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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.

…

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.

…

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?

Bernie Sanders Fans: How to Overcome Socioeconomic Ignorance

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Bernie Sanders lost in a rigged and patently unfair primary process over a year ago to the neoliberal establishment candidate and paid Goldman Sachs shill, Hillary Clinton. I get that. I agree with that. However, it’s time to grow up and lose the notion that what he had to say substantively was worth the electrons used to broadcast it to your screen.

Bernie-lemming “democratic socialists”: what is your major malfunction? Your very slogan — democratic socialism — is a self-contradictory, oxymoronic, and just plain moronic load of bull cookies.

Equality and fairness are not synonyms! We may be loved equally in God’s eyes, but God did not give us equal genetics, sizes, shapes, interests, intellects, or talents. No matter how hard I try, I cannot play basketball like MJ. MJ was not constructed to lift weights like Arnold Schwarzenegger. Arnold could never be the kind of scientist his fellow German-speaker Einstein was. Einstein wasn’t able to be on Mozart’s musical level…and so forth.

We each, individually, have different individual abilities, purposes and motivations. That’s true diversity! We are not made to benefit equally from economic outcomes, and therefore, we should not.

Socialism innately dissuades both diversity and productive quality. When you force equal outcomes across unequal individuals, by whatever sociopolitical means, you disincentivize productivity because (please read carefully!) human nature is fundamentally both selfish and survivalist. That’s just the cold, brutally honest truth, and you are not going to change that. People want reward for work, and consistent with human nature, that means money to buy what they both need and want. Having things provided for people “for free’ (at someone else’s expense, naturally) only incentivizes dependency. Dependency, in turn, yields sloth.

It’s not your job to decide what someone else should or should not possess — despite the patronizing attitudes of white liberals toward minority “needs”, and despite the fundamental arrogance of the socialist myth that the rich man’s money belongs to others who haven’t earned it. Yes, humans at all levels of the ladder are fundamentally selfish, economically. Anecdotal exceptions of altruism aside, people by in large demand tangible incentive (capital) to produce, to create, to innovate.

Less innovation, less incentive, less progress, less efficiency, slower gains, and loss of personal freedom…is this what you want, you fools? Because if you entrust centralized, federal Big Bureaucracy to mechanisms now done by for-profit business (however imperfect they are now), they will become more imperfect, more inefficient, with bigger overhead, less creative, slower, and more wasteful. Such is the historical, inherent, unavoidable, and inevitable nature of distant and detached central bureaus. If you do not believe this, then for once, study history. Or if in government, join a federal employees’ union, like I have — ironically, being a union member has shown me more than I ever could read in a textbook about the ineptitude, nefariousness and oppressiveness of upper management in a governmental bureaucracy!

There’s a lot more to this than I can give you here, and you need to do most of the lifting and learning yourself. For starters, though, look up and read and watch the related material from two highly regarded economists: late, Nobel-prizewinning economics professor Milton Friedman, and the Jim Crow-era North Carolina/Harlem-raised black economist and writer, Thomas Sowell.

Their expertise and credentials in these issues are much greater than yours, and you need to learn from them. And after doing so, don’t come back to me with the ridiculous and baseless arguments akin to, “That was then, this is now, we are better.” No provable basis exists for that argument. It is a logical and rhetorical recency fallacy, a head-in-sand mentality that ignores precedent and reality, in favor of a nonexistent Utopian dreamland full of unicorns crapping Skittles.

Consider health care and public policy…Bernie vs. Friedman:

And more general discussion on the end game of socialism itself:

In fact, in the last 100 years, the great majority of the tangible economic and efficiency gains in modern society are the result of capitalistic business. Yes, here in the U.S., government research developed many great ideas (lots of basic science and tech research), along with some horrible ones (nuclear war and forms of eugenics) that get ignored by pro-bureaucracy socialists. Private enterprise also developed others (such as Texas Instruments with the transistor…look where that has gone!). But only capitalistic business and its incentive to profit and make jobs took them from the ivory towers and flourescent-lit labs, made them real and mass-producible and tangible and workable, and put them into your hands. Never, ever, ever forget that.

      “Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.”

      “Social injustices are clearly greatest where you have central control.”

      “Most of the energy of political work is devoted to correcting the effects of mismanagement of government.”

      “If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there’d be a shortage of sand.”

— Milton Friedman

      “It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.”

      “Socialism sounds great. It has always sounded great. And it will probably always continue to sound great. It is only when you go beyond rhetoric, and start looking at hard facts, that socialism turns out to be a big disappointment, if not a disaster.”

      “I have never understood why it is ‘greed’ to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else’s money.”

      “When Senator Sanders cries, ‘The system is rigged!’ no one asks, ‘Just what specifically does that mean?’ or ‘What facts do you have to back that up?’ In 2015, the 400 richest people in the world had net losses of $19 billion. If they had rigged the system, surely they could have rigged it better than that.”

      “The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.”

— Thomas Sowell