For the purposes of this article the word "socialism" is used to capture all of the main leftist political ideologies and "isms" the world has. This includes socialism, communism, marxism, "Scandinavian socialism," feminism, environmentalism, the democrat party, labor party, veganism, and any political party/group that advocates increased taxation and a larger state. It does so not only to simplify the writing and reading of this article, but to also make a point about nearly every one who advocates these variant strains of socialism, which you will read below.
I ask you to consider the total human, financial, capital, and technological resources that have, and will continue to go into the Democratic Primary debates. Just this one political party, of this one primary election, in this one instance of all of human history consumes a considerable amount of resources.
There are certainly the ten's of millions of dollars spent by CNN, NBC, and CBS to host the debates. There are certainly tens of millions of more dollars spent by the remaining main stream media outlets to do their "post sports game analysis" shows to analyze the debates. There will be no less than 100,000 new media outlets who will do the same on the internet. Ever so roughly this will probably generate around a billion dollars in advertising revenue. There will be hundreds of millions of people spending billions of human hours analyzing, discussing, and digesting what was said by these dozen people for a total of 10 hours. And all of this will piggyback on the trillions of dollars invested in the cable, radio, television, and internet infrastructure built over the past 60 years.
But why exactly is so much time and money spent on these debates? What exactly are all these media people and the hundreds of millions of viewers analyzing about what the Democratic presidential hopefuls have to say? Is it that important? Is it that complex? Do we need several billion dollars in both explicit financial costs and implicit labor-cost-for-human-hours to truly understand what the Democratic party has in store for America? Is their political platform so complex?
Take another example. Academia.
Unlike a single primary debate in a single election year, academia has been running for hundreds of years, chewing cud over (more or less) the same social, political, and economic issues. And instead of just 12 people chewing cud for 10 hours, when you consider the resources that have gone into academia over the past 60 years, you are easily talking trillions of dollars worth of explicit financial costs and total human time costs being sunk into this endeavor. Billions of humans spending trillions of years sitting in class. Millions of pages written across thousands of books and research papers, which said students are going to be forced to read. And this says NOTHING about the millions of people outside of academia who read these books/papers, and then further go onto digest, analyze, and argue about what was in those books.
It gets even worse, because like with the democratic presidential primary debates, whatever discussion is generated in academia also gets out into the general public, prompting a further
You'd think we'd have a solution by now to all these world problems. You'd think with more human effort and resources spent on any other problem facing society, we'd have solved poverty, hunger, humanity, economics, sociology, and so forth. But we haven't. We still need to debate. We still need to discuss. Some people are so ardent in their beliefs they'll protest, commit assault, dox people, try to get people fired, and violate people's freedom of speech. We are just as far away from finding answers and solutions to these problems than when humans first started forming societies.
But this leads me to an interesting observation. Is it that the political problems of the world are so complex, so nuanced, and so large that we need to spend more resources on analyzing them than we did putting men on the moon? Or are we as a societal whole missing something? A simple, singular thing we've overlooked and would free the rest of humanity from wasting our literal lives on this? An Occam's razor of sorts that would make most of us go "oh," and instead of vomit political diatribe on the internet, pick up our golf bags and go golf?
I argue the second, because honestly, I'd rather go golf than debate an SJW online. And that Occam's razor is that we are WAY overthinking socialism. That we need to boil socialism down to it's basic tenets. And that we need to understand socialism "simply."
I didn't not mention the democratic primaries or academia by accident. They are the most ardent promoters and supporters of socialism (again, I do not wish to hear from any of the groups mentioned above that they're not "socialist," they're "democratic socialists" or "vegans" or some other such nonsense). But again, look at how much time, effort, energy, money, and resources these aforementioned people spend on promoting socialism. It's jaw-dropping. The trillions of government grant money that has gone to fund liberal arts/social science programs that past 50 years, advertising for the democrat party, bribe money in the form of government welfare programs, propaganda in the public schools, the media giving a free platform to socialists in their shows and programs, even the people themselves dedicate their entire lives to the cause of socialism be they professors, researchers, politicians, activists. No amount of resources has ever been spent trying to sell the American public than socialism.
Have you ever asked why? Why are you CONSTANTLY being sold and promoted socialism? Chocolate ice cream needs no such selling. Video games need no such promotion. So why on god's green Earth is the marketing budget for socialism larger than the US military?
Because socialism is simply theft.
