L. Neil Smith
L.Neil Smith is the libertarian movement's most prolific author, with more than twenty books to his credit. He lives in Fort Collins, Colorado. For more of "El Neil's" material, see www.lneilsmith.com. This is Neil's last appearance as a guest columnist. Starting with the August issue, he joins Rational Review as a contributing editor.
The
Wages of Socialism Are Death
by L. Neil Smith
Independence Day is on us again. In the west, instead of fireworks -- which have been forbidden by gubernatorial edict -- we have forest fires.
People have died. Homes and other buildings have been destroyed. All in all, there are wildfires raging out of control in 17 states. And each and every one of these fires -- including the devastating blazes in New Mexico and Florida last year -- have a single, common cause.
Socialism.
Socialism is a discredited and obsolete 18th century political and economic theory that asserts that the group -- "society" -- as opposed to the individual, is what's really important. The lone individual, his or her life, and all of the products of his or her life, belong to society. They are society's property to do with, or dispose of, as society (or whoever ends up speaking for it) wishes, no matter what the individual (whose importance in the scheme of things can only be defined in terms of his or her value to society) may feel to the contrary.
There are grievous difficulties with this theory. To begin with, it's unnatural, by which I mean contrary to fundamental human nature. We are the most recent and successful products of three and a half billion years of evolution that -- quite properly -- requires us to look out for ourselves and our offspring ahead of anything or anybody else.
Even if an individual believes sincerely in the obscene, unnatural doctrine of "To each according to his need; from each according to his ability", over a period of time, he'll find his enthusiasm and energy waning as he fails to receive a suitable reward for his efforts, but watches what he created, instead, being given to someone who didn't earn it. Behaviorist B.F. Skinner -- ironically, a kind of socialist himself -- referred to this unavoidable phenomenon as an "extinction paradigm".
In the end, it's what killed the Soviet Union.
Another problem with socialism is that it invariably depends on bureaucrats to administer it. Not only are bureaucrats invariably careless with "other people's money" -- as likely to spend it in ways they'd easily recognize as idiotic if the money were their own -- but their careers depend more on appearances (on impressions that can be generated, for example, at a congressional hearing) than they do on reality. This, of course, is a guaranteed recipe for an inevitable disaster.
Like these fires, caused by socialist mismanagement of "other people's land" by bureaucrats concerned with appearances (impressions generated, for example, at environmentalist press conferences) before reality.
Long before a socialist culture dies, however, of its own internal flaws, the failures those flaws create lead that culture's leaders to assume -- because their theory is obviously, self-evidently perfect -- that it must be people causing all the trouble. It isn't long before bureaucrats, accused of incompetence or corruption, and ordinary individuals, accused of slacking off, hoarding, or "incorrect thought" find themselves in front of a firing squad being offered a final cigarette.
Purges and executions come as naturally to socialism as lying to a politician.
Adolf Hitler, who murdered something on the order of 13 million of his fellow Germans, and started a Second World War that wound up killing another 60 million people, called himself -- surprise! -- a socialist.
Joseph Djugashvili "Stalin", who cold-bloodedly starved 15 million Kulaks to death because they refused to submit to the collectivization of their farms, and sent millions more to freeze in Siberia, was a socialist.
Mao Tse Tung -- who conducted an internal war against those who owned property, and people with a western (presumably individualist) education that culminated in the deaths of 50 million people -- was a socialist.
Pol Pot, whose propellor-beanie theories led him to kill at least a third of his fellow Cambodians, and get away Scot-free, is still a socialist.
Lest you imagine this is a purely foreign affectation, consider Abraham Lincoln, angered by stiff-necked southern states that wouldn't go along with his idol Henry Clay's socialistic "American System", who killed 620,000 people, and would have killed more, if he'd only had the technology. Everything Lincoln inflicted on millions of helpless individuals, he justified in the name of a collective he called "the Union".
Woodrow Wilson, another socialist, managed to resurrect Lincoln's income tax, which had been declared unconstitutional, helped his billionaire buddies create the Federal Reserve System, which illegally collectivized banking, revived the military form of slavery we call conscription, nationalized radio broadcasting, and treacherously plunged Americans into a socialist war to "make the world safe for democracy".
Skipping through an unbroken 20th century of socialist leadership, Bill and Hillary Clinton, who presided over the unspeakable atrocities at Mount Carmel, who left a trail of dead bodies behind them wherever someone stood in the way of their disgusting political ambitions, and who murdered thousands overseas in an attempt to cover up their many high crimes and misdemeanors at home, were -- and remain today -- socialists.
Amnesty International has called socialist governments "killing machines".
Now Silverfoot Junior ("Pooooor George," intoned Texas governor Ann Richards at the Democratic Party national convention, speaking of George Herbert Walker Bush, the current president's father. "He was born with a silver foot in his mouth.") shows us his true socialist colors in so many ways it's difficult to decide what to write about first.
Observing that his predecessors' "War on Drugs" -- their excuse to pry into every aspect of every individual's life -- was finally beginning to lose popular support, he and his owners seized on the events of September 11, 2001, to declare an irrational and futile "War of Terrorism" which allowed them to continue the socialist excesses of the "War of Drugs", completing the utter destruction of the Bill of Rights.
In the name of the collective entity known as "national security", they now feel free to arbitrarily cancel the American citizenship -- and the Constitutional rights -- of any individual who offends them, and threaten anyone who criticizes them with unspecified but ominous "charges".
And finally, in perhaps the lowest, but most revealing blow of all, the socialistic Silverfoot Junior has declared that being fat is now "unpatriotic", presumably because the state to which your body (and everything else) belongs, might just have a use for it that being fat gets in the way of. Given the murderous behavior of socialists in the past, toward individuals who foolishly refused to "get with the program", future firing squads for fat people are not entirely inconceivable.
The enemy of everything admirable about America is the assumption that your life, your property, and your rights are somebody else's, to be used or disposed of as they wish. That is the assumption that must be eradicated, if liberty is to survive and flourish once again. The Founding Fathers fought monarchism. It's our destiny to fight its socialism.
So this July 4th, resolve to dedicate yourself to ... yourself. Accept no substitutes. Your life is nobody's property but your own. It doesn't belong to your neighbors, it doesn't belong to bureaucrats, it doesn't belong to national security or to the War on Whatever We're Waging War on Today. It belongs to nobody but you. And it is its own justification.
That's the real meaning of Independence Day.
