“THE FACTS OF LIFE ARE CONSERVATIVE.”1
– MARGARET THATCHER
Socialism doesn’t work. At the very least, its implementation creates catastrophic economic consequences, and more often than not, it also results in widespread death, suffering, and despair. On the other hand, they do build some nice statues of the dictators.
By this point in our conversation, I think socialism’s history of unparalleled failure has been well established. But what we haven’t spent much time doing is discussing why socialism has been so remarkably unsuccessful. And when it comes to socialism, the “why” matters. Some socialists—the honest ones—admit that their prized philosophy has a really bad track record, but they think it’s possible to make socialism workable by putting the right people in power, building new safeguards, or having a better plan in place for the future.
These socialists are suffering from a terrible case of denial. They’re like women who find themselves dating a real loser but keep the relationship alive anyway because they think the “loser” can change. They say their boyfriend “doesn’t have a job, lives in his parents’ basement, can’t afford his own car, and seems to shower only on holidays. And, not like Flag Day either…only the big ones. But I can find a way to make this relationship work. I can ‘fix’ him.” But here’s the thing, ladies: sometimes, you can’t “fix” him. Sometimes, you end up with a guy who is just a dirty, unkempt, unsuccessful loser, and the best thing you can do for yourself is to move on.
Socialism is the abusive loser boyfriend of political and economic ideologies. Sure, he’s got some interesting things to say, nice smile, a bit subversive and rebellious, so you’ll overlook his seemingly endless list of flaws and try to “fix” him. In the end, the relationship always ends the same way—with a box of his crap thrown out your bedroom window. Save yourself the heartache and get out of the doomed relationship now.
As much as you’d like to “fix” socialism, you can’t. It literally never works and never lasts, because at its foundation, socialism is so rotten, so flawed, and so broken that no amount of planning or effort could ever make it successful. The best you can hope for is a little less death, destruction, and tyranny than usual.
The reason why socialism doesn’t work is that humans are human. For it to have any chance of success, people would have to be fundamentally different creatures whose natures would have to be completely altered in line with socialist principles. Unsurprisingly, that has never happened, and it never will.
When the Founding Fathers were deciding how to structure America’s new government, the primary question that needed to be tackled was how to create a government powerful enough to defend itself against foreign invaders and protect the rights of individuals while not making it so powerful that it would grow out of control and eventually transform into a tyrannical monster. Many of the Founders were avid students of history, and as such, they understood the pitfalls other societies had previously fallen into. They also knew that designing a well-functioning society depended on having a proper understanding of human nature.
For example, in a 1788 essay by James Madison published in the Independent Journal in New York—which would eventually become known as essay number 51 in the Federalist Papers—Madison wrote:
Madison was right; men are inherently flawed and ambitious, so government is needed to help protect the rights of individuals. However, to prevent government from becoming too powerful, the people must have the ability to act as the “primary control on the government.” But even then, Madison notes that “auxiliary precautions” are necessary. Why? Because at any time the public could use government as a tool to take away the rights of individuals—one of the primary flaws of any socialist model.
“It is of great importance in a republic not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part,” Madison wrote. “Different interests necessarily exist in different classes of citizens. If a majority be united by a common interest, the rights of the minority will be insecure.”
Madison’s remedy for this problem was a federalist system in which there would be numerous states, communities, and “factions” holding each other accountable. If power is spread out across an entire nation, it becomes much more unlikely that a majority faction would develop and take away the rights of the minority.
Although many of the other Founders agreed with Madison’s view, they were skeptical that such protections would be enough to guarantee the rights of individuals and the states. For that reason, they demanded a “Bill of Rights” be added to the Constitution that would help to keep the federal government from becoming too powerful.
A SOVIET UNDERSTANDING OF “RIGHTS”
The Constitution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics guaranteed its citizens numerous “rights,” including a right to “free” education and health care and a variety of personal liberties, such as the freedom to associate and free expression.
Why is it, then, that the Soviet Union was one of history’s most egregious human rights violators? Well, the devil is in the details.
Although the Soviet Constitution did include various protections for individuals, they were all subject to one extremely important constitutional provision, one that must be present in all socialist societies. Article 39 reads, in part: “Enjoyment by citizens of their rights and freedoms must not be to the detriment of the interests of society or the state, or infringe the rights of other citizens.”
Or, put more simply, your “rights” only exist if they don’t get in the way of the “interests” of the collective. And who decides that? Well, the government, of course. Does that sound like a free society to you?
So, the Founders built two important checks on the power of government and the majority of society into their Constitution: federalism and constitutional guarantees for individual liberty. Both were meant, in part, to stop the very developments socialists now regularly call for: granting nearly all power either to a small minority in government or, in the case of democratic socialism, to the majority population.
30 SECOND GUIDE TO GOVERNMENT SPENDING
Socialism’s primary purpose is to enhance the power of the collective by seizing power, wealth, property, and rights from individuals. This is an extremely dangerous way to structure society, as evidenced by the numerous socialism-related catastrophes mentioned throughout this conversation, because humans are terrible central planners who are much better at managing their own affairs than they are managing the affairs of others. People are also much more likely to work harder, more efficiently, and longer days when they are motivated by a reward for themselves or their families. When you take that incentive away and turn it into an abstract “do it for the motherland” slogan, people stop working efficiently, and economic chaos eventually ensues.
