socialism won't work

American socialism won't work

By DENNIS CLAYSON

If there is anything to be learned in this election cycle it is that many Americans, perhaps the majority, want the government to take care of them. They not only tolerate a Nanny State, they want a Nanny State.

I find this development troubling.

Nannies are employed to care for children. Children are not expected to act, think or react to logic the same as adults. Even in minor emergencies, they are expected to run to their nanny for protection.

Where the nanny gets her resources, or her information, is of no concern to the child as long as she is taken care of and protected from anything in the world that may be threatening, either real or imaginary.

One of the problems with a Nanny State is that the state and the children are made up of the same people. If the citizens are children, then their representatives in government also are children, and having the most important government on the planet being controlled and run by children is not a comforting thought.

Playrooms ruled by children may appear idyllic at times, but more often than not, they can degenerate into the nightmare portrayed in "The Lord of the Flies."

There is another problem. Not everyone is a child, and the human sharks are attracted to naïve children with illogical beliefs of freedom and economics like fresh blood in the water.

Governments that promise you everything are lying to you. If they obtain the power to approximate this ability, they have become socialistic and tyrannical.

Socialistic governments do not produce workers' paradises, or places where everyone is educated and has "free" health care. These exist only in the lies these states call demographics. They produce festering hell holes that impoverish entire nations and drive the human spirit into a nihilistic sickness that even drugs, alcohol and rampant sex can't alleviate.

Wealth is not "spread around." Poverty is, while the powerful get fabulously wealthy.

This is not hypothetical. It has all been tried. Socialism does not work as advertised. It has been implemented by Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Mao, Zhou Enlai, and Kim Jong-Il, who the CIA estimates has salted away $5 billion while his people starve.

If these are not enough, we could add Tito, Nasser and the Pol Pot. If you think socialism fails because of some fluke of culture, we could add Castro and Hugo Chavez, or even African socialism as showcased by Julius Nyerere, who may have been one of the more principled leaders in a long line of body bag tyrants who promised social Edens and delivered death, poverty, and famine.

If you don't want free markets, but don't want communism, then you could call for a third way. That also has been done and gave the world Mussolini and Hitler.

History has even done experiments with this. How about a controlled experiment in which we take a country with the same climate, culture, language, and history and split it down the middle? We will establish socialism on one side and relative free markets on the other, and then we will wait fifty years to see what happens.

It has been done. Germany, once the most advanced country in the world, was split down the middle into East and West Germany and with what result? Korea, a land of peasants, was split down the middle. The free market side is a prosperous modern nation. The socialist half is a hellhole with starving people watched night and day for the least sign of rebellion.

But the dreams of economic illiterates and those into Santa Claus economics don't die easily, especially when wedded to liberal arrogance.

You see, some "modern" person or group can make socialism work because the rest just didn't do it right, or they weren't as smart.

The idea that Obama or some government bureaucrats are more intelligent than all the men I listed earlier is laughable. The idea that a modern American has more stomach for the struggle, or more will to wade through blood up to his knees to impose a socialist vision on the unwilling, is so absurd as to be contemptible.

American socialism will be no improvement on the other varieties. If anything it will be worse because we will have soft-handed children doing men's work.

But like all pampered children, we don't want to hear this; we just want to be taken care of.

http://www.wcfcourier.com/articles/2008/11/02/columnists/clayson/10724374.txt
_______________________________________________________________
June 3, 2003

In Britain we can see a perfect example of why socialism doesn't work. Healthcare is "free" in the sense that it's paid for by taxes, but apparently some people (such as fat people and smokers) are putting more strain on the system than it can bear. The government has responded by proposing "healthy lifestyle contracts" that doctors would encourage their patients to follow as a part of treatment.

Naturally, this "oppressive" proposal had fat smokers up in arms.

Claire Rayner, president of the Patients' Association, branded the proposal to ask smokers and overweight people to sign healthy lifestyle contracts as "oppressive and obscene".

She said the implication of the plan was to blame people for their own poor health and suggest that they would have to pay more for healthcare because they had brought their illness on themselves.

Ms Rayner said: "This is a nasty middle class document. It's the Tuscan bread and olive oil set telling people they can't eat pizzas and burgers.

She's right about one thing: this does represent the tax-payers telling the poor that they need to take better care of their health. But, that's unfair! Well, it would be, except for the fact that the tax-payers are paying for the medical care these others consume. If I were paying for my neighbor's car, I would certainly insist that he take good care of it and not waste the money I was spending.

You can't have liberty and socialism. It's just not possible for people to live however they want and have society pick up the tab by subsidizing the cost of dangerous behaviors. Because of economic realities, you have to pick: either you have freedom to make dangerous decisions and bear the cost for yourself, or society picks up the tab for everything bad that happens but also has the authority and power to make many decisions for you.

When a child lives at home with his parents, he necessarily lives under their rules. He can't just destroy stuff or leave food or dirty clothes everywhere because it puts impossible strain on the people providing for him. When a child grows up and lives on his own, he (eventually) learns to minimize harmful behaviours due to the cost of dealing with the aftermath. Same with healthcare and lifestyle, socialized jobs and productivity, you name it. There's a liberty/security trade-off that cannot be avoided.