Q.Will there be any state, province, or national borders?
A.Not any more. “According to its basic principles,” socialist Eric Fromm said, “the aim of socialism is the abolition of national sovereignty, the abolition of any kind of armed forces, and the establishment of a commonwealth of nations.”83 “[Socialism] insists on a comradeship of the workers which transcends racial or nationalist lines,” said Norman Thomas. “It is therefore international in outlook.”84
Q.What if I change my mind about living in socialism?
A.Depends on whose socialism is used. The Socialist Party of Canada tries to have it both ways: “Those who disagree will be treated like anyone else. If a person or group decided to start promoting a return to capitalism, or some other class-divided social form, they would be free to do so. If however, a person or group was damaging society (beating people up, or blowing up buildings, etc.) then society will take appropriate action against them.”85
Q.Must there be violence to switch to socialism?
A.It depends on how submissive people are through the transition. Lenin called for a war for power among the masses to impose the dictatorship of the proletariat—“an organization for the systematic use of violence by ... one part of the population against another ... [and then] there will vanish all need for force, for the subjection of one man to another.”86
Q.How does socialism get started?
A. Three simple steps. Engels explained: “By limiting private property in such a way that it gradually prepares the way for its transformation into social property, e.g., by progressive taxation, limitation of the right of inheritance in favor of the state, etc. By employing workers in national workshops and factories and on national estates. By educating all children at the expense of the state.”87
* * *
59 See www.worldsocialism.org.
60 Encyclopedia of Marxism, Wage & Benefits.
61 The World Socialist Party—see www.wspus.org.
62 The World Socialist Party—www.wspus.org.
63 The Socialist Party of Great Britain—see www.worldsocialism.org/spgb.
64 World Socialism—www.worldsocialism.org.
65 World Socialism—www.worldsocialism.org.
66 Ibid.
67 Ibid.
68 See www.worldsocialism.org.
69 George Bernard Shaw, “The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism,” 1928, p. 470.
70 World Socialist Movement, 2006.
71 Paul Hubert Casselman, Labor Dictionary, New York: Philosophical Library, 1949, p. 63.
72 Anne Fremantle This Little Band of Prophets: The British Fabians, p. 263 (Note: The Fabians coat-of-arms is a wolf in sheep’s clothing).
73 Norman Thomas, America’s Way Out: A Program for Democracy, p. 54.
74 Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.
75 Karl Marx to Joseph Wedemeyer, March 5, 1852, Marx, Selected Works, Co-operative Publishing Society, Moscow, 1935, I, p. 377.
76 Friedrich Engels, The origin of the family, private property and the State, p. 206.
77 William Z. Foster, Syndicalism, p. 3.
78 Lenin, V. I., Religion, p. 47.
79 Friedrich Engels, quoted in the Handbook of Marxism, p. 249.
80 Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?, Monthly Review, May 1949.
81 Friedrich Engels, Herr Eugen During’s Revolution in Science, 1894; 15. V.I. Lenin, Religion, p. 47..
82 Encyclopedia of Marxism, Unions.
83 Erich Fromm, Let Man Prevail, 1960, p. 26.
84 Norman Thomas, America’s Way Out: A Program for Democracy, p. 55.
85 Ibid.
86 Joseph Stalin, Problems of Leninism, pp. 26-27.
87 Friedrich Engels, Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith.
Chapter 8: Sample Fruits of Socialism
The Founding Fathers repeatedly emphasized that national self-government required a high level of personal self-governance. As Benjamin Franklin said, people who become corrupt and vicious “have more need of masters.” Freedom, therefore, can’t exist without a minimum level of personal responsibility. This can’t be forced, it must be a voluntary contribution from the people who want maximum freedom. Here are some samples of issues dealt with by government edict that could be better handled with personal responsibility, freedom and free market innovation—
Socialist Idea: Can’t name your baby
Principle Violated: Freedom to choose
Story: In August 2013, an Israeli couple living in Brussels for three years, was forbidden by City Hall to name their first born, ‘Alma Jerusalem.’ The reason given was that ‘Jerusalem’ was not on the list of approved names. The clerk suggested as an alternative, ‘Bethlehem,’ an approved name, or to contact the Israeli embassy for a written document confirming that ‘Jerusalem’ was a valid name.88 Justification for the list is that it prevents such names as ‘Lucifer,’ ‘Mafia No Fear,’ ‘Queen Victoria,’ ‘Number 16 Bus Shelter,’ among other submissions.
Socialist Idea: No hoarding of food
Principle Violated: Freedom to acquire property
Story: In May 1918, Francis Smith Nash and his wife were charged with violating Section 6 of the U.S. government’s Food Control Act for storing a large supply of flour, sugar, and other foodstuffs in their home.
The Act prevented Americans from storing more than a 30-day supply, an amount that Food Administrator Herbert Hoover deemed a “reasonable one.” The purpose, Hoover said, was to keep the troops overseas supplied. The Nash’s food stash, legally purchased over time, was valued at $1,923.36 ($31,700 in 2012 dollars). For this crime, the judge set their bail at $3,000 ($50,000 in 2012 dollars) each.