Rewards and competition haven’t only been proven to be effective ways to increase efficiency and productivity in the workplace and classrooms, they are essential parts of every environment on Earth that have always been part of the human experience.3 Children naturally compete for attention from their parents and race other children in school yards. Societies have developed massive, complex entertainment systems built around competition, like professional sports. In nature, animals of every kind compete with each other for scarce resources and mates. Reward systems can even be found in the lore and legends of ancient religions and mythologies, as well as throughout humans’ long tradition of storytelling: After defeating the dragon, the noble knight always gets the hidden treasure. Similarly, Han Solo wins the heart of the princess after helping blow up the Death Star. (I told you I would work in an Original Trilogy reference.)
Competition and the rewards that flow from it are literally everywhere. By denying that reality, socialists work against fundamental laws of nature. It’s no wonder then that they have been so unsuccessful.
There is no way to train people to genuinely desire to act against their own self-interests. (And yet, people still sign up for Twitter accounts.) That doesn’t mean people are incapable of helping others without some kind of monetary reward; obviously, people engage in charitable activities all the time—and not just in the sense that they give money to charitable organizations. They also do simple things like walk an old lady across the street, help a neighbor bring in the groceries, stay behind church services to sweep floors, and a million other little things, too. But it’s wrong to assume that these voluntary activities aren’t tied to the self-interests of those who engage in them. Those who choose to help others do so for all sorts of reasons, but all of them come down to one thing: They truly believe that they would rather help another person than do some other activity.
However, socialism, even democratic socialism, destroys voluntary choice. It demands actions on the part of others, even if those people do not want to engage in them. It’s a philosophy built on the idea that force and coercion can be used to accomplish good things—and by “good things,” I mean whatever the collective decides it wants at the time. This is the least-inspiring way to get humans to help others, because people are often required to engage in actions they really, really don’t want to do.
Free, capitalistic societies do the opposite: They allow everyone to pursue their own personal hopes, dreams, and ambitions. They don’t tell people how or where to live or work, they provide an environment in which millions upon millions of people choose to make those decisions for themselves. The end result isn’t a world in which everyone has everything they want—but socialism doesn’t produce such a world either, even in its most utopian form. What capitalism—real capitalism, not crony capitalism—does do, however, is provide people with the freedom to pursue the lives they desire most.
Greed does create problems, but no government mandate or law is going to change people’s hearts. There are, of course, problems in every free society, but it’s not because there’s something wrong with free markets or individual liberty; it’s because people are not perfect. To build a better world, we don’t need to take rights away from individuals, we need people to voluntarily change and choose to act in ways that will help others who are truly in need. It must be a free choice, not something that is imposed on them, and it can only happen in a world in which people have the liberty required to make those decisions. Socialism doesn’t provide that opportunity.
If you’re forcing and mandating people to act in a certain way, then it’s not really “benevolence” or “charity”; it’s effectively nothing more than tyranny, and tyranny never produces a well-functioning, happy society.
SOCIALISM:
TRIED (AND FAILED) BY THE WORLD’S MOST PIOUS AND INDUSTRIOUS
PILGRIMS:
STARVED TO DEATH
MORMONS’ UNITED ORDER:
MASSIVE FAILURE
JAMESTOWN:
STARVED TO DEATH
LA RÉUNION SOCIALISTS (DALLAS, TEXAS):
TOTAL COLLAPSE
Every dictator, king, emperor, and tyrannical government that has ever existed has insisted that its mandates, government programs, and taxes are for the betterment of mankind—regardless of whether that was actually true. And the essence of tyranny isn’t that a centralized power is making inefficient decisions, but rather that it’s making decisions on behalf of everyone else. In other words, tyranny is the absence of freedom. And every socialist system, even a theoretical one that manages an economy efficiently (something that never existed), requires a reduction of freedom. It’s an essential part of collective property ownership and management—whether it’s in just a single industry or throughout an entire economy.
It’s also important to remember that there’s absolutely no evidence at all that collective property ownership and management or raising taxes improve prosperity. Some of the states with the highest tax rates and largest welfare programs also have huge impoverished communities. For example, progressive Democrats in Rhode Island have had continuous control of both the state’s House of Representatives and Senate since 1959—more than 60 consecutive years—and yet the state has traditionally had the worst poverty rate in New England. Further, many of the U.S. cities with the highest rates of extreme poverty have been for decades controlled by progressives and/or socialists, including Buffalo, Detroit, New York City, and Philadelphia, among many others.4 Similarly, many of the cities with the highest drug and crime rates have also been controlled by progressives and socialists for many decades, like Baltimore, Detroit, and St. Louis.5
If it were possible to fix America’s poverty problem by giving power to government and creating welfare programs, it would have happened long ago.
Remember the whole “I can fix him” analogy from earlier? Yeah, you’re doing it again—just like socialists have been doing for more than a century. And while you and others like you work to try to change socialism, you should know many socialists are working to change you.
In 1924, Leon Trotsky, one of the leading figures of the Russian Revolution and an original member of the Soviet Politburo, wrote a series of essays called Literature in Revolution. In one of his essays, Trotsky described a truly remarkable (and delusional) “transformation” of mankind that would soon come in the workers’ paradise the Russians believed they were building.
According to Trotsky, under utopian socialism, “The human species, the coagulated Homo sapiens, will once more enter into a state of radical transformation, and, in his own hands, will become an object of the most complicated methods of artificial selection and psycho-physical training.”6
Trotsky believed that this transformation would effectively improve humanity, and that this was “entirely in accord with evolution.”
CODIFYING RACISM
It’s common to hear socialists and progressives laud Charles Darwin’s most famous work, On the Origin of Species, but what you almost never hear them mention is the full title of the work: ORIGIN OF SPECIES BY MEANS OF NATURAL SELECTION OR THE PRESERVATION OF FAVOURED RACES IN THE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE.
Prior to Darwin’s writings on evolution, many people saw Africans as “savages,” a view held as a result of ignorance, fear, or greed. But Darwin’s work codified the view and justified racism on allegedly scientific grounds.
