Why Socialism Will Never Work, in One Easy Post (That Isn’t 200 Pages Long)
As we mentioned in the previous post, socialism’s core principle is that you have two groups of people: The “haves” and the “have-nots”. The “haves” have more than they “deserve” because they’ve only gotten what they have by taking it from the “have-nots”, so it is the socialist state’s duty to reclaim the wealth the “haves” have “stolen” from the “have-nots” and redistribute it “fairly.”
Introducing the bell curve, because everything is distributed that way. It’s also called a Gaussian Distribution, at least where we come from:
It works for everything, literally. If the X-axis is cholesterol level, then the Y-axis is the percentage of people with that particular level of cholesterol in their blood. Same if it’s IQ, shoe size or number of times they’ve cried watching “It’s a Beautiful Life”. You have the tip of the curve in the middle, which is where most individuals find themselves. We’ll leave aside for now that some distributions, a lot of them actually, are not perfectly bell-shaped in that the “slope” on the left and right side aren’t exact mirror images of each other. It’s irrelevant. What’s relevant is that there is a peak and there are left and right slopes.
For this post, we’re going to go with the X-axis representing “wealth.” The tip of the curve is then “average wealth.” The further above or below average wealth that you are, the smaller part of the population you belong to. In a socialist dystopia, the tip of the curve represents where you “should” be. If you’re to the left, you’ve been robbed, and if you’re to the right, you’ve unfairly “exploited” those to the left.
What socialism then claims to do is to take the wealth on the right and distribute it to the left. In the name of “fairness.”
Of course that’s a great deal for those living on the left slope, because they’ll now get for “free” what those living on the right slope enjoy. No effort required, because they’re “entitled”, don’t you know? After all, those on the right slope never truly “earned” it, they just stole it from those on the left. As a result, you won’t see those living on the left slope objecting to higher taxes on those on the right. They’re not paying for it, after all, they’re receiving the free lunches, and who doesn’t like free lunches? But we’re getting ahead of ourself.
So far, so good. Now, it also doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that living on the right slope really sucks compared to living on the left slope. Everything you’ve earned above the socialist approved median will be taken away from you and given to those who didn’t earn it.
What’s the logical conclusion to that, if you’re a rational human being? It’s to simply quit living over there on the over-taxed right slope and just move in with the guys on the left slope who don’t have to lift a finger. You can earn $100,000 a year and have the $50,000 that you earn above average taken away from you, or you can work for only three months a year, earning $25,000, and get $25,000 of Other People’s Money to make up for the shortfall, netting you the same $50,000 a year.
Not rocket science.
Unfortunately, and this is where socialism always fails, that $25,000 you get from sitting on your arse 3/4 of the year has to come from somebody stupid enough to still work for 12 months a year, making the $100,000 you used to make. And when you moved in on the left slope, there was at least one less of those. Because government doesn’t create wealth, that’s what you used to do, government only redistributes it.
But, as more and more of people who are smarter than phlegm, and those would be pretty much everybody living on the right slope of the bell curve, change their zip code to the left slope and decide to, literally, spend more time with their families, that source of wealth that the socialist state can rob from diminishes ever more.
And as the amount of produced wealth diminishes, so does the average or “peak” of the bell curve, so where the average when we started might be the $50,000 in our example, it will soon move ever downward as more and more people decide that “the fuck with this noise, I’m not going to work my arse off if I don’t get to keep any of it.” The bell curve doesn’t disappear magically, as socialists always promise in the beginning, it just shifts to the left. Until the average is so low that the whole house of cards tumble because you can’t survive on it.
But that’s after the gulags get built.
Math doesn’t lie, and this is the simplest math there is.
Still, maybe we really ought to make a Power Point demonstration and start touring the country with it, because it seems to be too complicated for this nation as well.
Thatisall.
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20 Comments »
Misha old pal, I don’t know quite how old you are but I will hazzard we are fairly close in age.
In about 2 more years I for one can flip the switch and retire at the earliest possible date allowed by SS which will be 62.5 years. Guess what, that simple act of giving up the rat race will pull down that bell curve and I automatically move over to the left side of the slope. And there are, ahem, millions of us coming in the next 8 years or so…. Now whether we can afford to live off SS plus our savings and investments is an open question, but I think the N Socialists simply refuse to see the obvious with the baby boom generation virtually ALL retiring by 2020 they are not going to have enough patsies that worked 9 to 10 hours a day for 35 years to steal from any more, that and the fact their own polices place almost all of the younger generation that borrowed for school into the menial earnings capacity for at least 1/2 of that working lifespan…. there is coming a major SHTF moment my friends, be as ready as you can be..
