“THE DOCTRINAIRE UTOPIA OF COMMUNISM”
by Old Frank, ©2018
(Oct. 23, 2018) — Dear Friends and Colleagues:
This may be preaching to the choir, but nonetheless parts of it might be useful in discussing the Democrat Party’s emerging embrace of socialism with your millennial grandchildren or liberal acquaintances.
“Socialist” is how the USSR (and Nazi Germany) and the Warsaw Pact nations referred to themselves. They did so because under Marxist doctrine, communism — the end state — was a utopian ideal wherein the ‘government withered away’ and the ‘people’ (the proletariat) ruled themselves. Of course, the withering-away part could never be achieved because force was always necessary to keep the proletariat in line. And ‘force’ means ‘power’ and power is exercised by government. Really smart people in Russia and elsewhere tried hard for 70 years but never could achieve nor implement the doctrinaire utopia of ‘communism.’ They made do by labeling themselves “socialist republics.”
In every single one of them, from Europe to Asia to the Caribbean and Latin America, these ‘republics’ established ‘watchers’ throughout society to report on any who might disagree with the “state” (and who would be rewarded for such reporting). In other words, if one complained or wanted something changed, you were likely to be reported on, investigated, and punished such as commitment to the looney bin, the Gulag, or even a quick dispatch with a bullet behind the ear.
What makes socialism so attractive to ‘educators’ in the West is that many of them spent years getting post-graduate degrees by doing lots of reading and having to write a thesis and to undergo an exacting oral exam. And, at the end of all that, they might end up with a comfortable salary and sinecure teaching at a college or university. But, as time passed, they began to rankle at the old saw… “If you’re so smart, how come you ain’t rich?” And, looking down their noses, they noted that most billionaires and captains of industry were NOT PhDs, nor extensively well-read. And worse, some of them actually dropped out of college because they felt it wasn’t getting them where they wanted to go. And yet, to the dismay of these ‘academicians,’ such people become incredibly rich and many even run things!
Another attraction to the siren song of socialism is that it promises not only greater ‘income equality’ but better results overall, because learned ‘experts’ would run government and exercise power to keep us proles in line (AKA enforcement) and to run industries and the entire economy as well by applying their ‘expert knowledge.’
That’s the theory, and many shining intellectuals in the Russia of 1917 bought into it and strongly supported it. But, what history, everywhere, shows plainly is that intellectuals don’t end up running things. THUGS do! Lenin was brilliant and a deep thinker who was well-read and quite learned. But he died, and Stalin, Lenin’s successor, was a genuine thug, a poorly-educated peasant (apprentice cobbler) with a long record of bank robbery, murder, and other crimes. And so was Stalin’s successor, and the next, and the next. Cruelty was essential, even AFTER the socialist ‘state’ was established. It resulted in tens of thousands of political prisoners, detentions, deprivations, ‘disappearances’ … the list goes on… all for the ‘greater good of the proletariat’…or so the propaganda informs.
Here at home, the previous administration had no one in any key positions or even as close advisors with a scintilla of business experience. Nonetheless, they felt qualified to write THOUSANDS of regulations that stifled business, growth, and job creation. “Experts” with degrees in journalism – or whatever – pretended to know what was good for businesses, for labor, for growth, for energy, and for industries of all kinds. Fortunately, such folks were not thugs, but they had the power to stifle progress and steer policies in directions that led to higher costs for goods and services and to chronic unemployment. The greatest ‘successes’ for those sad eight years were a massive expansion of folks receiving food stamps and millions more on Medicaid. But what would one expect from an ‘expert’ who gained his spurs as a community organizer?
The true face of socialism today is Venezuela and Cuba. One finds more mature variants of ‘socialism’ in China and Southeast Asia that permit a limited degree of private enterprise while they still rely on force to keep folks from even ‘thinking the wrong way,’ let alone acting out their thoughts.
Free markets – the new descriptor for ‘capitalism’ — encourage growth, competition, innovation, full employment, personal choice, and thus, a better life for all. Socialism stifles all of these and thus cannot really compete. Equal outcomes for all are not only impossible, it is a wrong message. It flies against human nature. Such an idea suppresses innovation and nullifies individual success, AKA, fulfillment and self-actualization, and the desire in each of us to provide a better life for our children.
Old Frank