I am writing a series of blog articles on why communism and socialism always fails. I am mainly writing it for millennials and zoomers, because I believe that we boomers did younger generations a massive disservice by leaving them with mountains of debt, mostly accumulated by a series of corrupt politicians, and by putting our children in public school systems that are amongst the most expensive in the world ($26,000 per pupil in Washington DC, $38,000 in New York), but do a mediocre job teaching our children and even damage our children with a steady stream of far left poison. I am now trying to make amends for myself by reaching out to young people who were not given the benefit of a sound education (regardless of color or race).
In my first article about “Why Communism Always Fails,” I essentially asked the young reader, perhaps someone attracted to socialism’s false promises, to consider why communism and socialism had been tried so many times, in so many places, and resulted in the deaths of so many millions of persons. I recommended people to do their own research, if necessary, to confirm the “horrid carpet of dead bodies” caused by communism all over the world. I also suggest that young scholars meet and talk to actual survivors of communist systems. For example, many Venezuelans have fled to the US after the hard core communist takeover of Venezuela, which took a prosperous oil producing nation and reduced the people to eating garbage out of dumpsters and consuming their own household pets to avoid starvation. Is this the kind of equality American youth hope for: everyone starving together?
The second reason communism always fails is that it distorts normal human incentives through massive wealth redistribution. Wealth redistribution is an essential feature of all far left systems. The concept is simple: the central government forcibly takes or steals wealth generated by successful and productive people and companies and redistributes that wealth to a variety of people, special interests, and corrupt politicians who did not earn it. Importantly, the central government always pays itself handsomely in any wealth redistribution scheme. Remember that the corrupt government officials who administer all wealth redistribution programs have to all be paid – in some cases much better than the people whose money they are stealing.
Aggressive wealth redistribution destroys the incentive for the productive to keep working. Nothing is more natural than a mother or father working as hard as she or he can to provide for and protect their children. A desire by people to protect and strengthen their nuclear families is one of the most basic and most powerful instincts known to human kind. Communists hate this. For example, “Black Lives Matter” is openly and explicitly anti-nuclear family. Communists want all people to work for the government, not for their own families. They want no competing source of loyalty – not even from the nuclear family, which is the institution that allowed humans to survive through the harsh ages and eventually achieve some degree of freedom and comfort. In a sense, communists regard all the men, women, and children trapped in communist systems as their livestock. All of these faceless people, are generating capital for use by corrupt communist officials on their own international projects, whether the Belt and Road Initiative, Yellen’s undemocratic International Minimum Corporate Tax, which no American voted for, the meaningless Paris Climate Accord, and other international, anti-democratic initiatives.
Regardless of the specific projects involved, communists want to destroy the will of free men and women to work for themselves and their families. Communists want them taxed aggressively and broken. All money must flow to the central government, which will then inefficiently dole out crumbs to the population until the entire population works only for the central government and everyone is dependent on inefficient communist programs to survive.
Communism undermines the incentives for people to work hard in another way too. In most traditional communist employment regimes, such as work on collective farms, in state controlled schools, state controlled enterprises, or in the military, wages are historically quite low and stagnant because these institutions crush individualism and individual initiative and do not allow the innovation and personal striving that would allow real business success. Moreover, communist economic principles slowly destroy the health and vitality of the economy: the economic pie shrinks, the GDP goes down – sometimes dramatically as in Venezuela – and the wages paid in communist jobs become truly inadequate. People trying to support their families through the grim transformation of their country’s to communist dictatorships find that the government pay, once so enticing to the lazy and hoodwinked, is no longer capable of supporting a family. The father or mother of a communist family must quietly seek a capitalist solution on the side. Only the dullest and least motivated citizens make do with the government pittance, as people, families, and innovation whither around them.
In the old Soviet Union, it was not uncommon to find examples of, say, a television or radio repair man who barely survived on his state salary, but who then fixed the radios of friends and neighbors at night or on the weekends. Ironically, such people were creating a gig economy, which socialists also hate, in the middle of a corrupt, failing communist system. Almost every citizen likewise had her own vegetable and herb garden to help the family survive. When I read Milton Friedman’s famous book, “Free to Choose,” one of the most amazing revelations to me was Friedman’s calculation that all these tiny little private vegetable gardens, added together, actually produced more than the giant, state-run collectivized farms that were the hallmark of the soviet system. Individual fathers and mothers, attempting to ensure they and their children had onions, potatoes, and carrots to eat, produced more in their tiny backyards than the corrupt and incompetent government run enterprises, which had access to some of the best farmland on earth, but still could not devise a system that caused individuals to want to work hard. Imagine that people like Bernie Sanders and AOC actually want corrupt ranks of government bureaucrats to run everything in America including public education, universal healthcare, retirement programs, green investment programs, and other things that government bureaucrats have no knowledge or competence to do.