Truth, and exactly what I’ve preached since deciding to become politically active. What is particularly stupid is the assumption that I owe anybody shit, or that anyone else owes me, other than contractually. 20 years in the military got me 50% of my base pay, by contract. By that same token, the OATH never expires. The Constitution still has the blank check in the drawer underneath it.
As I’ve said for I don’t know how many years: If they can’t work, help them. If they won’t work, fuck them.
LC cmblake6, Imperial Black Ops Technician recently posted..This was fairly early in my life,
None of this will make a dime’s worth of difference to the collectivist parasites who want to grind human beings into bloody bone-flecked hamburger in the name of “fairness.” The essential immorality of politically valorizing the most shameful and unheroic of sins, envy, has to be attacked at every turn.
We could always look to history to help us. In fact, our American predecessors already learned this lesson on our behalf a long time ago, if our contemporary “leaders” were anything other than power-mad sociopaths, Here.
Kto kogo, bitchez.
–V. “I am the Walrus” Lenin
I asked on a blog someplace if someone could please explain why I should care whether or not someone else gets health care or eats or has a place to live. Especially why I should pay for it.
I’ve donated to help defray medical expenses for people I care about, but that’s my choice.
Paying for some pole-smoker’s AIDS medicine is something totally different.
I’ve gotten no responses.
Hey, but the COVETOUS party is the COMPASSIONATE party, dont’cha know.
Envy is the new Virtue. Especially Malignant Envy.
From Orwell’s 1984:
Eric Blair (i.e., George Orwell) was a fucking genius when it came to understanding the Communist mind.
The socialists are the mind-shapers and the mind-destroyers. But they always start out with the Siren song of the “Mommy Party”: “come suckle at my breast, and sleep thereon; never worry or labor any more; you will be safe and protected and babyfied forevermore.”
Oh, except for the sex-and-drugs thing: Those, we will “allow” you to indulge in to the outermost limits of depravity. Why? to buy votes, to seduce the young [and, though we will never admit it, to rip the family to shreds. . . .]
I say — why don’t we adopt Orwell’s term “PROLEFEED” to signify our Pravda Media?
Prolefeed: “The rubbishy entertainment and spurious news which the Party handed out to the masses.”
Mark12A says:
Perfect.
LC cmblake6, Imperial Black Ops Technician recently posted..Listening to the radio,
Terrapod @ #:
there is coming a major SHTF moment my friends, be as ready as you can be..
*locks and loads*
I’m not sure the Empire can survive even if we
get rid ofvote Chairman Maobama out of office in November. Romney in the White House would be akin to the orchestra playing on deck as the Titanic sank into the frigid waters of the North Atlantic. The communist Kenyan has come very close to accomplishing his mission: to destroy the good old USA.Start gearing up for The End.
At least a couple of classes of college students have gotten object lessons in the “benefits” of communism, when their teachers averaged the students’ grades after each test, until the classes FAILED, because of the same predictable outcome you mention above, where the producers resent doing all the work, and the idlers can’t bother getting unassed long enough to do anything, even when their grades depend on it. Maybe we can hope that some of the lessons of those classes soaked into those grey blobs of mush, but the cynic in me doesn’t hold out much hope.
Mattexian recently posted..National Ammo Day, 2011!
Mark12A says:
Matthew 5:3-12
Mandrake says:
Please cease and desist from quoting Scripture until you’ve gained at least a passing familiarity with the meaning of it.
You’re only making yourself look silly.
Emperor Misha I recently posted..Lying Liars and the Lies they Tell
Mandrake says:
Mandrake…… in keeping with the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount I will show you the mercy of not pointing out exactly how stupid you seem right now.
Okay, Mandy, you wanna throw Bible verses at us?
Try these on for size: 1 Tim. 5:8, and 2 Thess. 3:10. To me, these address socialism far better than the Sermon on the Mount.
I so love it when those whom deride Christians want to tell us what Jesus said. Mandrake, SHUT THE FUCK UP.