In many respects, socialists and progressives still use evolution as a discriminatory tool, this time as an excuse to dismiss the opinions of their rivals. Those who disagree with them are often considered to be a more evolved, more intelligent part of humanity. Those who “cling to guns or religion,” as Barack Obama once said, are treated as though they are not fully human.
Trotsky wrote, “Man first drove the dark elements out of industry and ideology, by displacing barbarian routine by scientific technique, and religion by science. Afterwards he drove the unconscious out of politics, by overthrowing monarchy and class with democracy and rationalist parliamentarianism and then with the clear and open Soviet dictatorship. The blind elements have settled most heavily in economic relations, but man is driving them out from there also, by means of the Socialist organization of economic life.”
According to Trotsky, man’s human nature, which “is hidden in the deepest and darkest corner of the unconscious, of the elemental, of the sub-soil,” will also soon be replaced, and this change was inevitable and “self-evident.” Trotsky insisted, “The human race will not have ceased to crawl on all fours before God, kings and capital, in order later to submit humbly before the dark laws of heredity and a blind sexual selection. Emancipated man will want to attain a greater equilibrium in the work of his organs and a more proportional developing and wearing out of his tissues, in order to reduce the fear of death to a rational reaction of the organism towards danger. There can be no doubt that man’s extreme anatomical and physiological disharmony, that is, the extreme disproportion in the growth and wearing out of organs and tissues, give the life instinct the form of a pinched, morbid and hysterical fear of death, which darkens reason and which feeds the stupid and humiliating fantasies about life after death.”
According to Trotsky, the socialist “new man” would become so powerful and rational that he would even cease to fear death: He “will make it his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the heights of consciousness, to make them transparent, to extend the wires of his will into hidden recesses, and thereby to raise himself to a new plane.” Trotsky said this socialist revolution would even “create a higher social biologic type, or, if you please, a superman.”
This wildly idealistic view of the transformation of mankind can be found, to varying degrees, throughout socialist and communist states, although none quite match Trotsky’s enthusiasm. Why are such views so common among socialists? Because the earliest socialist and communist revolutionaries knew and openly discussed the reality that without a transformation of mankind, the whole “let’s share all our property and wealth and sing kumbaya by the campfire every night” thing wasn’t going to happen. People needed to be better, and they would be better, as Trotsky explained, because once they have been freed from the shackles imposed by capitalism, they would be free to “evolve” and see the errors of the old world.
Of course, these transformations never happened. Just two years after Trotsky promised a new socialist utopia, he was pushed out of his leadership role in the Politburo. A year later, he was removed from the Soviet Central Committee. Then he was exiled from the Soviet Union and forced to flee the continent of Europe. He spent the next dozen years or so living in Mexico City, until he was brutally murdered with an “ice axe” by an assassin sent by the Soviet government.7 So, yeah, that whole new man, “superman” Soviet theory—let’s just say it didn’t work out the way Trotsky expected it to.
OTHER ATTEMPTS AT CRAFTING A MIDEL SOCIALIST citizena
CAMBODIA: Pol Pot sought to create a Cambodian “master race” using social engineering
USSR: Stalin commissioned officials with the task of using psychological conditioning to create the “Soviet new man.”
CHINA: Mao followed in Stalin’s footsteps, believing Pavlovian conditioning could help craft desired actions.
NAZI GERMANY: The Nazis pursued policies and eugenics to achieve a “strong and pure” Aryan race.
Human nature fundamentally doesn’t change, and the best proof of that is the very fact that no matter how many times socialists have tried to create a “new man,” they’ve failed. No matter how many times they’ve tried to conquer foundational truths about man’s self-interests, they’ve failed. No matter how many times they’ve promised a glorious revolution that would lead to the birth of a new “superman” human race, they’ve failed—and spectacularly.
The very fact that we’re having this conversation is proof that people cannot overcome their fundamental natures simply by learning from history, especially when it comes socialism. I know it’s been a while since we talked about the horror show that socialism has been over the past 100 years, so let’s do a very brief refresher: Socialist Soviet leader Joseph Stalin is estimated to have killed 20–30 million people during his reign in the first half of the twentieth century.8 From 1975 to 1979, more than 2 million people were slaughtered in the “killing fields” of socialist Cambodia.9 More than 100,000 were killed by Fidel Castro’s socialist regime in Cuba.10 More than 3 million have been killed by North Korea’s authoritarian socialist regime, and hundreds of thousands more have been imprisoned in the country’s labor camps. Venezuelans are enduring years of economic, social, and political chaos because of decades of socialist policies.
HUMAN CARNAGE SCOREBOARDb |
|
|---|---|
Country Name: CHINA |
Deaths: 65,000,000 + |
Country Name: USSR |
Deaths: 20,000,000 - 30,000,000 |
Country Name: NAZI GERMANY |
Deaths: 15,000,000 - 20,000,000 |
Country Name: NORTH KOREA |
Deaths: 1,000,000 - 3,000,000 |
Country Name: CAMBODIA |
Deaths: 2,000,000 |
Country Name: VIETNAM |
Deaths: 1,600,000 + |
Country Name: ROMANIA |
Deaths: 435,000 + |
Country Name: CUBA |
Deaths: 100,000 + |
Country Name: ZIMBABWE |
Deaths: 50,000 |
Country Name: ANGOLA |
Deaths: 10,000 - 20,000 + |
Country Name: VENEZUELA |
Deaths: 10,000 + |
If the socialists in North Korea didn’t learn from the mistakes of the socialists in the Soviet Union, and the socialists in Cambodia didn’t learn from the socialists in North Korea and the Soviet Union, and if the socialists in Venezuela didn’t learn from the socialists in Cambodia, Cuba, North Korea, and the Soviet Union—along with dozens of other examples—what makes you think that American socialists know something that socialists in Asia, the Caribbean, Europe, and South America did not? (And before you answer, remember that your response could be used against you as proof of racism in a future Kangaroo Court of Public Opinion. They have a lot of those these days.)