Of course, massive redistribution schemes also undermine the motivations of the people receiving the “free” welfare or transfer payments. Such people never learn the joy of making their own free economic decisions and charting their own course in life. They are trapped in an endless cycle of government payments that gives them enough to survive on, but not enough to work for joyous objectives in life. This kind of government payment trap is how you can have generations of poor people on welfare, giving them just enough to destroy the incentive to learn to manage their own lives and locking them into poverty for generations. Perversely, the Looney Left wants more Americans, not fewer, to be driven into a supine posture of government dependency. They want the only successful rich people to be corrupt bureaucrats, people who never learn to generate wealth, hold a real private sector job, or run a business, but who somehow end up fabulously wealthy (Biden, Obama, Sanders, Clintons, Schumer, Cheney, McCain, Donald Rumsfeld, Elizabeth Warren, Pelosi, etc…).
This brings us to our third and final type of distorted incentive – the incentive for corrupt bureaucrats and government officials to steal from the people and make themselves fabulously wealthy. In every communist or socialist system, it is a cabal of leftist leaders who become fabulously wealthy because of their use of government power and influence to steal from the people. These same leftists, who never stop harping on the notion of income inequality when they are talking about people who actually earned the income they want to seize and allegedly divide more equitably, raise no complaints when the same or worse income inequality occurs in a communist or socialist state, where the corrupt kleptocrats did literally nothing to earn the money. Apparently, it is selfish for hard working individuals to want to keep the money they earned, but moral and enlightened for socialist bureaucrats to steal other peoples’ money and spend it on useless programs.
Vladimir Putin and his immediate circle of friends and supporters are the richest people in Russia. But not because any of them invented a new personal computer, designed a new kind of microchip, or founded a successful business that employs thousands of people. No, Putin and his friends are wealthy because, when the Soviet Union fell, they used their authority as government officials to transfer assets of the former Soviet Union to themselves – becoming instant billionaires. To paraphrase John Houston, “they did not get wealthy the old fashioned way – they did not earn it.”
The same basic story of corrupt wealth transfer has been repeated in every communist country. In Venezuela, Madura and his family and supporters transferred vast wealth to themselves, even shipping gold bullion out of the country, while the country failed. Where did this wealth come from? It was stolen from successful private industry – from people who knew how to run grocery stores, oil processing operations, engineering projects, the electrical grid, and so on. Maduro and his cronies stole much of the wealth of these businesses, while destroying the businesses and scattering all the productive people. Meanwhile, in addition to becoming personally wealthy, Maduro made a disgrace of himself, becoming porcine while caught on camera stuffing his face with eclairs and other pastries, as the average Venezuelan lost 20 pounds and became more and more desperate to find anything to eat in a country that was rich a few years before. That is the true face of “communist equality’ for you. The communist leaders become fabulously wealthy as the people become poorer and poorer. This same scenario has played out in communist countries all over the world, from Asia to Africa to South America. The communist rulers become corruptly rich, the economy withers as the productive lose their incentive to work hard, and the average person suffers and dies, sometimes in vast numbers. In sum, one of the main reasons far left centralized governments always fail is that they distort or destroy wholesome incentives. Contrary to leftists delusions, the wealth of a nation is not primarily based on reserves of gold or even the stock market. It is based on the intelligence, education, culture, and innovation of the people living in that nation. If you switch the populations of Japan and Haiti today, and changed nothing else, Japan would become a poor nation and Haiti a rich nation within one generation. Japan is a wealthy nation, not because it has skyscrapers and bullet trains, but because it has Japanese people there – people who think to do things like build bullet trains and become good at it. Any system that removes the incentive for the smartest people, the most creative people, the hardest working people to continue to work hard and generate new ideas and wealth is doomed to whither and fail. It is not about who has a certain pot of capital at any one time. That is where Marxism goes completely wrong. Capital is easy to find in the current world. The hard thing to find are brilliant, honest, motivated people. A system that targets such people for abuse and destruction is not only a stupid system, it is an evil system – a system intended to destroy human family life and throw human kind backwards to a less accomplished and less comfortable and less secure state of existence.
By Paul H. Beattie
Notes from the Secular Right 