To escape punishment Nash tried to distribute the food to charity. The Food Administration said they would prosecute all food hoarders to the fullest extent of the law regardless of a hoarder’s social standing or efforts to dispose of the evidence.89
Socialist Idea: Force recycling of trash
Principle Violated: Freedom to dispose of property
Story: In 2010, Cleveland residents were warned that their curb side trash would soon be monitored to make sure they were recycling. If they didn’t comply, they would be fined $100.90
Trash carts for recyclables were distributed with identification chips and bar codes. City workers started monitoring the activity of all such carts. If a cart was not wheeled to the curb for a few weeks in a row, this gave the Trash Czars automatic permission to dig through the companion trash cart’s contents. Whenever more than 10 percent recyclable waste was discovered, the owners were fined $100.
Chip-embedded carts are in use in other parts of the U.S. and England, and are catching on elsewhere.
Socialist Idea: Ban lemonade stands
Principle Violated: Freedom to try, buy, sell, and fail
Story: In 2010, Julie Murphy was only 7 years old when Multnomah County (Oregon) shut down her lemonade stand for failing to obtain a $120 temporary restaurant license.
A health inspector patrolling the monthly art fair in northeast Portland confronted the girl for failing to produce a proper license and threatened her with a $500 fine.
Nearby booth people told Julie to stand her ground, but two inspectors came back a short time later and forced her to shut down. A growing crowd protested, and Julie started crying while her mother gathered up Julie’s hand-made sign, her bottled water and Kool-Aid, and wheeled it away for home. Eric Pippert from the Oregon public health division vapidly responded with a bland, “Our role is to protect the public.”91 The summer of 2011 also saw half a dozen such cases across the U.S., and dozens more are reported each
year.
Socialist Idea: Allow New Black Panthers to threaten voters
Principle Violated: Equal rights and responsibilities
Story: On Election Day 2008, three New Black Panther party members intimidated voters with threats and coercion. They were dressed in military clothing, brandished batons, and stood menacingly outside a Philadelphia polling place. They threatened and verbally harassed black Republicans and whites who came to cast their votes. Their message was clear: vote for Obama or else.
Evidence of the Panthers’ violation of the Voting Rights Act made it an open-and-shut case for President George Bush’s Department of Justice.92 But when President Barack Obama came to power, he appointed Eric Holder as attorney general. Holder dropped the charges after the thugs agreed to a plea deal not to do it again in that same city. The length of the probation? Only a couple of years, just in time to do it all over again for the 2012 elections. The three walked free.
Socialist Idea: National health care—Sweden
Principle Violated: Freedom to choose
Story: In 2010, a bleeding man named “Jonas” who was waiting in a Swedish emergency room took matters into his own hands by sewing up a deep cut in his leg.
“It [waiting] took such a long time,” Jonas told the Sundsvall Tidning Daily.
He said he first went to the regular health clinic, part of the socialized health-care program for which Sweden is so famous—it was closed. He called for help and was told the clinic wasn’t supposed to be closed. That’s when Jonas went to the emergency room of a hospital much farther away, but waited there more than an hour as his wound bled down his leg.
Deciding he had to take some kind of action, he sought out a sterile needle and thread and stitched the wound himself. Hospital staff caught him doing the procedure and reported him to the authorities. The charge was suspicion of arbitrary conduct for having used hospital equipment without authorization.93 Socialism failed Jonas and punished him for disobeying control.
Socialist Idea: National health care—Canada
Principle Violated: Freedom to choose
Story: In July 2010, Christine Handrahan was nine weeks pregnant when she started bleeding. Fearing for her unborn baby’s safety, her husband rushed her to Queen Elizabeth Hospital’s new emergency room.
She sat waiting unattended in a packed waiting room for three hours, with blood seeping out of her jeans and tears of panic rolling down her cheeks. Finally fed up with the wait, the husband pushed her wheelchair back to the parking lot where he helped her into their truck to make a 45-minute drive to Prince County Hospital, where Christine was given the sorry news that she had miscarried.
“Somebody should have cared enough to say, ‘Oh my goodness, you’re going through a miscarriage, do you need some quiet time?’” Christine said. “What bothered me the most was the fact that I had to sit in public going through a miscarriage.”94 Over-taxed national health care in Canada failed Christine.
Socialist Idea: National health care—Britain
Principle Violated: Freedom to choose
Story: Britain’s famed National Health Service (NHS) has been around since 1948, the oldest and most socialized health-care system in the world. Though it has had more than 60 years to sort out the bugs and become lean and efficient, just the opposite has unfolded. It is a bloated, redundant, government-run institution that employs 1.5 million people, is immune from change, and is losing money left and right. With few free-market forces to impose corrections, some real problems have erupted.
