According to the latest survey, 84%
of people under 35 want to vote for Sanders. Does this mean that 84% of young
Americans want socialism? When I listen to Sanders, he has no concrete plan.
All he wants is to “tax Wall Street speculation to pay for college” and
increase taxes to 90% with respect to everyone else.
What “Wall Street speculation”
actually means is Sanders wants to take any and all profit you may make as
an investor purchasing and selling shares. He wants the government to be the
final judge and arbiter as to which business should succeed and which fail.
While most banks do not give any interest to those who want to save (mine gives
0.1%!), one can make 2-5% in investing in stocks and bonds. This will not be
permissible under Sanders. What is more, Sanders completely abolishes all
theories of the value of money (Locke, Adam Smith, Ricardo), as I explain
below.
Socialism requires a centralized
economy, not a competitive market but economy directed by the
politi-bureau (DNC), which will take away money from oil companies in
order to finance companies like Solyndra, etc. The next step is allowance of
property. For example, no single family shall be permitted to own a house
worth more than $1 million. Schools will be “free” but no matter how hard
you study, you won’t be eligible for university unless both your parents
are significant contributors to the DNC. Of course, if they are, you will be an
Ivy League, no matter what your results. In the end, such a person may become a
doctor, surgeon, lawyer… and kill your mother on the table or sentence an
innocent man to death. Lawsuits? You cannot sue an honorable Party member –
ever. At best, the judge will say,“What difference – at this point – does
it make?” At worst, you will end in jail yourself. Why? Because you
virtually tried to sue the Party itself.
I could go on and on, because as a
former Czech that is the environment in which I grew up and still remember only
too well. However, let me explain what underscores Sanders’ popularity and this
repetitive rise of communism in our country (which we had in 1918 and then
again during the McCarthy era).
First, Sanders is an old man who
promises the young, naïve, gullible sheep the blue colors from the sky. The
comparison Greg Guftfeld made to Santa Claus is arrogate. Young people who
have not had to work or have not experienced the natural forces of the market
mostly feel a craving to be satisfied. Such satisfaction must come from
without – and who else should be the bearer of good news than an old sugar
daddy with gray hair and a good-natured smile.
What is more important, we all know
that Thomas Jefferson, well read and one of the chief sources of the
Declaration of Independence, was John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government.
Jefferson probably took more from George Mason’s Virginia Constitution, which
incorporated a similarly worded Declaration of Rights, but he must have known
that John Locke’s Treatises constituted a powerful rebuttal to the absolutist
paternalism of Sir Robert Filmer and the benevolent surrender to
totalitarianism in the skeptical Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes. Such works
propounded and supported the absolute monarch as a patriarch and viewed the
whole society as a family, status quo headed by the alpha male, descendant of
Adam, at whose benevolent, merciful feet we should kowtow, pay our tithes and
worship him till death.
No wonder modern socialists do not
see Muslims as evil because Sharia is very much in accord with such views.
Our country is based on the rights
to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, derived from such magnificent
thinkers as Locke, Voltaire, Rousseau, and the philosophers of the Scottish
Enlightenment: Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Reid, Adam
Ferguson and others. The pursuit of happiness was re-phrased by Mason.
Originally, Locke spoke of the “pursuit of property” in the sense of following
the acquired value. In other words, if I take possession of public land
and irrigate it, improve it, use it for others’ (and my own) benefit (e.g. by
growing wheat), such land acquired value through my labor, the excess of labor
is mine and I am free to sell it, market it etc. By the same token, I have
taken possession of the land, tilled it, and built upon it, so the land becomes
mine through my actions. (Adam Smith’s theory of Invisible Hand of the
market is based on this rationale.)
