Tag Archives: socialism

Bringing harm to others is socialism’s primary goal

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A comment on a thread at Powerline on Liberalism is just resentment and envy sanctified where the video showed up as well. After eight years of PDT, even if the astounding success of his first year as President continues for the following seven, you will hear exactly the same. That is what this post is about:

I recall a recent twitter conversation that I engaged in. Basically it was a discussion on the outcome of a social experiment where people were given a choice between two alternative income distribution models.

The first one, choice A, had the highest level of income capped at say 100,000, had a fairly tight distribution across the quartiles, with the lowest being something like 10.

The second one, choice B, allowed for a very small number of individuals to earn 1,000,000 followed by a much wider distribution of quartiles, with the lowest being something like 100.

People were asked to choose which distribution they preferred, and I think they chose option A over option B by more than 2 to 1. This was the case even though it was clear (and perhaps emphasized) that everyone in option B had more money, with the poorest having effectively 10 times the purchasing power over option A.

While that result is astounding in and of itself, the replies on the twitter thread were even more interesting because there were so many people who offered strained and painful rationalizations as to why choice A was better. One I recall insisted that choice B was worse because the purchasing power would be reduced back to A levels since the economy would just reset to the higher levels of wealth due to inflation or something.

My comment ultimately was that all the rationalizations were just thin cover, and that the real reason for the choice was plain old envy of the top. Now I’d have to go back and find the thread to be sure, but I seem to recall the gentleman who started the thread insisting that the authors of the experiment made it clear that the 100 to 10 ratio at the bottom levels really did imply B had 10 times the buying power of A, but that it clearly didn’t matter to the outcome.

I find this result to be a fascinating insight into the irrationality of human economic/moral intuition, and how jealousy and envy play such an outsized role in shaping it.

Socialism has never done anyone any good, other than the handful of leaders who eventually climb to the top of the pyramid. But the envy that drives it will never go away, which is why the socialist impulse will also never go away. For the rest of us, what is crucial to remember is that the motivation behind the rhetoric is in no sense benevolent, but as malevolent as the human heart can be.

What have socialists ever done that would make anyone think they care about other people?

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Cannot think of a single thing. Socialist ideas have never, not in a single instance, not at any time in the whole of history, improved the lives of the communities they ruled. Socialism has only caused misery for anyone who has been trapped inside a socialist regime.

This is a reminder of a fact that cannot be denied other than by liars or those with not a shred of historical memory, written in memoriam of the no longer celebrated October Revolution which was once the centre of a worldwide faith in a glorious future, once the tens of millions of regime opponents had been eliminated, placed within the gulag, or terrified into silence.

October Revolution, also called Bolshevik Revolution, (Oct. 24–25 [Nov. 6–7, New Style], 1917), the second and last major phase of the Russian Revolution of 1917, in which the Bolshevik Party seized power in Russia, inaugurating the Soviet regime.

Socialists seek political power by pretending to fix real problems but only make such problems infinitely worse. We will never be rid of problems, nor will we ever be free from people who will tell you that if they are put in charge, they will make our problems go away. Any community in which the majority of its population are unaware of this massive danger to the future lives is perennially in danger of falling into the abyss of a socialist governing clique taking power.

Here is the reality. The socialist left is filled with people whose lives are driven by envy and hatred for the productive, contended and self-reliant. Ruining their lives makes no one better off but ruins the lives of everyone involved other than those who take power. No one can any longer by unaware that every single socialist non-solution to our existential and economic problems has been disastrous for everyone but those who seize power. Every socialist is a Stasi agent lying in wait.

Give Peace a Chance is NOT Peace at Any Price

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It is hard to believe that LIQ was actually ever a general if he cannot see how fortunate we are that Donald Trump is President and not Hillary and no longer Obama. I particularly find it wonderful how invisible Obama has become since he has nothing to say about anything that would not make people on his own side wince at their stupidity. A cipher before and a cipher since, but alas, eight disastrous years as president in between. For a very good summary of what Trump said at the UN and why it matters, there is this which you can enjoy end to end. Much to choose from, but North Korea has almost disappeared from the news since the Democrats, and the left in general, have nothing constructive to add to the conversation, which is why the media have dropped this as a story. So let me focus here.

In particular, and in detail, Trump called out the rogue states of North Korea and Iran. He did not follow a script of pollysyllabic diplomatic enumerations of unacceptable activities. He reminded the UN members of Pyongyang’s “deadly abuse” of American student Otto Warmbier. He talked about North Korea’s kidnapping of a Japanese 13-year-old girl “to enslave her as a language tutor for North Korea’s spies.” And he cited “the assassination of the dictator’s brother using banned nerve agents in an international airport.”

