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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.

Scattershooting 190418

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Scattershooting while wondering what happened to common standards of moral decency in communities, or for that matter, cohesive communities…

POTENT MARTYRDOM STORY against NAZIS: A Catholic friend sent this story of Maria Restituta Kafka, a Fransciscan nun whom the Nazis executed. What an amazing story of Christian martyrdom in the face of a powerful, genocidal terror state. She and all the others who opposed the Nazis on righteous grounds, whether famous like Dietrich Bonhoeffer or relatively obscure like her, were martyrs and heroes. It’s still happening today in places like North Korea, Iran, and across north and central Africa (Boko Haram attacks, among others). The oppressors, be them Nazi, Communist, Islamic, or otherwise, fail to realize that it only strengthens and grows the Christian faith to try to kill it off. The martyrs are assured a place at the Lord’s side in eternity, for dying in his name. And in the end, we know, by faith and prophecy, who wins: God.

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TESTING STUDENTS’ SOCIALIST IDEALS: I hope at least a few of the involved learned something from this exercise in socialism applied to GPA. The limits of socialism, on a personal level, stop at what’s inconvenient for “me”. That’s because people are, by nature, from the start, selfish. [This is why toddlers have to be taught to give, not take.] And even those rare few who genuinely are altruistically inclined to socialism fail to realize that overwhelming majority of others are selfish; therefore, socialism inevitably leads to centralized authoritarian corruption. Systemically, it’s an ideal whose end game is death, destruction, famine, and all other manner of mass misery. Venezuela is just the latest rock-solid and indisputable evidence of this. Yet socialism appeals mightily to the naive, young and old alike, in its simple, populist promise of something for nothing, and a bogus “social justice” that ends up only stealing, never giving.

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THE RELIGION of SECULARISM: There is no question among observant people — those outside the problem — that secularism is a de facto religion (not in name, but most certainly de facto). And yes, I agree with this essay that ours is a two-faith nation (religious and secular), and there is no old-Democrat center-left anymore on social positions. Instead: bizarre, radical, and extreme-fringe/left-wing concepts like “gay marriage”, more than two genders, and the infanticide of pre-born babies, have been culturally normalized amidst the ethos of intersectional victimhood, then shoved down our throats by a holier-than-thou secular mirror image of the old “Moral Majority”. In the Clintons’ and Obama’s cases, as former pseudo-centrists, their “evolution” flip-flopping into the social-justice herd on such issues was only for political expedience, not honest principle. [Do they even have any honest principles other than power, money, and self-glorification?] But for the current crop of Democratic radicals, it’s a genuine ideal/delusion. This quote was quite apt: “As Andrew Sullivan and many others have been arguing for some time, the language and practice of secular intersectionality directly compares with multiple elements of classic religious belief — from original sin (privilege), to justification (becoming woke), to sanctification (being an ally). ” Those of us looking in from the outside see secularism exactly for what it is: a conformity cult.
…

THE NEXT PERVERSION ALREADY BEING NORMALIZED by the LEFT: Pedophilia. First it was extramarital “free sex” between men and women. Then it was homosexual behavior. Then it was cross-dressing, “transgender” and “gender identity”. Somewhere amidst all that, bigamists are clamoring for “equality”. At each step along the way, advocates denied that the next step would happen, wrongly of course, and arrogantly mocked those who correctly predicted it as having slippery-slope fallacy. And now, in the ceaseless “give an inch, take a mile” demand for more immoralities to be normalized and their practitioners granted “equal” rights, so are the perverts who want to molest children: pedophiles. As immature underlings in the power structure of adulthood vs. childhood, minors cannot make informed consent to sexual acts with adults, period, full stop, no exceptions, no question. Yet, just like minors and young-adult students have been the target of decades of slow-creep, agenda-driven curriculum brainwashing and conformist, herd-mentality peer pressure in public schools, and public and private universities, programmed to accept homosexual and extramarital sex as moral and normal, and to incorrectly attack opposition thereto as “hate”, adult-child perversion is the next domino to fall in Satan’s big divide-and-conquer agenda. Who will have the courage to speak out and stand up to this horror?

Enough with the Ignorant Nazi Comparisons

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In the Bush-43 administration, some left-wingers compared the president to a Nazi. In the Obama administration, some on the right made Obama out as a Hitler-like figure. Now as the pendulum of ignorance continues to swing from right back to left, the left is doing similarly with Trump (of whom I’m no fan, but he is not anything close to a Nazi!).

Nazi comparisons to U.S. politicians, regardless of how much one disagrees with their policies or behaviors, are all not only wrong, but hideously ignorant and misguided, insulting to those with friends or loved ones who were killed (or survived) the Holocaust. Those propagating such asinine comparisons need to learn basic Holocaust history. In addition to reputable websites, there are any number of Holocaust- and Nazi Germany-related books one can read, or take a personal visit to one of the larger Holocaust museums around the nation.

A longtime friend, who is Jewish, recently visited Yad Vashem in Israel for the first time — a place I have right in my top-handful, high-priority list if I ever journey to Israel.

My friend wrote:

    “Had an unforgettable VIP private guided tour of Yad Vashem. It was an intensely emotional experience… While I went into this already knowing a great deal about The Shoah, the perspective gained through interacting with an expert whose entire life’s work is focused on this subject left an indelible mark on me. This was industrialized mass murder on an unprecedented scale. The world does not appear to have learned the lessons of The Holocaust. The next time someone compares an American or Israeli politician or policy to something or someone from Nazi Germany, you can safely and instantly conclude that said person doesn’t know what the hell they are talking about and has zero credibility on the matter.”

Yad Vashem first and foremost is a memorial to the incomprehensibly vast number of those lost to a regime so evil as to commit industrial-scale killing, but also, a reminder that is apparently much-needed in today’s world about the ultimate result of state-run collectivism carried to its fullest. My friend’s last sentence is absolutely spot-on!

My friend’s first-hand imploring from Yad Vashem imply reinforces the notion that far too many are abjectly ignorant in their comparisons of anything in America to Nazism. The term Nazi itself is short for “National Socialist” (emphasis mine) — and the Third Reich was a secular (not Christian!), collectivist, authoritarian, megalomaniacal, and decidedly anti-religious. They persecuted and killed Christians, Muslims, and Jews, but especially and most horrifically, Jews.

If the point of such ridiculous comparisons to Nazism is that we always need to be vigilant for the seeds of that sort of industrialized horror, then that’s good and true. We do, here and anywhere in the world, from far right or far left (collectivism, in the form of both the Communists and the Nazis, has a virtual monopoly on non-Islamic genocide worldwide the last 100 years).

Germany in the 1920s didn’t have a Constitutional republic with a balance of powers specifically and (to the time of founding) uniquely designed against collective authoritarianism of the sort ultimately and contemporaneously consolidated by both Hitler and Stalin. We are fortunate to have systematic structural guards in place against such a devolution, and should be sure to use them where and when necessary. Neither fascism nor its kin communism ever should be allowed to take root here!

Regardless, I’m with my friend here — for all the troubles that are real, I don’t think a lot of folks realize how good we have it in the bigger historic picture. There is no comparing any of our problems since WW2 with Nazism. A whole different level altogether…equating any U.S. politician or policy with the Nazis is so far over the top, such a crazy stretch of reasoning, that (as my friend stated powerfully) anyone doing so loses all credibility in the argument.