When it comes to human misery, no system of government or philosophy has produced more than socialism. Rather than being a bug in specific applications of socialism, misery is a feature of socialism that its adherents — and even critics — try to shrug off as the unintended consequence of an otherwise evil system of thought and belief.
Socialism is not the ill-considered philosophy of well-intentioned academics. Socialism is evil. Its implementation and practice has lead to miserable deaths of hundreds of millions of people around the world. And yet a third of American millennials — parroting the moronic babble of Hollywood bubbleheads, tenured professors, and public school indoctrinators — identify as socialists. They have no idea what that philosophy and system of government actually does to the people who live under it.
A headline from London’s Telegraph on Dec. 29, 2018, captured the evil that socialism leads those living under it to contemplate: “Pirates of the Caribbean: Venezuelans stalking open seas as socialist economy collapses.”
In truth, there is very little difference between piracy and socialism. Both involve the threat of force and theft; pirates are just more honest about it. People in Venezuela were promised a socialist paradise but received the socialist reality: misery.
Socialism, like cannibalism, only “works” so long as there is a steady supply of outsiders upon which to prey. For cannibals, that would be people outside the tribe; for socialists, that would be entrepreneurs and producers.
Even the socialists understand that their philosophy cannot produce the bounty of free people living and working in free markets, so they have to make scarcity sound like a good thing. A video has emerged of Bernie Sanders, Vermont’s socialist senator and darling of hip-and-cool millennials everywhere, describing the “good thing” of breadlines.
“It’s funny, sometimes American journalists talk about how bad a country is, that people are lining up for food. That is a good thing! In other countries people don’t line up for food: the rich get the food and the poor starve to death.” – Bernie Sanders
Actually, Bernie, it is only in socialist countries where people starve to death because they are poor.
I wonder how many of the millennials so eager to describe themselves as socialists would feel about lining up for bread? “Camping” outside the Apple Store in your Patagonia jacket while sipping a mocha latte to buy the latest gadget with dad’s MasterCard just isn’t the same thing as lining up and hoping the government store won’t run out of bread. Not being among the first to get the iPhone Whatever means a day without an Instagram brag; a day without food because your local socialist commissioner was throwing a party is something else.
But then, Bernie Sanders is one of those who knows he’ll get food no matter what’s happening to everyone else. Even as he extols the virtue of citizens queuing up for bread, he and his wife own a series a vacation homes for themselves. Just as the members of the Soviet Politburo never went hungry and North Korea’s Kim Jung-Un is hefty from luxurious dining, Bernie Sanders knows he’d never have to stand in line for food except at a Democrat Party reception.
The powerful and politically connected always do just fine in socialist countries. Everyone else, however, is made to suffer.
Here’s how Winston Churchill described socialism: “Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy.” In contrasting socialism and capitalism, he noted: “The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of Socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.”
Socialism is a philosophy of misery because it is based on the flawed idea that a men are inherently good and that a wise and educated few can benevolently rule over everyone. As it is implemented, it demands that government power be the final authority in life. Dissent is not allowed; God must be expelled from not just the public square but the human heart.
Liberty, not the breadlines of socialism, produces abundance. The freedom of God’s love, not the socialists’ shackles, is the cure to human misery.
