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Severe Outflow by R. Edwards

Socialism vs. Communism

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Often, when comparing policies of socialist governments, or proposed ideals of the Democratic Party here, which is increasingly influenced by the radical extremist organization, “Democratic Socialists of America,” one will encounter a reactionary, reflexive, overly defensive statement to the effect of, “Socialism is not communism!”

That is glib sloganeering, and also, exceedingly misleading or disingenuous.

A few points…
1. Marxism: They’re branches of the same ideological tree (Marxist theory). In Marxist theory, socialism is the transitional phase to communism. Socialism involves state control of production, nominally for workers (“from each according to his ability, to each according to his contribution”), while full communism is the classless, stateless endgame (“to each according to his needs”) with no private property. Lenin, Marx and others explicitly framed it this way. There is a reason the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had its name.

Socialism isn’t communism the same way adolescence isn’t adulthood — it’s the stepping stone. History shows the “transition” rarely ends…just slows or gets temporarily distracted, without some form of true revolution or outside military intervention.

2. Shared core, regardless of semantic games: Rejection of private property and markets — both nominal systems advocate public/collective ownership of the means of production (factories, land, computing, energy, other resources) over private enterprise. Communism goes further (no private property at all, often via revolution), while socialism allows some private ownership but with heavy state regulation/redistribution. In other words, distinctions that are semantically correct but functionally meaningless!

That’s because socialism and communism differ in degree, not kind. Both subordinate individual liberties to collective control. So-called “Democratic socialists” still push expansive government ownership and planning (look up the latest DSA platform*). This historically concentrates great power and money into centralized bureaucracies. Human nature is to abuse great power and control over unearned treasury largesse.

3. Historical track record: Socialism often leads to or masks authoritarian communism. Regimes like the USSR, China, Cuba, and Venezuela called themselves explicitly socialist, while pursuing communist goals (e.g., “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,” as I noted above; Chinese Communist Party’s “socialism with Chinese characteristics”). Even the Nazis were socialist; it was firmly amid their name (National Socialist Party), and like many others, including their war opposition in the USSR, their “socialist” experiments involved one-party rule, suppression of dissent, and economic centralization. Two sides of the same tyrannical coin!

Yet logically, failures of “real socialism” are frequently dismissed as “not true socialism,” which is a classical No True Scotsman fallacy, and as such, easily exposed as invalid rhetoric. Every major 20th-century communist state and the German Nazis started as or claimed to be socialist. Body count: tens of millions (famines, purges, gulags, Holocaust). The supposed distinctions didn’t save the victims.

4. Convergent incentives and outcomes: Without market prices and private property, both struggle with calculation problems (Mises/Hayek critique), leading to shortages, inefficiency, and coercion. So-called “Democratic socialism” often slides toward more controls when voluntary cooperation falters. That occurs when citizens realize that: a) they have lost liberty, b) they are poorer, and/or c) their bureaucratic overlords are corrupt and untrustworthy (a feature common to all forms of governance, but rampant in collectivist states).

Nordic models (often cited) pose as pseudo-capitalist welfare states with free markets, strong property rights, and high economic freedom — generally, not socialist ownership of production. However, socialism nominally sells the compassionate halfway house. Reality: it inherits communism’s knowledge and incentive problems, just with slower erosion of freedoms and prosperity.

5. Rhetorical sleight-of-hand: The phrase is often used to distance “nice” policies (welfare, regulation) from authoritarian failures. But classical socialism (e.g., nationalization) goes well beyond that. “Socialism is not communism” is a semantically crafted PR slogan, a parlor trick with words, not reality on the ground. When it expands state control over energy, healthcare, housing, or speech, it follows the same logic: bureaucratic elites deciding “the greater good” over voluntary exchange.

If I’m too wordy for you on this, here’s a bullet list from commentator Michael Smith for shorter attention spans:

    “Democratic socialism” is an oxymoron.
    • Central planning requires centralized power. Someone must decide what gets produced, by whom, and for whom.
    • No planner possesses enough knowledge. Economic information is dispersed among millions of individuals and cannot be effectively centralized.
    • Planning replaces voluntary choices with political decisions. Resource allocation becomes a matter of government judgment rather than market exchange.
    • Democracy struggles to sustain comprehensive planning. Citizens rarely agree on the countless tradeoffs required, leading to political conflict.
    • Conflict drives greater coercion. As voluntary cooperation breaks down, government increasingly relies on regulation, mandates, and enforcement.
    • Economic control becomes political control. A government that directs livelihoods inevitably gains leverage over individual behavior.
    • Liberty erodes incrementally. Each planning failure invites additional intervention, concentrating more power in the state.
    • The destination is authoritarianism, not because it is intended, but because it becomes necessary to preserve the planned system.
    I agree with F.A. Hayek:
    Democracy can elect a socialist government, but a fully socialist economy cannot remain genuinely democratic for long because comprehensive economic planning requires a concentration of power incompatible with individual liberty and limited government.”
    — Michael Smith

There’s your (lower-case) libertarian lesson on socialism and communism for the year. It would be wise to heed!