Rushed—2007: A doctor at St. Ann’s Hospital, examining an 18-month-old baby, failed to notice that the child’s back was broken. The baby died two days later. An investigation was squashed by the hospital’s chief administrator. An independent report earlier warned that St. Ann’s Hospital was “clinically risky.”95
Elder Care—2011: Some 100,000 terminally ill Englanders do not get proper care and run up costs by dying in the hospital instead of at home. New socialist measures are being deployed to grant each patient a pot of money based on circumstances to handle end-of-life expenses. Not mentioned is what happens when the pot of money runs dry.96
Too Sad to Be Sad—2011: Rachael Dobson, 22, suffering from post-natal depression, was denied access to the U.K.’s NHS support group for post-natal depression sufferers because, they told her, she was too sad.97 Her health visitor referred her to a community practice nurse from the mental health team. That nurse told Rachael to “work through it on your own.”
Selling Name Lists—2011: Legal firms offering to represent patients in law suits to win damages have been receiving private patient names and phone numbers after the patients leave the hospital. The hospitals denied that names were being sold for profit.98
Hiding Incompetence—2011: European Union laws prevent Britain from verifying qualifications of foreign doctors. Many European countries refuse to reveal malpractice information, putting patients in England at risk from under-qualified doctors. A recent case involved a German-qualified cosmetic surgeon who accidently gave his 70-year-old patient a tenfold overdose of painkillers in 2008, killing the man. The doctor was found guilty. He moved back to Germany to continue practicing medicine.99
Incentives to Work—2011: Doctors receiving more money for performing certain treatments tended to ignore other activities that did not lead to extra money, a survey discovered. Quality of care that was not incentivized went down, while rewarded care went up.100
“The System” Trumps Sanity—2010: A five-year-old girl suffering from 3rd degree burns that required skin grafts was turned away from Coventry’s University Hospital. Her parents were forced to drive her 25 miles to a burn specialist.101
Meat Market Medicine—2010: A man was left infertile when surgeons removed the wrong testicle. After the mistake was discovered, the doctors had to remove the other, the cancerous one. A hospital spokesman responded with, “The safety of our patients is our number one priority.” A consultant suggested the hospital give clearer instructions on how to mark and verify sites.102
Star-Struck Sloppy—2010: A British movie star died of cervical cancer because NHS doctors failed to notice a tangerine-sized tumor.103 The problem with lists such as the preceding is that mistakes happen everywhere, including in private health institutions. For the private sector, however, the impact of sloppy medicine can be devastating. A tainted reputation results in a decline in patronage, lower profits, a wounded ability to grow and modernize. Such pressure typically pushes private groups to bend over backwards to rebuild trust by taking strong action to correct the flaw.
Government institutions, however, are insulated from those corrective pressures. Whether they are tainted or not, or whether patronage climbs or drops, the tax-funded incomes, supplies, staffing, etc., are never seriously threatened. They just keep going, too busy to improve, unmotivated to change. In nations where tax-funded health care is the only game in town, mistakes don’t draw market pressures for correction. Mediocrity becomes the standard.
Socialist Idea: Prohibition (1919-1933)
Principle Violated: Freedom to choose and control property
Story: Prohibition in the U.S. was the constitutional outlawing of the manufacture, sale, and transport of alcohol to curb the abuse of drinking—“for our own good.” A majority of Americans believed that using force to prevent drinking was a good idea, a principled idea, a constitutional idea. The 18th Amendment barely passed
The result? People demanded their freedom to choose, and some began a private revolution. Thousands of “speakeasies” or their equivalents sprang up overnight. Underground railroads and black market exchanges began moving illegal goods across the country. Violence, shooting, raids, mobs, fighting, killing, and destruction exploded in the major cities. The idea of forcing people into abstinence was the deployment of socialist ideas of compulsion against human nature in violation of unalienable rights. The wh
ole thing flopped and was repealed.104
Socialist Idea: Complete Submission to the Master Race
Principle Violated: All natural rights and freedoms
Story: Primo Levi was a survivor of Auschwitz, and described in his memoirs the utter brutality of an existence in the concentration camp where life and civilization had been stripped from everyone. He said each inmate was ultimately alone in his heart and mind, although surrounded by hundreds of others. The men could either fight to survive, mentally and emotionally, or give up—“drowning,” as he called it, the easy way out.
Living was a daily battle, an unending hourly struggle. Those who surrendered their human will and relied on what was given to them became the “drowned.” They soon died from starvation, disease, back-breaking labor, or from the death of hope.
“Precisely because the lager was a great machine to reduce us to beasts we must not become beasts,” Levi wrote. “We must want to survive ... to bear witness.” Their hearts, their minds, and their very human nature remained the one place the Nazis couldn’t reach. The freedom to choose was the freedom to survive.105
The Historical Record Says It All
Socialism is structured so that it will never achieve its stated goals. The reason is self-evident: Socialism is a self-perpetuating consumption of other people’s labors, and when those labors run out, the whole system collapses. History shows that when reckless consumption grinds an economy down, the masters compel society forward using whips, chains, cruel force and coercion. And today? Today, the whips and chains are present in the form of fewer rights, less freedom, higher taxes, higher levels of borrowing, and unsustainable liabilities and debt.
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