These claims are FACTS. They are not subject to dispute by any honest economic historian.
What drives Socialists under their many names is not a benign desire to actually help people, but to FEEL like they are helping people, or in all too many cases, the obvious FACT that the larger the government, the easier it is to achieve tyranny. If you depend on government for a job, for healthcare, for energy, for housing, for food, for education, then they have you by the balls, don’t they? They say “let me take care of that” for the same reason men buy women drinks in bars: they want to fuck you later.
Here is the point I wanted to make. Most simple, common ailments, like headaches, colds, minor flu, bronchitis, aches and pains and the like fix themselves. Some minor palliatives like analgesics might be warranted, but basically most people’s bodies will heal themselves. Our immune system does its job. This is obvious, and the analogy I would draw is with poverty fixing itself if people are simply allowed to go out and pursue money their own ways.
Leftist economic theory, by contrast, keeping with the analogy, REQUIRES strong action in response to ALL ailments. If there is any poverty, then all wealth must be nationalized. If there is any inequality, everyone who is not a part of the power elite (don’t skip those parties!!!) has to be taken down.
All colds require STRONG medicine, the most powerful broad spectrum antibiotic, even if it doesn’t do anything, and destroys the digestive tract in the process. All headaches need codeine, as much as needed, even if it breeds dependency. The JOB of a doctor, on this rendering, is not to watch and wait, but rather in ALL CASES to prescribe the strongest “medicine” possible, even if it makes everything worse. It is the process which matters–prescribing medicine–not the result–a healthy, independent patient–which matters.
I continue to think of China and India, which languished in abysmal poverty for decades prior to liberalizing markets and achieving something substantively close to instant relative prosperity.
Again: the FACTS are not in question. The only possible debate is whether socialism IN THEORY is a moral creed. In FACT it very clearly is destructive, angry, and hostile to everything in any of our cultures which gives people hope outside the State.
If I were in China I would argue for traditional culture, updated to improve the rights of women, minorities, gays, and others stranded outside that culture.
If I were in India, I would be arguing daily for the rights of the Dalits, for women, and others. It was only the British who put a stop to the horrific practice of expecting widowed women to immolate themselves on their husbands funeral pyres. They are also the ones who stopped the Thuggee cult.
Where in the world is sanity? I continue to wonder why so many of our best minds preoccupy themselves with patent imbecilities.