While ostensibly commenting on the latest crock-umentary from Michael Moore in a post over at Hot Air titled Socialism: A Hate Story, Doctor Zero makes some very sharp observations about the straw man of socialism. First, his brief comment on Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story:
Moore’s method involves finding people who are unhappy with their circumstances, lying about the particulars of the cases to make them illustrate his points better, and converting them into wholesale indictments of the free market, and America in general. Althouse captures the overall flavor of Moore’s work with this observation:
Moore shamelessly and repeatedly advocated the violent overthrow of the economic system. It was somewhat humorously or moderately presented — such as through the mouth of a cranky old man who was being evicted from his home — but it came across that Moore wants a revolution. He kept advising the workers — and the evictees — of the world to unite and shake off their chains.
The esteemed Professor Zero then walks us through the basic truth that socialism requires the support of the disaffected and that there will always be dissatisfied people in any free society. Churchill expressed this eloquently when he said that “The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of misery.” The problem is that this reality is universally used by statists as a grand Straw Man to undermine free markets and capitalism. Zero continues:
The irony is that no system of government is more brutally unfair to the disaffected than the kind of total State that Michael Moore lusts after. A central State has more power to rob its citizens, waste their resources, cause devastating economic fluctuations, and cause physical injury than any private corporation. The State is far more difficult to change, and more likely to persist in its mistakes. It is utterly inescapable, to a degree that Microsoft and Wal-Mart can only envy.
One of the most persistent and dangerous illusions of socialism is the belief that money becomes magically virtuous when government handles it. Politicians are at least as greedy as any captain of industry. The installation of a politburo does not eliminate ambition from a society – it changes the means used to fulfill those ambitions. The political class achieves its desires through force, by definition. Unlike commerce, force produces no side benefits for the larger population – the politician and his constituents get what they want, at the expense of everyone else.
The entire post is excellent and I urge you to read it. But first read this one paragraph so perfectly describing the reality that follows the dogma of socialism:
The architects of the State can have all the good intentions in the world – they can be paragons of selfless virtue – and it doesn’t change a thing. The nature of the system they create will inevitably corrupt it, because the nature of the people trapped in the system doesn’t change. They want more for themselves and their families, and if they can’t earn it, they will band together to demand it. There is only one reliable way to hold those bands together over the long term, only one predictable response to the diminishing returns gained by each sacrifice of liberty… and only one emotion the leaders of each collective entity can easily encourage, to maintain their own power: hatred.
Read the entire thing.