Of course, property is a word of
far-reaching implications and connotations. Socialists would like us to think
only of money, always money, in terms of the rich vs. the poor, the
haves vs. the have-nots, and not in terms of those who work and those who
idle. Paradoxically, it was Marx who pointed out that alienation of labor,
introduced by Smith and Locke, is tantamount to “alienation of selfhood.” By
adding value, one adds a part of one’s self, one’s own soul, to property (as
Marx said in Das Kapital). So far, Locke and Marx would be in agreement–but it
was the next sadomasochistic step that turned the tables on Locke. For
Marx, everything in the world consists of an abstract “value” which is a part
of some larger ideology, which has been misappropriated and abused by the “evil
capitalist” who, in exploiting the concrete market value of a commodity, is in
fact exploiting the abstract identity of the proletariat (workforce). While
there may have been some justification for this rationale 150 years ago, it is
hardly the case today.
Instead of taking Marx as a
significant step forward in terms of spreading personal liberty, i.e. the world
is more free, not less, when the market trades in goods that have acquired our
rights and values (indeed our personal and national pride), the socialists took
Marx’s criticism of capitalism as a guide to appropriating the power to rule
over people. He did so by taking the value each person has added to
commodity/ property, abolishing free market, and creating a system of
paternalistic hierarchy within ideology. Marx defined this ideology as”
interests uniting a particular social class.” Thus, Railroad Labor Unions would
be united by their interest in railroads because the workers have contributed
their (personal) value to the product (rails, locomotives, upkeep, etc.). Since
many of Sanders’ followers have little and produce little, they identify
with the ideology of the evil “speculator,” some mythical “rich man” who
has mafia-like lackeys on the stock exchange and vacations endlessly. What
unites them is not their added value but the envy of someone else’s added value
– which would be sad, but is in fact absurd, because such value is imaginary.
As Alinsky clearly delineates in the
Rules for Radicals, people are not ruled by money but by their desires, wants
and suffering. Marxist socialism stands market theory of value on its head:
people must not freely trade in the added values but shall be ruled by them
from above. Marx assumed this was what capitalists did to proletariat, so what
it all comes down to is this: the time
has come for revenge. It should also be noted that anyone could run a
business or enterprise in England or the United States at the time. Napoleon
scornfully declared that England was a “nation of small shopkeepers.” We all
love to show off our value, the product of our work, which is more than some
gadget, trinket or piece of writing; it is a product of our heart and soul
and money is a byproduct of that.
Not so for a socialist. For a
socialist, money is a means of manipulation of a social class. Every
ideology is a half-truth (as Marx stated) because people are required to
suspend their disbelief. Sanders says, “I’ll tax Wall Street speculation and
I’ll pay for your college.” Thus, he unites the young under the false belief
that their college will be paid for by someone else. Their parents are happy
too, of course, unless they can see through the thin veneer of the word
“speculation.”
All market is speculation. When I go
shopping, I speculate whether turkey or chicken is better or if I should buy
this type of milk rather than the other one. I look at price and
contents. That is exactly what Wall Street “speculators” do. That is also
what the store owner does when he is ordering the goods, looking at how much of
what item has been sold. You cannot “tax speculation” without harming the
market, which ultimately harms you, because this eliminates choice, bankrupts
companies, drives people out of work. Such people will have one thing in
common: suffering.
Marx famously said “religion is the opium of mankind.”
Many people know this, but not many people realize the insight of his
psychology. Marx spoke about ideology and gave religion as an example but
what he meant to say is that people will suffer and long for absolution.
However you cannot take away their suffering, because you would take away the
absolution. Thus, religion is indispensable. Communists made the State
indispensable by the same rationale.
All socialists are communists and
all communists are sadists. They want you to suffer, not themselves. Every socialism develops a
“privileged class” of Party members and more privileged Party members. In other
words, “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others…” That is
what Sanders’ smile says; never mind his words. The psychology is too
sophisticate to see through by a modern teenager brought up in the Land of
Plenty. It took me years of suffering and self-education to be able to
recognize this Evil – and I am probably inoculated to it only because I had to
experience it first hand.
http://politichicks.com/2016/02/sugar-daddy-sanders-and-the-power-of-socialism/
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