Technology and our understanding of the universe unquestionably change over time, and humans can learn from the past to improve the future. But, fundamentally, human nature doesn’t change, and the primary reasons socialism continues to fail throughout the world is that one thing all people have in common, on every continent and in every era, is that they are human and share certain foundational characteristics that can’t be legislated out of existence by well-meaning socialists.
Yes. Right now, you’re talking to a big, walking, talking example of a flawed human being.
Since the birth of progressivism and the writings of Prussian radical Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in the nineteenth century, the free people of the world have repeatedly been told that if only they were willing to give their liberty and property rights away to the state, an army of well-trained administrators could pull all the levers and twist all the knobs of society in such a way that everyone would be better off. They are “experts,” after all. Who the hell are you?
But as I’ve noted throughout this conversation, the more authority and economic control is centralized in the hands of a select few—however “qualified” they might seem—the worse things get. There are two important reasons why this is the case.
SIDE NOTE
IF THE AVERAGE PERSON CANNOT BE TRUSTED, ISN’T QUALIFIED TO MANAGE HIS OR HER OWN AFFAIRS, AND NOT EDUCATED ENOUGH TO MAKE HIS OR HER OWN DECISIONS, THEN WHY DO SOCIALISTS BELIEVE THAT PERSON IS CAPABLE OF CHOOSING THE MOST QUALIFIED “EXPERTS” TO MANAGE SOCIETY?
First, the primary reason societal problems exist is that humans aren’t perfect. Why would you think a handful of imperfect people could manage the countless billions of economic decisions made throughout a free-market economy by hundreds of millions of individuals? Why would imperfect people far removed from individuals’ unique circumstances be better equipped to manage those individuals’ lives? The more you centralize authority, the easier it is for a system to become inefficient, broken, and corrupt.
Second, as I mentioned earlier, people are primarily motivated by their own self-interest. When you take that away, you leave them with no reason to work harder, work longer hours, or to be careful with others’ money and resources.
For example, imagine you have a socialized farm in a mostly socialized society. Every farm worker at our fictional workplace—let’s call it “Mao’s Broccoli Plantation”—receives the same pay, regardless of how talented he or she is or how much effort the worker contributes to the farm’s output. Under this system, the worst worker on the farm earns the exact same pay as the most productive, innovative worker. Under this model, it doesn’t take long for Broccoli Plantation workers to realize that they don’t need to work as hard as they did before to earn the same wealth, so they don’t.
MAO’S BROCCOLI
THE BEST (& ONLY) BROCCOLI IN THE COUNTRY!
All they must do is work as hard as the worst-performing worker. They can’t fire everyone, right? Someone needs to produce the broccoli being shoved down American kids’ throats at government-run schools. And even if they do fire every worker, who cares? It’s a socialist society after all, so the collective has promised to take care of the workers either way. It’s a true slacker’s paradise. Your co-worker who comes in late, does the bare minimum, and leaves at 4:54 p.m. everyday will feel right at home. This socialist model inevitably leads to a “race to the bottom,” one that once it’s applied across an entire nation typically results in a gigantic economic collapse.
Of course, we don’t have to speculate about how all this works out. In addition to the dozens of examples presented earlier in our little talk, consider the following examples of failed central planning:
After socialist Mao Zedong seized control of China, he implemented one of his most substantial (and disastrous) reform programs, the “Great Leap Forward.” Among the Great Leap’s many failures was the collapse of agricultural production—which, you know, is a pretty big deal for the country with the world’s largest population.
As the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers noted in a 2018 report on the failures of socialism, “Mao’s government implemented the so-called Great Leap Forward for China from 1958 to 1962, including a policy of mass collectivization of agriculture that provided ‘no wages or cash rewards for effort’ on farms. The per capita output of grain fell 21 percent from 1957 to 1962; for aquatic products, the drop was 31 percent; and for cotton, edible oil, and meat, it was about 55 percent.”11
In the 1970s, many Chinese farmers secretly privatized their land, causing grain production in 1979 to increase by six times compared to 1978.12
In an effort to increase “green” transportation options and limit traffic, California voters approved in 2008 a high-speed rail project that would have connected Los Angeles and San Francisco, two of the state’s largest cities. A decade later, the rail project became the poster child for government projects gone wrong.
By mid-2018, the high-speed rail line was running more than a decade behind schedule and its final cost projection had jumped to as high as $100 billion, $67 billion more than the original projection of $33 billion.13,14 Things got so bad that California officials gave up on trying to connect the line from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Even worse, because the geniuses who planned the rail line’s construction chose to start the project in California’s Central Valley, the line will not reach either Los Angeles or San Francisco. Instead, it’s now only projected to operate from Merced to Bakersfield. Yes, Merced to Bakersfield—which, by the way, are only less than 170 miles away from each other by car. And that assumes the state chooses to operate the rail line at all. Some analysts have predicted the state might never actually use the line, because the costs wouldn’t be worth the relatively few economic benefits.
If California, the largest state in the country and one of the states most committed to building “green” transportation systems, can’t manage to build a high-speed rail line between its two most important cities, what makes anyone think government can effectively manage everyone’s health care—or anything else, for that matter?