Emperor Misha I says:
okay
Mandrake says:
Well Hell’s Bells, with that edit you just went ahead and disarmed a perfectly prepped, armed and ready to launch snarky counter-rant. You are to be commended for that, and I don’t mean that sarcastically at all.
Now, instead of unleashing a torrent of abuse upon you, I feel strangely compelled to explain myself in an even-tempered manner, as somebody who seeks to explain this whole Christian charity and Sermon on the Mount thing without being my usual, angry self. Damn you for that
Now, I’m not a renowned Biblical Scholar myself, but through years of Doing it Wrong™ and trying to find out what this whole Sermon on the Mount thing is really about I have managed to learn quite a bit. Both from re-reading and thinking myself, but also from people much more learned than I who helped me understand.
Where the wheels come off when some people (and sadly there are Christians among those) try to interpret the message of Jesus Christ, is when they see His sermons as commanding us to go forth and do good deeds. He didn’t. He did the exact opposite. He gave us a bunch of good pointers as to how we, too, could become more like unto G-d, he led by example and then, in the end, he told us to do as we will because that is the very core of Christianity: Free will. Doing the Right Thing™ is worthless if you do it as a result of coercion, it has to come from within yourself.
Surely the Son of G-d could have made us do all of those things if He wished, G-d could have done so too or just wiped out anybody who didn’t follow His will. But that would have made the whole exercise worthless.
Similarly, “charity” exercised at the point of a gun by the government is not charity at all. It is people doing something that they wouldn’t have done if they hadn’t had that gun pointed at their heads should they refuse to do so. Note that Jesus doesn’t say that we’ll all go to Hell if we don’t follow His instructions to the letter. He says, instead, that if we do follow them, we will ourselves be blessed through the blessings we bestow upon others. As long as we bestow them ourselves, of our own free will.
Doing something, whether it is good or bad, does not in the least reflect upon the person doing it unless that person did so because he or she chose to. And if it doesn’t reflect upon that person, then it doesn’t really matter how good a deed it may be deemed to be, they had nothing to do with it and therefore can’t be rewarded for it. Similarly, if somebody does something bad under duress they can’t be blamed for it in the same way that they would had they done so deliberately of their own free will.
So when the government forces me to do something, good or bad, it neither makes me a better or a worse person. When that something has been deemed “good”, even if it’s by a majority of the people, that still doesn’t make it “charitable” of me to comply.
And that’s what the Sermon on the Mount is about. How I will be judged by my deeds, and how I, through my deeds committed without coercion, might make that judgment kinder to me. Just as I won’t be judged a better Christian by doing “good deeds” at gunpoint, so will I not be judged a better Christian by forcing others to do them. It all has to come from within.
And I’ll stop preaching now
Emperor Misha I recently posted..Money talks
Emperor Misha I says:
I appreciate your reply, and I agree “doing good” through coercion isn’t a moral choice … it’s no choice at all, right? But if the question is why someone should care about someone else in need, including a stranger, doesn’t the Sermon on the Mount address that? That was all I was trying to say. Mark12A posited the question, and I tried to respond as succinctly as possible.
But aren’t we all “coerced” in some way or another into supporting things we don’t believe in? A city council votes to change zoning laws, and a mall goes up where farmland used to be; or the federal government cuts veterans’ benefits but increases sugar subsidies; etc. I’m not being forced to believe that everything government does is good, but I am forced to support it through taxes, tariffs, etc.
Every government in history has coerced its citizens or subjects to support its goals. But in a democracy, or democratic republic – whatever we want to call it – we can check that power through elected representation. But we can’t check it as individuals, otherwise we’d have anarchy and no government, right?
I guess what I’m trying to say is that coercion is the norm when it comes to anything that any government does. But its that whole social contract thing – we promise no bloody rebellion in exchange for constitutionally protected rights, including the right to throw the bums out and bring in new bums.
My grandfather, who was professor of history, frequently cited the famous Churchill quote about democracy being the worst form of government, except for all the others.
Sorry for the spew. I enjoy your site, and I’m grateful that you let me comment now and again without kicking me to the curb. Even though I’m one of those bleeding heart pinko lefties, I never read liberal blogs. And if a liberal tries to engage me in political discourse, my frequent first reaction is to rip up his Che Guevara t-shirt and punch him in the throat for his general douchebaggery.
Thank you for the courtesy, Emperor M.