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* Footnote:
The DSA’s new platform is as authoritarian/Communist as can be, while avoiding the C word. Truly batshit crazy, horrifying, dystopian, far-left extremism, including:
1. Forbid bills (payment invoice) for any person
2. Government-run food, transportation, housing, medicine, and nationalization of large corporations and essential industries (Communism!)
3. The drafting of a “new Constitution”
4. Defunding the Department of War/Defense
5. Slavery “reparations”
6. Unlimited free abortion and “gender-affirming care” for all, including minor children with underdeveloped brains;
7. Taxpayers cover all student debt and unlimited “free” higher education for all (payable only through top-down coercion, of course);
8. Taking “steps toward fully abolishing the police and prison system”
9. Ending all deportations, providing amnesty for all illegal immigrants, and allowing unlimited migration to America (fully open borders)
10. Abolishing the Presidency, Supreme Court, and Senate (in effect, destroying the Constitution)

I’m not going to give their site clicks by linking here, but the DSA platform is not hard to find for those morbidly interested.

Lessons from a Dallas Deck Park

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Quality urban renewal takes a lot of commitment from multiple people and organizations. It cannot be all governmental, or it will fail to live up to potential due to suffocation in layers of red tape. You know the drill: shortfall-budgeted, bureaucratized, top-down, one-size-fits-all, rules-driven rigidity, unimaginative design, CYA decision making, and poor-quality, lowest-bidder contract work. That’s a recipe for disuse, decay and crime. Yet it can’t be all private, or it will lack transparency, public accountability and maybe even public access.

Dallas offers a success story most would have deemed highly unlikely beforehand: an urban park built over a freeway, doubted by many in city government itself, opposed by the adjoining major art museum that’s now awash in revenue from it, named after a living child. The park was conceived by highly regarded architects, urban planners, engineers and designers mainly hired through a nonprofit foundation, and molded conceptually by visits to renowned spaces in several other cities.

It was and is funded by a wide mix of wealthy private donors, venture capital, big-corporate gifts, city, state, and federal sources, all shrewdly solicited by talented business people and dealmakers devoted to applying those skills to civic service. All of the above had to set their egos aside and make compromises, which ain’t easy when great gobs of money are at stake. It sounds complicated, daring, and risky to pull off, absolutely needing bold visionaries with dogged determination to make it happen. It was all of those things — and that’s what it takes.

I’ve been to Klyde Warren Park several times now, and it’s both a relaxing and exciting hangout: a large, surprisingly roomy and open deck park bridging Uptown and Downtown in ways even the “pie in the sky” dreamers and early promoters didn’t imagine. One sees restaurants with open-air seating, street-food trucks, pavilions, trees, gardens, sunny and shaded areas, executives in Armani suits, moms strolling babies, children at play, teen lovers, yuppie residents of all the new condos nearby, buskers, tour buses, film crews, blue-collar workers from nearby taking breaks, the occasional celebrity sighting, some event or another (concerts, weddings, festivals, small fairs) almost daily, a lot of people without feeling crowded, unrestricted access from either side, and enough police presence to notice and keep it fairly safe, without being obtrusive.

That combination is not common in this country. It also hosted a huge total-eclipse party in April 2024; a lot of the awestruck, cheerful roar I heard through the urban canyons emanated from that direction within seconds after the moon blackened the sun’s space in the sky.

Massive residential, office and arts developments have sprouted around the park to the tune of over $1 billion in value, with cranes rising continually in the line of sight, and the surrounding tax base growing. Several cities look to it for inspiration for their own forthcoming projects. Best of all, access is free to the public, with a million visitors a year.

For all the problems Dallas has had the last 20 years or so on several other civic fronts, bogged down in red tape, interdepartmental and governance disputes, study after study sans tangible action, that deck park is a spectacular success. The city has just opened another over I-35E in Oak Cliff, near the zoo, with more on the way. Dallas Morning News architecture critic Mark Lamster won a 2026 Pulitzer Prize in criticism for his outstanding story on how it all came about.

Excerpt:
“That philosophy of programmatic excess defines the park and makes it, aesthetically, something of an upended toy box, with its diverse goodies strewn about. There is little relationship, for example, between the park’s allée of mini-arches with Japanese-style lanterns and the cool minimalism of Phifer’s performance and restaurant pavilions. The park surely subscribes to the mantra of architect Morris Lapidus, champion of Miami Beach modernism: ‘Too much is never enough.'”

Useful Idiot, Now Merely Idiot

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This ridiculous Trump/Pope squabble is distracting folks (perhaps by design) from the far more meaningful story: Eric Swalwell and more crucially, related unmistakable, if circumstantial, evidence of a secret-state blackmail apparatus active in Congress. Could it be that we really do have shadow governance, and this is but a small signal thereof?