I'm not being cute or coy here. I'm truly boiling down socialism to what it is on a genetic level. It's nothing but theft. It's nothing but parasitism. Socialism is taking other people's money and giving it to yourself. And everybody who advocates it is a thief, in one way or another, trying to steal real people's, real workers', real producers' money. I would even argue socialists are advocates for slavery because you are not stealing workers' money as much as you are the time they had to forfeit to earn that money, making you a slave owner. Regardless, that's all socialism is - whatever it's variant - stealing.
This is why so much propaganda, advertising, double speak, and orwellian language has to go into it. This is why when you look at people who are promoting socialism they do not have real jobs. This is also why you will see the main job of socialists is to come up with the most mental-acrobatic rationalizations to steal other people's money (privilege, isms, ists, oppression, wage gap, etc.). And so when it comes to the Democratic primaries, or the world of academia, realize that all the pomp and circumstance, all the fancy words, all the made-up degrees and college classes, as well as all the fancy acronym and words they assign to their "advanced political ideas" (BGI for example) it's nothing more than
simple
outright
theft.
Therefore, I pose a question to the democratic candidates for president and anybody in academia when it comes to the solutions they put forward to solve all these world problems.
Do you have ONE solution that doesn't involve "more of other people's money?"
Again, I'm not trying to be cute or quaint here. I'm just pointing out the emperor has no clothes. I want ONE solution that comes from this entire multitrillion dollar industry and the millions of people it employs...
Do you have ONE solution that does not involve taking other people's money?
Of course, I know not one democrat politician or one academic professor is ever going to answer my question. And that is really not the point of this piece. But I did want to present this question so that the rest of society can see through all the BS, see through all the propaganda, see through all the pretty words, and see these people for who they truly are.
Theives.
Ocasio Cortez is not a "visionary" who wants to "lead us into the new economic world."
She is a thief.
Nancy Pelosi is not a "strong leader, here to help out the little guy."
She is a thief.
Your sociology professor is not a "wise, learned man with 30 years research experience at the university."
He is a thief (and a fraud).
And your tatted up, nose pierced, feminist buddy is not a "feminist fighting for women's rights."
She is a thief.
And that is literally all that can be said about socialism and all of it's political derivations. It's theft.
Enjoy the decline.
_______________________
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27 comments:
Aaron, follow Occum's Razor to its cleanest, simplest ultimates on this thievery. You assume they have cultural value. Thievery requires the conceptualization of property rights. They take our rule book and hit us over the head with it. But they don't know what it is, just what it does to us. Watch the lions and the hyenas fight over a carcass buffet. Do you see a violation of ethics? of property rights? of a social contract? Lately, I have come to the conclusion that I am not truly a misanthrope. Nay, it is the subhumans I hate. My 'They Live' glasses are indispensable. You attribute the slightest humanity to them at your peril. Go lower until you have gone too low, to find that edge. You may never find it. Charles Darwin, The Descent ofo Man. The wikipedia entry is enough to get the idea, a 100-year-old realization. And here we are, my friend. Here we freakin' are.
Congrats. The Thief Party has been my alternative name for the Dem Party which I use on web forums with liberals. Naturally, they are outraged, but I guess the truth hurts.
You are 100% correct. The main aim of The Dem Party (The Jackass Party is another name I use) is to extort money from the producers to give to their constituents who are more than happy to accept "free" money for sitting on their kiesters.
One of my favorite books on my shelf is one I found about government accounting. There is one page where it acknowledges that taxpayers are 'involuntary resource providers'.
They are legally obligated to pay such things like a property tax for example. I've shown this to people who profess to educate known to you as 'teeeeecheeerrzzzz' who vehemently disagree with me that this constitutes slavery not much different than Toby's legal obligations.
Also, not to be a grammar Nazi, but
"Theives." was not spelled correctly.
It's i before e, except after c. Not that hard to remember.
Politics is sportsball for the intelligentsia.
Maybe it's all a conspiracy to suck up everyone's time so that a pause to think critically about anything is impossible.
I think it was Margaret Thatcher who said, "Socialism is fine until you run out of other people's money." Since feminists own the Democratic Party, socialism is just fine with them. There is a problem. They are taking away motivation from men to contribute.
There is one other thing. Feminists are just fine with totalitarianism. You are not understating when you illustrate with the hammer and sickle.
I have to wonder if the Democratic Party will survive the 2020 election?
-Fuzziewuzziebear
Socialism is the mechanism by which the lazy, the unproductive, the talentless acquire wealth and power without having to do any actual productive work.
Socialism is theft. Tax payers are indentured servants. Seems simple enough
You should add "Koch-sucking Rove Republicanism" to that list.
An excellent piece Cappy that really strikes at the heart of the matter.
