tool’ to three bases spread across the country, one official familiar with the contents of the reports said Thursday. No one had checked in years ‘to see if new tools were being made,’ the official said.”
As commentator Laurence Vance notes, “The government didn’t even trust its own [socialist] postal system to send the tool.”
This Times story also fails to mention the role of socialism in producing these gross errors. All news stories describing failures of socialism fail to mention socialism as the root cause.
Of course it’s going to take untold billions of dollars of taxpayer money to upgrade the arsenal. You may think that arsenal exists to protect Americans from attack, but it exists primarily as an excuse for our socialist rulers to steal our money. That’s why, demoralized and decrepit, it functions poorly, but it’s extremely effective at emptying our wallets.
Socialism never changes. It’s a system of aggressive, coercive and violent government. It produces giant, collectivist corporations, special interests, and plutocrat rulers who run them. Let’s go back to capitalism.