For background, back in 2012, a Chinese spy, Fang Fang a.k.a. Christine Fang, went after aspirational politicians in the Bay Area and elsewhere, who had eyes on national positions. Charm, money and seduction were her tools, variably employed depending on who she targeted for her deep-pocketed, long-game-minded, red Commie Chinese puppet masters.

Swalwell was one of the recipients of her caress, probably in both figurative and literal senses. Even as a rising local star without classified access at the time, he would have such privileges if elected to Congress, and she “helped” with those efforts, even becoming Facebook “friends” with his father and brother. She fund-raised for him and directed an intern in his office likely quite compliant with her espionage agenda. She also allegedly seduced Swalwell into an affair — which, given revelations about him since — is a notion far more credible than any of his denials about that, or denials about his other affair(s) and sexual harassments.

[Before China found out she was found out, and summoned her home for good, Fang Fang also got inside the pants of at least two Midwestern mayors, based on FBI surveillance revealed in multiple media stories, and who knows who else. The U.S. secret state therefore knew this stuff was happening and who all was involved. Hold that thought.]

This is not Days of Our Lives, or whatever J.R. Ewing dug up on the competition; this is serious stuff. Even information about current, former or potential government officials that is not classified yet private, like interests, exploitable personality weaknesses (Lust! Greed!), sexual preferences, financial problems, addictions, marital distress, browsing history, Snapchats, texts, Signal messages, other vulnerabilities, schedules, social networks, contacts…all of those are valuable as intelligence! [Same goes for domestic spies as for foreign. Hold this thought too!]

Despite that becoming known behind the scenes (and perhaps because of it?), Swalwell was elected to Congress. Wouldn’t you know it, he became a useful, reliable, dependable tool for his party’s well-connected establishment! He would vote exactly as predictable, right down the company line for a California Democrat (and perhaps, exactly as told?). If they had a blind spot for his lewd predations, it was willful.

Surprise, surprise! Fang Fang allegedly was far from the only woman Swalwell messed around with, outside whom he married. Swalwell’s sins with other women filled his closet with skeletons—more than a closet, a veritable boneyard of predation and lust — which have been known behind the scenes years before they were revealed recently. And how convenient it is they were publicized and compelled his exit, only when more palatable candidates (to his party) came along for both his old House seat and California governor. Amid this sudden storm that was a long time brewing, he also tried to fight the FBI hard regarding their consideration of releasing the Swalwell investigation files. What a surprise there, too (not)!

It wasn’t just the Democrats. The FBI and NSA outwardly knew a lot and inwardly had to have known far more, since he was already their radar as a major espionage vulnerability. The political establishment at large, including Republicans and some media, knew for years. They didn’t do a damn thing about it until…he became too inconvenient. How is this (not just his predations, but the hushing thereof until the time was “right”) not an epic scandal?

Could it be because this is business as usual on Capitol Hill? I’m not defending Slimeball Swalwell at all. Still, how many more Swalwells, or mini-Swalwells if still compromised but not so deeply, govern us? Who is holding what over their heads to get them to vote in certain ways for, or against, certain bills and provisions—or to not even allow them to the floor? Or influencing executive or judicial outcomes, perhaps?

We’ve seen this tactic before (e.g., Brett Kavanaugh, which was much more baseless, nothing but hearsay, and did not succeed). Go even further back and read about Anthony Weiner. Or when the Obama FBI visited CIA head David Petraeus and alerted him that he was having an affair with his biographer? That came in handy later, didn’t it? Go further still and J. Edgar Hoover’s files (whether real or not…and truth isn’t the point here) describing salacious sexual stories about Rev. Martin Luther King. Or the known mainstream media and political cover-ups of JFK’s affairs. [Ironically, his brother RFK signed off on wiretapping MLK. See how nasty and convoluted this can get?]

COINTELPRO proved it was possible in the ’60s, long before modern surveillance tech. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. I cannot help but wonder if perhaps not a majority—but at least a critical mass—of Congress, Presidential cabinetry of both parties, and the federal judiciary—is similarly compromised by publicly hidden dirt that is known to the deep apparatus through their surveillance tactics.

Does every Congressman and Congresswoman eventually get presented with old dirt and “asked” to do things certain ways at certain times? Or if the dirt is trivial or deemed not enough, a honey trap? Increasingly plausible against even those of the cleanest and most impeccable backgrounds: AI-generated fake dirt? How many of our leaders, all the way up to Presidential levels, have been and remain compromised by their own secrets…or by convincing fakes?

I’m not positing anything as certainty, except that Swalwell is another example of a political downfall to personal scandal. I am, however, taking real puffs of smoke wafting from cracks in the ground, patterns apparent therein, and asking if this represents a great subterranean coal-seam fire that has potential to bring much more down into its hellscape?

There is nothing wrong with asking questions. Getting believable answers is a different story. Good luck.