Unfortunately, there are still way too many of those who are naive, unschooled, or simply don’t give a shit, who actually believe that liberals are simply following their core belief mechanisms & are sticking to their well thought out philosophy & values which drives them to do the things they do, ie: vote democratic, advocate for govt action, promote socialism-fascism-communism, etc etc. They really think these lowlifes follow a well documented orthodoxy which guides them since it surely must be based on some super wisdom developed by a group of academicians sent down from the heavens.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The hard reality is that those who advocate for socialism are not driven by some adherence to an ideology they studiously adopted as their own. Liberal ideology, my friends, is utter & complete B_llsh_t. The real driver that motivates these miscreants is their infectious belief in a “something for nothing” mentality. Their motivation is simply unadulterated self-interest & GREED. It’s nothing more than an easy way out to make a living. And who can really blame them since earning a living through hard work & effort is ridiculously difficult, especially in this day & age. So why work to earn a living when you can vote for a living, steal for a living, or lie-cheat-prevaricate-distort-exaggerate & misrepresent for a living. Why it’s as simple as pie, and is it any wonder why so many choose the easy way out option?
The problem of course is that more & more wanna-be parasites are figuring this out and are piling into the cart instead of pulling it. And you can bet the game will surely end when the parasites run out of hosts to feed upon. You don’t want to be around when that happens.
"Taxes are a barbaric remnant of ancient times in which early farmers, tied to the land, no longer able to roam freely, unable to fight back with awkward agricultural tools the way they once could with hunting implements, became victims, first, of itinerant plunderers, then of bandits settling down beside them to become the governments we know today." -- L. Neil Smith
Don't forget that that thievery is carried out by the power of government, the most powerful entity, the ultimate power, in a society.
For example, the BC (Canada) government, a socialist government, is collecting a 128% "carbon" tax on domestic natural gas usage. Why? Because they can.
That's why socialists work their way into government because it we have granted government the power to "govern" our towns, cities, states / provinces, and nations.
If socialists can't work their way into a society's government, they will bully their way into power by terror, intimidation, accusations, threats, and violence.
Islam is a prime example. (Yes, Islam is a collectivist ideology, too.) Islam is the greatest slave-making machine the world has ever known. What does it do? Muslims FORCE people to work for them for free, i.e., slavery, that is, theft of what does not belong to them, that is, human labour.
Good thing God exists to hold governments to account because if he didn't, this would turn into a horror show.
#Stating the Obvious
Income tax is theft, too.
"... the word 'socialism' is used to capture all of the main leftist political ideologies and 'isms' ..."
Once you stop seeing these as individual ideologies and instead as separate battles and fronts in a continuing war of social policy, then this becomes a lot clearer.
But there's a simple yet complex way to look at Socialism and its adherents that you may not have considered: Socialism provides easy answers yet requires complicated systems in order to attempt to support an illusion of simplicity as a going concern.
Simple-minded people choose Socialism because it requires them to think less about how they are personally responsible for producing better macro-level outcomes. These become "externalised" to crisis managers who are rarely thanked for successes and who are routinely blamed (if not executed) for failures.
People who advocate for Socialism pretend they're holding up their part of the bargain while performing the least amount of effort in order to maintain that illusion. Any would-be surpluses would be absorbed into the systems, providing little to no reward for such value transfers, and so it's in everyone's interest to build surpluses of unrealised gains.
Insofar as Socialism's social policy aspects tend to operate, these are essentially variants of Pure Land Buddhism in which an imagined territory comes into view as being desirable and then a map is created from best intentions, wishes, and often merest nothings in order to attempt to provide a pathway toward that imagined territory.
Most of these adherents in academia would never read Paul Ricoeur's writings on ideology and utopia even though they operate as individual members of the school of suspicion which he named: in the process of imagining the worst of mankind's failings, they react by imagining solutions that provide uncompromising corrections without also imagining the resistance that such solutions would also create.
The politicians and public intellectuals of any Republic are all corrupt, but do they actually practise their corruption in the way that their people get most of what they need and enough of what they want?
This is of course the grand failing of Socialism, in which the people fail their politicians and have the political classes begging that a new people may be "elected" ala Bertolt Brecht.
Inevitably these people set themselves against the others in their groups because they cannot reconcile their small successes against their grand failings, and so the process becomes a kind of hygiene purge in which those who believe in a less Pure Land are "cancelled" from the group and from future proceedings.
At this point the complexity of the makeshift scaffolding holding up such Socialist systems becomes obvious even to the most blinkered of adherents, although these people wish to continue to believe in such things because the alternative is not only figuratively but also literally death.
Confront a Socialist with the final end game, force the Socialist to make a choice leading away from the child-like simplicity of belief, and the Socialist dies.