One of the signature issues for American progressives and socialists is increasing the federal minimum wage to at least $15 per hour. The idea seems simple enough to socialists: If greedy companies are forced to pay their workers more, then workers would be better off. But here’s the thing, huge amounts of data show boosting the minimum wage often results in negative economic consequences, especially for lower-income workers, the very people minimum wage laws are meant to help.
For example, after Seattle increased its minimum wage to $13, lower-wage employees reported working 9 percent fewer hours and earned $125 less per month on average, according to researchers at the University of Washington.15 Similar results have been experienced in other cities across the country as well, and the Congressional Budget Office estimated in 2019 that increasing the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour would result in as many as 3.7 million fewer jobs and a $9 billion decrease in real income in 2025—and that assumes a slower rollout of the $15 minimum wage than what many Democrats are now calling for.16,17
If collective economic decision-making really does work, then why are there so many examples—literally thousands in America alone—of it failing?
Actually, they usually just start shooting people in the streets. You see, in a socialist society, you can’t motivate people using profits—at least, not if you want to be consistent. And in most cases, socialist governments can’t afford to pay workers more money anyway, because the efficiency of the entire marketplace usually ends up in the gutter. So, if you can’t motivate workers by paying them more money, which is how capitalism operates, then what are you left with? You put a gun to the back of their heads—sometimes literally—and demand that people work harder. Anyone who complains ends up dead, exiled, in a prison labor camp, or, if they are really lucky, they end up escaping with as much wealth as they can to countries like the United States, further exacerbating the socialist country’s economic problems.
“The minimum wage law very cleverly is misnamed. The real minimum wage is zero. That is what many inexperienced and low skilled people receive as a result of legislation that makes it illegal to pay them what they are currently worth to an employer.”c
– Thomas Sowell
Wow. That sounds very authoritarian of you, Mr. Guevara. What would you like them to do, then? Lock them away in prison after seizing all of their wealth and property?
Whenever such “exit taxes” are discussed, most of those with substantial amounts of wealth move their resources out of the country before their property can be taken from them, so threats of wealth taxes typically end up causing much more harm than good. But this provides a good opportunity to point out that for socialism to “work” at all—and I’m using “work” here very liberally—it must be in place throughout the entire world.
One of the biggest reasons isolated socialist states fail so quickly is that as soon as they start to dramatically increase taxes and seize property, everyone with wealth and property gets the hell out of Dodge.
GHOST OF
KARAL MARX
“MAY I?”
Sure, Karl, you’ve been good for a while. Shoot!
GHOST OF
KARAL MARX
AS I WROTE IN THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO, “THE COMMUNISTS ARE FURTHER REPROACHED WITH DESIRING TO ABOLISH COUNTRIES AND NATIONALITY. THE WORKING MEN HAVE NO COUNTRY. WE CANNOT TAKE FROM THEM WHAT THEY HAVE NOT GOT. … NATIONAL DIFFERENCES AND ANTAGONISMS BETWEEN PEOPLES ARE DAILY MORE AND MORE VANISHING, OWING TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE BOURGEOISIE, TO FREEDOM OF COMMERCE, TO THE WORLD-MARKET, TO UNIFORMITY IN THE MODE OF PRODUCTION AND IN THE CONDITIONS OF LIFE CORRESPONDING THERETO.
THE SUPREMACY OF THE PROLETARIAT WILL CAUSE THEM TO VANISH STILL FASTER. UNITED ACTION, OF THE LEADING CIVILISED COUNTRIES AT LEAST, IS ONE OF THE FIRST CONDITIONS FOR THE EMANCIPATION OF THE PROLETARIAT.”
Translation: If socialists want to do away with capitalism, “one of the first conditions” is “united action” among the world’s nations—or, more realistically, some kind of global government.
There are good reasons why many, although not all, socialists and communists have called for some form of global government. How can any good socialist say he or she supports true economic equality on the one hand, often calling it a moral imperative, while on the other allowing billions of people in other nations to live in poverty? The only philosophically consistent brand of socialism is one in which all of the world’s resources are shared—not just the resources of a single country.
Of course, if we were to spread around all the world’s wealth, it would create huge problems for those of us in North America and Europe, who have become accustomed to modern luxuries like grocery stores, clean running water, and heat. Spreading the wealth of the West equally around the rest of the world wouldn’t make anyone wealthy, but it would make a whole lot of people much poorer.
More importantly, societies and cultures around the world are different—not necessarily inferior, just different. And in many cases, what works for one group of people won’t work for another. People have naturally grouped together based on shared characteristics for a reason; it’s an inherent part of who we are, and we’ve all experienced it. It’s why some places feel like “home” and others don’t. Global government, which is practically essential if the entire world is going to adopt socialist principles, defies this foundational concept and tries to force people to abide by the same philosophies, rules, and ideas, even though they don’t want to.
True. In fact, I personally have a room filled with gold coins. I spend hours doing backstrokes through the various piles of doubloons and pirate booty.
WARNING
Diving into a giant room of gold coins like Scrooge McDuck may cause injury and even death. Gold is a metal and does not share physical qualities with liquid.
Okay, now take a moment to imagine just how ridiculous an idea that is. In reality, this myth of wealth closets full of cash is simply not true. Business owners don’t typically “hoard” their wealth. They often use their money to invest in new business ventures or to expand existing ones. And even when they don’t, many business owners use their wealth as collateral to obtain loans that can be used for those purposes.
That doesn’t mean businesses are always spending or investing every penny they have. Obviously, many business owners and shareholders choose not to spend their resources. But does that mean the money is being wasted, or that they are simply being good stewards of their wealth? And unless those wealthy people you referred to as “hoarders” are putting their cash underneath their mattresses at night, much of their wealth stored in bank and financial accounts is being used to spur investment indirectly. The more money banks have, the more they can loan money out.
