Comment:
Let me think out loud a bit. None of us are as happy as we can imagine. What keeps us from happiness? Is it pain? Is pain an absence of happiness, and happiness an absence of pain? I don’t think so.
We often remember with the most fondness times when objectively we are challenged–for example, sports competitions–or pleasant days following difficulty. You can’t say a pleasant day exists on its own. It is in a context, where normally it is embedded in hard work. You work hard, you enjoy your vacation. The thrill of victory only follows great strain.
The starting point for happiness, it seems to me, is a life that is neither too hard nor too easy. That is the material requirement.
The moral requirement is relative tranquility. This means freedom from abusive emotions like chronic anger and jealousy, which themselves begin with casting ourselves as a victim of something.
Ultimately, you are happy as an individual. You can’t be happy as a “society”, unless the members of that society are happy. This means that happiness is an internal state, local to each individual.
Given this, the starting place for happiness is in the individual too. An individual can work to make his life physically easier. He can also toughen himself, such that he needs less, and the same amount of difficulty creates less strain on him.
On the one path, of physical ease, there is no logical end point until he is doing nothing all day. This is the dream of some people, until they achieve it, and realize doing nothing is overrated. And the prospect of achieving it is an uncertain one. You may fail, since you are trying to control things external to you. And until you achieve it, you are not satisfied, since you have not met your own requirement of happiness, that of ease.
Obviously, there is always potentially a stopping point, where you say “this is good enough”. This is the point of contentment. Yet, since this is an internal state–one with no external requirement–why not shorten the period, and alter your opinion earlier? This is the logic of the the wandering beggar, in the other extreme, who tries to live happily with nothing.
Socialism, in the event, is not a system for building ease and wealth, but rather for pulling people down who have been successful. It is not intended so much to raise the low, but to lower the high. The only places something like Socialism works is when you have very high degrees of cultural homogeneity, and where people tend to be like one another anyway.
In our own country, it is always expressed in terms of resentment and anger and hatred. No one is dying of hunger or thirst. The pain they feel is the outcome of agitation, which is the intentional cultivation of a sense of grievance on the part of professional activists, who use their clients as a means to their own power.
One could look at agitators like Saul Alinsky and Barack Obama as professional extortionists, who can be employed to get money and concessions out of monied elites, where the “interest” or fee they charge is power. You put them in power, they give you stuff. All they want is the land underneath you. You keep the house.
Now, I am not opposed to charity. If people are weak and hungry, or sick, and suffering in other ways, it is the decent thing to do to help them. This is not Socialism. This is not what I am opposing. Nor am I fully opposed to using even the Federal Government in this service, although I think it much better Constitutionally to limit those projects to the sundry States.
What I am opposed to is the belief that wealth, per se, is a crime. When the Russian Communists murdered the kulaks, or when Mao held his show trials by “The People” where so many “bourgeois capitalists” were killed, this was the crime that was alleged, and we see it in muted form every time somebody says “soak the rich”. The top 10% of income earners pay some 71% of the taxes in this country, and the bottom 47% pay nothing. Economically, asking them to pay 100% is stupid. History is clear: when you punish achievement, you get much less achievement, and correspondingly less money.
The “soak the rich” people are just jealous. They want to punish the successful for being successful, and to steal everything they own. This was done literally in all Communist nations, and is the idea behind most of the policies we see today on the Left.