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Socialism and morality

Perceiving the new is much like being in a completely dark room, where you can touch the wall, but in which you have gone around the perimeter many times, and now realize you must venture away from the relative clarity of having SOMETHING to orient you, into the unknown.  I have done this often, and as I have said several times, what I do is go in circles in this room, looking for new clues. 

That is my long way of saying I have said what I am about to say many times, but think this way is slightly different.

Morality, as a system for decision making, is inherently an individual attribute.  Even when diluted, as in committees, each individual must decide to consent to or reject any given proposal.

A coherent moral philosophy is one which, deployed generally, will work INEVITABLY to build a more prosperous, more harmonious society.  It will support a solid work ethic, honesty, sociability, empathy and warmth, tolerance, and goodwill.

The nature of Socialism is that moral activity consists in working to gain the power to force people other than you to relinquish what they have.  It breaks society into three components: producers, those who produce government, and those who consume the output of both.  None of these groups are improved morally by their work. 

Producers reliably resent the efforts of people to take from them the fruit of their labor.  There was a time when landed nobility was born into wealth that had been stolen a long time ago from someone else.  That time has long passed.  In our own nation, the OVERWHELMING bulk of millionaires are self made, and could not have succeeded without creating many jobs, and the ability of many families to pay their bills.

Those who want the stuff of others are taught to feel resentment at their superior success and position, to view private property as negotiable, to view government as the vehicle to personal economic advancement, to view hard work as ignoble and unnecessary and to feel strongly that they are ENTITLED, regardless of the content of their characters, to a certain standard of living, which is not something that entered any traditional tribal society ever in human history.  Old people and the sick did less, but able bodied people were out hunting, out on the farm, or making things, and who possessed all the self respect that came with their usefulness.

Finally, the socialists themselves reliably develop a sense of moral superiority that comes from the aggressiveness with which they are willing to take the stuff of the first group and give it to the second.  Necessarily, this involves the creation of a social gap between themselves and the other two groups.  They think they are better than BOTH.  This leads to arrogance, and it leads to HUGE decreases in actual empathy.  Their job is to give stuff to the poor, not to understand them.

I put forward above a list of moral virtues which would by definition be built by any useful moral philosophy.  To reiterate, that list (obviously partial) is a solid work ethic, honesty, sociability, empathy and warmth, tolerance, and goodwill.

Without exception, Socialism damages all of these.