For more than a century, wealthy business owners have also played a key role in establishing and maintaining important educational, cultural, and charitable organizations. The modern-day “Robber Barons” of our time, people like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, have used the profits generated by their successful businesses—which, let’s remember, provide products and services people love—to fund numerous important philanthropic programs.
For example, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the world’s largest charities, spent more than $1.8 billion on global development efforts in 2018 alone, including on programs to address nutrition, vaccine delivery, and reduce polio. The Gates Foundation also spent more than $1.3 billion on global health issues like malaria, HIV, and children’s health in developing nations.18 Since its inception, the Gates Foundation has made more than $50 billion in grant payments, much of which have been used to help some of the world’s poorest communities. Without capitalism, none of this would have been possible. Of course, capitalism also produced the Microsoft Zune. They can’t all be winners.
Money in the hands of private individuals is almost always spent more wisely than when it’s in the hands of government agents, because, again, humans are naturally more inclined to be better stewards of their own resources than they are of others’ wealth and property or collectively owned resources. Government bureaucrats are notorious money-wasters.
Sen. Rand Paul’s, R-Ky., “Waste Reports” have revealed more than $1.8 billion in government waste.19 Even more stunning, government watchdog Citizens Against Government Waste outlined more than 600 recommendations to reduce government waste in its most recent Prime Cuts report. According to CAGW, if the government were to make its recommended cuts, it would save an astounding $429.8 billion in the first year, and more than $3 trillion in just five years.20
The reason government bureaucrats are so wasteful isn’t because they are inherently bad or even irresponsible people, it’s because they have no reason to be cautious when spending other people’s money. In many cases, they are just doing what their boss told them to do, and that boss is just doing what his or her boss commanded, and on and on it goes. And let’s be honest: A few extra hundred thousand dollars wasted here or there isn’t going to raise any red flags in a multi-trillion-dollar, endlessly complex government bureaucracy.
To a limited extent, these problems exist whenever you have a large bureaucracy, including in private industry, but the biggest difference is that private companies do have an incentive to try to eliminate as much waste as possible: profit. The more money that’s saved, the more money business owners, shareholders, and others get to keep in their own pockets. Businesses can’t force their customers to pay higher prices, and if they raise prices too high, they run the risk of losing their customers altogether.
In the private marketplace, competition between businesses keeps costs down. But when it comes to government, competition is rarely ever a concern. In fact, in many cases, government agencies are encouraged to spend more money than they need to ensure that their agencies receive similar funding amounts in the future. Agencies that spend less than what has been budgeted run the risk of having future budgets slashed, creating an incentive to spend money irresponsibly.
Mr. Guevara, this is a really warped, albeit increasingly common, view of how economics works. Waste and destruction of property doesn’t lead to economic growth, it ruins it. This idea is best illustrated by what economists call the “broken-window fallacy”—which was first described by Claude-Frederic Bastiat, a noted nineteenth-century French economist.
The broken-window fallacy goes a little something like this: Imagine a medium-sized, mostly middle-class community in Pennsylvania. In town, there are numerous small businesses, including a glazier who sells windows to most of the town’s residents and other businesses. So, one day, the town’s village idiot—let’s call him Sal Gore—decides that in order to save the planet from an impending global warming catastrophe, every single homeowner and business owner should replace their conventional windows with more insulated, “green” windows.
Gore runs around town screaming at residents and businesses to swap their windows, but he’s not having much luck. Most people’s windows are in good shape and they don’t want to spend money on new windows in order to try to stop global warming 80 years into the future. Frustrated, Sal Gore gathers his closest friends together—let’s call them Bernie Spanders and Alexander Ocasio-Cortezio—and they come up with what they think is a brilliant plan: Instead of convincing people to buy new windows, they decide they will just run around town destroying them. Not only will this force people to have “greener” homes, they reason, it will also increase economic growth, because the local glazier will now have to replace a whole town’s worth of windows.
So, around midnight on the second Tuesday of November, they run—well, in the case of Bernie Spanders, ride on an old Hoveround scooter—around town destroying everyone’s windows. The next day, orders for new “green” windows flood the local glazier, who is now doing more business than ever thanks to the latest window crime spree.
According to socialists’ logic, the damage caused by Sal Gore, Bernie Spanders, and Alexander Ocasio-Cortezio led to increased economic growth. Prior to all that window-smashing, demand for windows was relatively low, but now, demand couldn’t be higher. The plan worked so well, in fact, the three renegades are planning to light everyone’s gasoline-powered cars on fire next—you know, to help boost local electric car sales.
Sounds like a great plan, right? But before smashing all your neighbors’ windows around town, let’s think this one through. The new windows will unquestionably create more demand, and thus more business, for the local glazier, but the money spent on new windows that otherwise wouldn’t have been necessary has now been diverted away from other important economic uses. Instead of having enough money to hire a new worker, the local coffee shop has to delay the hiring so it can pay for its new windows. Instead of having more money to take the family out to a nice restaurant, a local worker must spend that cash on a new window. Instead of spending the day with a prospective client, a local business owner spends the next two days installing a new window.
“If we discovered that space aliens were planning to attack, and we needed a massive build-up to counter the space alien threat, and inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months.”e
– PAUL KRUGMAN
NOBEL PRIZE–WINNING ECONOMIST, PERSON YOU WOULDN’T WANT TO HANG OUT WITH
You see, money and time are scarce, which means there is a limited amount of it, and if people have to spend their money and time fixing broken windows, it means they are spending less time and money on other endeavors that would help to grow the economy. This is why it matters when government wastes time and money, because those resources could have been used more efficiently in the private marketplace, increasing economic growth for everyone.