What replaces the Socialist may often be a kind of despot, but at least in this there is more honesty and more obvious corruption, and so the former Socialist who has experienced ideological death becomes more obvious for what remains.
Someone who concludes that Socialists are badly misbehaving children who were granted adult voting rights by mistake isn't too far from the mark, and that they have few skills for operating in the complex societies that exist as reality doesn't escape notice for long.
In this the fact that AOC (aka Sandy) is a high-functioning "kidult" is actually the least offensive of her particular character flaws and other personality offences ...
The democrat party? That's the party of the southern slavemasters, the party of the confederacy, the party of the klan, the party of jim crow and segregation. The party of welfare enslavement and the party of population control.
C'mon Texan, it was an obvious typo. "Thief" was spelled properly several times.
Do you know what else is theft? Minimum wage that is low and stagnant for years that is not able pay for the rising cost of living.
What about the large companies that undercuts, buyout and remove the smaller companies from the competition?
Then, setting up unfair prices once they control the monopoly.
I am pretty interested in hearing now not eating meat or eggs means you're a socialist. Can anyone help?
Socialism is theft. True.
Socialism is slavery. True.
The issue can be further simplified. Taxation is theft. Taxation is slavery. Socialism is nothing but big government and all governments constantly grow. Government is a metastatic disease. Our nation started with some great rules that helped keep that metastatic growth rate slow at first, but as we allowed government and its minions to ignore the words on that hemp parchment, our nation has increasingly surrendered to the socialist cancer than has almost killed our country.
I appreciate precise writing, so I object to equating vegans with this socialist phenomenon. There's probably a 98% correlation, but the terms are not synonymous. All squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares. Obvious fallacies weaken an otherwise good argument. Some people would make the same objection to including feminists, but I assume you use the term as shorthand for radical 4th wave intersectional feminists, so... yeah... socialists, or worse.
Great essay, thank you for sharing Capt. Capitalism.
However, I would suggest that socialism can be boiled down further than theft. The true core of it is control over people - the desire to remove all agency for people to act independently. Remove the capital (theft) and you reduce the agency.
It's all about agency.
I just discovered that I'm a Socialist ... because I refuse to participate in the exploitation and slaughter of other animals.
I guess that makes me an utter arse-hole.
It's 2019, and I have to defend myself for wanting to do no harm.
I before e except after c, weigh this neighbor - that's weird!!!
I before e except after c? Weigh this neighbor - that's weird!!!
If feminism is one of the "isms" lumped under "socialism" for the purposes of this article, and if that "socialism" is bad;
then what the fuck is wrong with the term "MAN-HOURS"?
It worked just fine before. And everyone understood that it applied even if it was a woman (or, God forfend, a post-p tranny) doing the work.
IT
CREEPS
IN.
there is NO taxes in socialism(at least should not be by idea of it).
why execly you have to pay taxes to government which you already work for?
you paying taxes to your employer? it makes no sense.
what you reffer to as "in socialism higher taxes" have absolutly nothing to do with socialism.
btw how can you explain mathematicly that :
if you exclude surplus value from the price, which included in the price on every stage starting from loan from the government to bank, that prices will be higher than in economy based on surplus value?
if you exclude huge chunk of something from equasion sum must go down. not up.
it's pretty much basic mathematics.
who teached you economy? go get your money back...
Socialism is the continuation of war and conquest by other means. In the U.S. and Europe it has produced a serf class, robbed of all self agency and representation, responsible for the rise and fall of everyone else. Socialism in a multiracial society or even a multi-class society creates avenues of financial (and thus, reproductive) oppression, whilst the "More equal" fight over spoils taken from the new serfs. "My people need more money because you are so bad. We're taking more of your money, because you are bad and your people did something bad sometime in the past." There is no end to the punishment until the perceived offender becomes completely extinct and all traces of them are erased.
"The Goal of Socialism IS Communism." - Vladimir Lenin
"The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism. But, under the name of 'liberalism,' they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program, until one day America will be a socialist nation, without knowing how it happened. - Norman Thomas
"The Socialist Party will no longer be running a candidate for president. The Democratic Party is leading this country to Socialism much faster than we could ever hope to. - Norman Thomas
"The difference between Democrats and Republicans is: Democrats have accepted some ideas of Socialism cheerfully, while Republicans have accepted them reluctantly." - Norman Thomas
Who is/was Norman Thomas?
Norman Mattoon Thomas was an American Presbyterian minister who achieved fame as a socialist, pacifist, and six-time presidential candidate for the Socialist Party of America.
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