I shouldn’t need to say it. I shouldn’t need to write it. Everyone should know it, yet here I am stating the obvious. Communism is evil. Socialism is evil. The evidence is overwhelming.
The ideologies of communism and socialism are always dangerous and evil because they steal from individuals their most fundamental rights of personal choice, autonomy and the ownership of private property. Communism and socialism have never worked and never will work. They always result in totalitarian regimes. They always result in poverty, pain, suffering and death. These ideas must be fought with extreme prejudice whenever they rear their ugly heads in our lives.
Freedom of speech is never allowed in socialist counties, lest you say anything that appears to be unkind about the government or its supreme leader, who of course the government claim was appointed by God and given the divine mission to to lead his people to mass starvation, death and despair. The confounded Internet, with its access to media that the government can’t control is naturally illegal for all but the most trusted and loyal government servants, not that most subjects of a socialist regime could afford to buy a device to access the Internet anyway.
But just controlling what you say, write and consume isn’t enough, the government must control what you think. Complete brainwashing from birth is necessary to make sure everyone knows how incredibly wonderful the government is, and how evil other countries where people are free to do what they want are. Unquestioning allegiance to the supreme leader is needed in thought, word and action, or else you will suffer the horrible consequences, such as being send to a reeducation camp and tortured, or a labor camp where 12 hours of back-breaking hard labor every day are needed to ensure you know the error of your ways. And naturally, leaving a socialist country is strictly forbidden unless you have proved your loyalty to the regime beyond question. Men with guns ensure that the people remain inside the great nation for life. Obviously, a country as wonderful as North Korea needs to force its citizens to remain inside it, because it’s so wonderful there.
“But… But… This Time Is Different…”
When presenting their case for why socialism/communism/whatever-name-they-call-it-this-time will work and benefit society, they will often say that in their new utopian society, everyone will own and benefit from the fruits of everyones’ collective labor, and that collective ownership will cure societal inequality. The reality is of course much more sinister; only those in power own and control everything, and everyone else must do exactly what they say or be executed. They present collective ownership as an enlightened idea, a compassionate idea, an empathetic idea, but it isn’t – socialism/communism A.K.A. collective ownership is theft, slavery and murder. In every society that’s ever existed throughout history, a small minority end up owning and controlling most of that society. The advantage of free market capitalism is that everyone gets the opportunity to take a slice of the ever-growing pie, and the ownership of assets is spread much wider among individuals. Individuals’ rights to own property and other assets are essential to a free and prosperous society.
Those who propose a system of collective ownership present it as something that is being done for the good of everyone, for the greater good of society as a whole, but it is always a scam perpetrated by a few power-hungry individuals who want to control everything you do, say and think. The scam is well-packaged and seems appealing on the surface. It’s presented as a utopian society free from the cutthroat ruthlessness and unforgiving greed of capitalism, but a scam it remains, and people continue to fall for it by the billions generation after generation. Collective ownership ends up meaning that a small minority have virtually unlimited power over everyone. Widespread and diverse ownership of assets reduces the power and control governments and large institutions have. Private property is private power. When the government controls everything, we are all slaves to their every will. Collective ownership is enormously detrimental to human life, liberty and freedom. All societies that are not free are fundamentally evil, and all societies that are free protect individuals and individuals’ rights to own assets.
The Government Cannot Make Your Life Better – You Can
Retain a healthy skepticism that a government can do better for you than you can do for yourself, because 99 times out of 100 they cant. Retain a healthy distrust of powerful individuals with bold and too-goo-to-be-true visions of an ideal society that involves only you trusting them and submitting to their rules in order to make a more perfect world. It’s a scam. It always has been and it always will be. Societies are made great by individuals acting autonomously in their own self interest and to improve their own lives and the lives of their families and loved ones. It may seem to be paradoxical that the selfishness of capitalism creates the most unselfishly high levels of prosperity for the whole of society, but that is just the way human nature works. It is a fundamental mistake to evaluate a political system based on how good and compassionate it sounds in theory versus how it actually works in reality. When a golden goose has a long history of producing many golden eggs but you still aren’t satisfied because it isn’t producing eggs fast enough for everyone, killing the golden goose won’t produce more eggs for everyone. Killing the golden goose means that there won’t be any more golden eggs for anyone. It’s not a difficult concept to understand, yet so few seem to these days.
The United States was the first country in modern history founded on the principles of individual liberty, freedom of thought and worship, private property rights, individual firearm ownership, and freedom from taxation and rule without representation that that’s why it’s the greatest and most successful country in the history of the world. The prosperity unleashed when individuals are simply allowed to be left alone to get on with their lives and create and build businesses, organizations and institutions is truly astounding. Naturally, the country has wavered many times along the way from these core ideals, and the further it has wavered, the more it’s prosperity has been held back. When the United States ceased to be what made it great in the first place, the entire world will return to the dark ages. There can never be freedom and prosperity without private property rights – the founding fathers of the United States knew this well. The assets you own ensure your individual rights and give you individual power. Dependency upon the government, or indeed any all-powerful institution, is not freedom but slavery, no matter how comfortable your servitude may seem. Human beings do not, indeed cannot prosper under socialism/communism/Marxism.
No government can control or dictate the direction of an economy better than the collective will of the individuals who make up that economy. We are and should always be free to decide what we do, what we think, and what we want out of our lives. Our choices are our own, and we will be subject to the consequences of those choices. That is right and just. That is life in the free world. Centrally planned economies always fail and result in incalculable levels of human suffering. Let us kill communism and socialism and bury them forever.