He caused a stir, and inspired plenty of headlines, with his comments:

“The United States has great strength and patience, but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea. Rocket Man is on a suicide mission for himself and for his regime.”

That’s not bombast. That’s a pointed and useful warning to a totalitarian tyrant, who in contravention of nine UN sanctions resolutions and all basic decency has been threatening preemptive nuclear strikes on the U.S. and its allies, advertising the testing of hydrogen bombs and shooting intercontinental ballistic missiles over Japan. Let’s hope Kim Jong Un takes it seriously, despite decades of U.S. compromise and retreat that led to this pass.

As for the derision implicit in the label “Rocket Man,” I’d say that Trump in describing the murderous despot of North Korea displayed a distinct delicacy simply by avoiding the use of raw profanity from the UN podium. Would it have been better to deferentially describe Kim as the supreme leader of North Korea? Mockery has its uses in facing down despots. The confrontation here is of North Korea’s making — and the dangers have grown all the worse over the years for such nonconfrontational approaches as the nuclear deals of Presidents Bush and Clinton, and the do-nothing “strategic patience” of President Obama.

And I don’t wish to leave out this which will be quoted far into the future:

“The problem in Venezuela is not that socialism has been poorly implemented, but that socialism has been faithfully implemented. From the Soviet Union to Cuba to Venezuela, wherever true socialism or communism has been adopted, it has delivered anguish and devastation and failure.”

How long has it been since we have heard any political leader say things like that, never mind an American president? Our enemies are not only our worst enemies, they are their own worst enemies but are too ignorant even to know that.

Giving the game away on the left’s views on inequality

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I wrote on Ha-Joon Chang yesterday about his ignorant views on Say’s Law. Now let me turn to his views on inequality which have such a bizarre quality to them that it quite takes the breath away. Chang starts with a joke although it is a joke I don’t think he quite gets.

The peasant Ivan is jealous of his rival Boris, because Boris has a goat. A fairy comes along and offers Ivan a single wish. What does he wish for? That Boris’s goat should drop dead. (p 317)

But to Chang this is only a quasi-joke. It is more a tale of reality from which we should learn. Here’s the section heading that comes immediately after the above:

Ivan is not alone – the pursuit of equality as a driver of human history

And if you think he is being ironic in thinking this is a proper illustrative example of the ethic of equity, it is not in the slightest way part of his nature. He actually thinks that wanting what others have even if they worked for it and you haven’t is reasonable. He thinks it is reasonable for someone to prefer both peasants to be in misery when only one was before. Look what he writes:

Ivan is not alone. In Korea, there is a saying that you get a bellyache when your cousin buys a plot of land. And I am sure many readers know similar jokes or proverbs about people becoming irrationally jealous with other people doing better.

The pursuit of equality is a very natural human emotion and has been a powerful driver of human history. Equality was one of the ideals of the French Revolution, one of whose most famous mottos was ‘Liberté, égalité fraternité ou la mort’ (liberty, fraternity, brotherhood or death).

Although I have seldom come across such a repulsive sentiment stated in such an open way, what is startling is that he gives the socialist game away although in such a sordid fashion that it is almost too bizarre to realise he doesn’t understand what he has said. The others will have to get to him before he reveals too much more. It will have to be explained to him that one is supposed to seek equality because of one’s love of mankind, so that others can share the wealth, not because one is worm-eaten, bitter and envious when it is discovered that someone has more than you do, if only slightly more. He has actually spoken truly, has stated the socialist creed in all its fulness, but it is nevertheless astonishing to see it stated in print by one of the left’s leading lights.

He even goes on to sneer at this famous statement from Milton Friedman which I would have thought was almost a truism:

Most economic fallacies derive from … the tendency to assume there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another. (p 319 – his ellipsis)

This is, Chang says, an example of the belief in “trickle-down” economics, that the productive getting richer by producing things others want to buy helps the poor become better off by selling them what they would otherwise never be able to have.

And this is a man whose specialty is a development economist. If he doesn’t know that the rest of us only because reasonably well off because a few people have become wealthy by inventing products and producing them at affordable prices, he will do only harm in any country he is asked to provide advice. A world authority and at Cambridge yet (but then again, so was Keynes) he seems oblivious to the source of wealth, to why we are all immeasurably richer today than a century ago. An absolute clown but a perfect representation of the belief system of the left.