The bottom line is, economies work best when people have the ability to spend their own money and time on those things they believe will be most valuable, because they know better than some disinterested government bureaucrat hundreds or even thousands of miles away what would most improve their own lives. Remember, humans are terrible central planners and completely incapable of properly managing the lives of other people.
If wealth really does equal power, then the federal government is already controlling society. The U.S. government has and spends more money than all of the wealthiest businesses and people in America—and it’s not even close.
The three most valuable brands in the world today are Amazon, Apple, and Google. Amazon is currently listed as the most valuable brand, at about $315.5 billion. Apple is worth about $309.5 billion, and Google barely trails behind Apple, at $309 billion.21 Combined, these three behemoths are worth less than $1 trillion—not even enough to match the national government’s expected budget deficit for the 2019 fiscal year.
Even more incredibly, Forbes reported in 2018 that the 400 richest Americans—including Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Jeff Bezos—have a total net worth of $2.9 trillion.22 To put that in perspective, the U.S. government spends more than $4 trillion every year. That means even if the federal government were to confiscate every penny from everyone on the Forbes 400 list, plus confiscate Amazon, Apple, and Google and then sell those businesses, it couldn’t come up with enough funding to pay for just one year’s worth of spending at the federal level alone—never mind state and local spending.
It always amazes me that socialists like yourself seem obsessed with taking wealth away from those who have it because you believe they have too much power over society, all while demanding we give even more power to government. Bernie Sanders and others have even gone so far as to insist that wealthy Americans have created an “oligarchy” that rules over the country’s economy—a claim that simply isn’t supported by the data.
If your goal is to decentralize power by decentralizing wealth, then the last thing you should want is to concentrate more wealth in the hands of the federal government, a relatively small group of people that controls much of the nation’s lands, wealth, natural resources, and laws. Congress, which is supposed to serve as the people’s representatives, is only composed of 535 people. So, 535 people, plus the president and nine Supreme Court justices, have control over most of the United States, a nation of more than 330 million and the most powerful country in the history of the world? Boy, that sounds an awful lot like an “oligarchy” to me.
And socialists can talk about the alleged “danger” of having much of the wealth in the United States controlled by a relatively small group of private Americans, but let’s not forget that it’s the federal government that owns the tanks, guns, and nuclear bombs—not Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates. What’s the worst Jeff Bezos can do to you, anyway? Cancel your Amazon Prime subscription?
This is why a discussion of human nature is so important. If humans really do abuse their power—and socialism is built on that idea—then why would we expect the human beings running the government to be any better? In the pursuit of trying to fix socialists’ perceived “power” problem, they make it much, much worse.
No, I stand by my concerns about Facebook, Google, YouTube, Twitter, and other tech giants. They represent one of the greatest dangers facing individual liberty and the dissemination of free speech in the history of the United States. But I think you misunderstand some of the biggest reasons why these companies have become so powerful and potentially dangerous.
To say tech giants like YouTube are some of the most powerful organizations in the world is a gigantic understatement. Together, Facebook, Google, and YouTube control most of what Americans watch, learn, and see on the internet, and much of the world as well.
YouTube has more than 2 billion monthly users, who watched a combined 250 million hours of content every single day in 2019, a 39 percent increase compared to the previous year.23
Sixty-eight percent of all Americans say they use Facebook, and the number is even higher among Millennials and those who are slightly older and younger than Millennials. Eighty percent of Americans aged 18–49 say they use Facebook, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center.24
Although Google is notoriously secret about the number of users it has, it confirmed in 2016 that its users conduct at least 2 trillion searches per year, or about 5.5 billion per day.25
In our current Information Age, Google, Facebook, and YouTube are kings, and like all kings, they’ve started to use their power to target the people they consider to be their “enemies”—supporters of free-market policies and individual liberty.
The worst-kept secret in Silicon Valley is that most of America’s tech giants are controlled by people who align closely with progressive or even socialist values, and that many of those who don’t agree with those beliefs are forced to either conform or get out. According to one survey conducted in 2018, two-thirds of Silicon Valley employees who consider themselves to be conservative, very conservative, or libertarian say they don’t feel comfortable discussing their ideological views with the people they work with.26
In 2017, the problem allegedly got so bad at Google that employees were fired for criticizing the company’s leadership team, which the employees said had created a culture of bias against conservatives. One of the ex-employees, James Damore, had written an internal memo while he worked at Google alleging, among other things, that “Google’s left bias has created a politically correct monoculture that maintains its hold by shaming dissenters into silence.”27,28
It’s bad enough that tech companies like Google are creating work environments that “shame” conservatives—and anyone else who is “dissenting” against the politics of Google’s leadership team—but what’s much more dangerous is how Google, Facebook, YouTube, and others have used their power to quietly favor certain kinds of political speech over others, making it difficult for anyone who doesn’t toe the socialist-progressive line to reach new and existing audiences.
For example, in 2018, the Daily Signal, a publication of the Heritage Foundation, had one of its videos pulled from Facebook that shows a physician warning the public about the dangers of “puberty blockers.” These drugs have been disgustingly used by some parents and physicians to stop children from experiencing puberty because, as Planned Parenthood notes on its website, “If you’re transgender, intersex, or nonbinary, puberty may feel especially hard. Sometimes during puberty the changes going on in your body might not line up with your gender identity.”29
These drugs are, unsurprisingly, extremely dangerous to give children unless they have some other medical condition that might require them. For example, Lupron, a drug approved by FDA to treat prostate cancer, can cause significant health problems, including joint pain, osteoporosis, and severe depression. More than 20,000 complaints of adverse reactions to Lupron have been filed with the FDA. Half have been determined to be serious health issues.30
What, exactly, is wrong with a video telling parents that it’s dangerous to give drugs to their children to block puberty? Well, apparently it doesn’t align with the disturbing views of some at Facebook. They blocked the video after it received 70 million views, and Facebook’s ad team only agreed to restore the video after immense pressure from the Daily Signal and other conservatives.
Dennis Prager’s PragerU, which has hundreds of videos posted on YouTube addressing economic, political, and social issues from a free-market perspective, has had many of its videos banned or restricted over the past few years, including one video about the Ten Commandments, which YouTube labeled “inappropriate” content for “sensitive” audiences.31
I’ve seen this bias firsthand. Not only have numerous videos posted of The Glenn Beck Program experienced biased treatment, but also many of Blaze Media’s most influential voices have had their work removed or labeled as “inappropriate” by tech companies like Facebook and YouTube. For example, conservative commentator and comedian Steven Crowder, whose videos have been viewed more than 800 million times on YouTube alone, had his YouTube account demonetized after a writer for the left-wing publication Vox organized a campaign to have Crowder banned from the platform for making “homophobic” jokes. This occurred even after YouTube announced Crowder’s channel did not violate the platform’s community standards.32,33
There are dozens of other examples I could point to. There’s absolutely no doubt that many of the biggest tech companies in the United States are working to silence conservative voices, and that represents a significant threat, not just to conservatism, but to free speech in general—regardless of what side of the aisle you’re on. If Google, Facebook, and others can silence conservative political speech they don’t like, then they could come for you next. That’s how opponents of free speech always operate. The power companies like Google and Facebook have over the internet—and thus over public speech—is only likely to grow in the coming years.
Now, does this mean I think government should do something to stop these private companies from becoming too powerful? Yes, they should stop protecting them. I’m not asking for more rules and regulations, I’m simply calling for the existing rules and regulations to be applied equally.
Many people on the Left think I’m being a hypocrite for sounding the alarm about big tech companies and their power over free speech, but that’s because they don’t understand how government has created this problem in the first place, and how it continues to allow it to exist by not acting.
AN ALGORITHM MISTAKE OR ELECTION MEDDLING?
After the first Democratic presidential primary debate for 2020, Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard made headlines for being the most Googled candidate. Her staunch anti-war message resonated with potential voters. In an attempt to capitalize on this flood of interest, the Gabbard campaign began promoting Tulsi with online advertisements.
In these crucial hours of public interest, the Gabbard campaign’s Google ad account was disabled. After the campaign appealed the decision to disable the account, a Google spokesperson chalked this up to a mistake in the algorithm. By the time the account was reinstated, the damage was already done.
The Gabbard campaign filed a complaint in a U.S. District Court alleging Google censored her campaign, violating her free speech and harming her chances at becoming the nominee.f
Section 230 of the U.S. Communications Decency Act allows open platforms to escape liability for the posts of their users.34 For example, if in a fit of rage, a degenerate coworker—let’s call him Stu—decides to post dozens of totally false claims about his saintly boss in a series of Facebook posts, Facebook can’t be held legally liable for Stu’s defamatory statements. If, however, Stu were to quit his job and become a writer for the New York Times and publish defamatory statements at the Times, the newspaper would share in the liability.
The idea here is that social media outlets like Facebook and search engines like Google are not “publishers,” they are platforms that provide a forum for people to communicate with one another, and thus shouldn’t be responsible for what their users say and do. Publishers, however, should be liable for their false statements, because if they aren’t, then there would be nothing stopping them from constantly defaming people they don’t like.
Section 230 is a really important law. Without it, many social media platforms couldn’t exist, because they would constantly be sued for the terrible things some of their users say and do. But here’s the thing, that protection is only supposed to belong to companies and organizations that are truly acting as “platforms.” Once you start to ban certain kinds of political speech because you only want your platform to share a specific set of views you like, then it’s no longer an open platform—you’ve now crossed over into “publisher” territory.
Social media companies like Facebook and Twitter would have to radically change their business models or close down if they were subject to the same legal standards that publishers like Blaze Media and the New York Times are held to every single day. So, they continue to deny that they are treating certain kinds of political speech differently than others, even though anyone who has been involved in this business for half a second—or someone who just regularly reads the news—knows this isn’t the case.
Do I want YouTube, Facebook, and Google to close because they don’t like conservatives? Not at all. I want them to play by the same rules as everyone else: either they should become publishers and take responsibility for the content on their platforms and in their search results, or they should get out of the way and let conservatives speak freely through their platforms. This doesn’t mean they have to let people threaten or harass others, by the way. They can and should have some community standards. But platforms and search engines shouldn’t punish political voices they don’t like while benefitting from special legal protections, and that’s exactly what they are doing now.
What’s happening today with tech giants like YouTube, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and others isn’t proof that we need socialism because corporations are out of control, it’s proof that the centralization of power is dangerous and that when government becomes powerful, it can and often does make crony deals with private industry. Your solution—if you were even concerned enough about the problem to suggest one—would be to give government even more power over the internet. So, instead of having to worry about left-wing executives at Google and YouTube silencing speech, I’d have to worry about left-wing government officials doing the same thing. And under a Republican administration, perhaps you’d be worried about someone like the proto-fascist caricature you imagine President Donald Trump to be doing it to you.
Socialism doesn’t work in large part because people are motivated by competition and rewards, but also because when human beings are given massive amounts of power over others, history has shown that they, acting in accordance with their nature, typically abuse that power—and there are millions of dead bodies around the world that prove it. I know you’ve heard this a million times, but get ready for a million and one: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”