What has Socialism done to our education system? Instead being a place where parents see to the instruction of their children, ensuring that their children obtain basic life skills and learn about their parents’ faith and traditions, school has become the Utopian’s primary indoctrination center. Our schools have become a place where any absurdity can be justified.
Illustration shows a gigantic boar wearing a crown with “$” and a shawl labeled “Plutocratic Greed” and holding the U.S. Capitol dome labeled “Special Privilege”, inverted to form a bucket from which it is sowing seeds labeled “Abuse of Power, Arrogance, [and] Contempt of Law” onto a field sprouting “Socialist votes”. It is stepping on an American flag and a Liberty cap. (from here)In his day (1801 – 1850) and with brilliant intellectual rigor and honesty, Frédéric Bastiat fiercely fought the Socialism that had become a national plague in France. Hence we have his Essays on Political Economy.
In our last visit to Bastiat’s work (WHAT WOULD IT MEAN TO MAKE AMERICA AMERICA AGAIN?), we considered the meaning of the idea that made America America. Here we will consider in more detail what makes Socialism organized injustice.
Socialism poses as a solution for many serious societal ills. Why doesn’t Socialism work?
You say, “There are men who have no money,” and you apply to the law. But the law is not a self-supplied fountain, whence every stream may obtain supplies independently of society. Nothing can enter the public treasury, in favour of one citizen or one class, but what other citizens and other classes have been forced to send to it. If every one draws from it only the equivalent of what he has contributed to it, your law, it is true, is no plunderer, but it does nothing for men who want money–it does not promote equality. It can only be an instrument of equalisation as far as it takes from one party to give to another, and then it is an instrument of plunder. Examine, in this light, the protection of tariffs, prizes for encouragement, right to profit, right to labour, right to assistance, right to instruction, progressive taxation, gratuitousness of credit, social workshops, and you will always find at the bottom legal plunder, organised injustice.
You say, “There are men who want knowledge,” and you apply to the law. But the law is not a torch which sheds light abroad which is peculiar to itself. It extends over a society where there are men who have knowledge, and others who have not; citizens who want to learn, and others who are disposed to teach. It can only do one of two things: either allow a free operation to this kind of transaction, i.e., let this kind of want satisfy itself freely; or else force the will of the people in the matter, and take from some of them sufficient to pay professors commissioned to instruct others gratuitously. But, in this second case, there cannot fail to be a violation of liberty and property,–legal plunder.
You say, “Here are men who are wanting in morality or religion,” and you apply to the law; but law is force, and need I say how far it is a violent and absurd enterprise to introduce force in these matters?
As the result of its systems and of its efforts, it would seem that socialism, notwithstanding all its self-complacency, can scarcely help perceiving the monster of legal plunder. But what does it do? It disguises it cleverly from others, and even from itself, under the seductive names of fraternity, solidarity, organisation, association. And because we do not ask so much at the hands of the law, because we only ask it for justice, it supposes that we reject fraternity, solidarity, organisation, and association; and they brand us with the name of individualists.
We can assure them that what we repudiate is, not natural organisation, but forced organisation.
It is not free association, but the forms of association which they would impose upon us.
It is not spontaneous fraternity, but legal fraternity.
It is not providential solidarity, but artificial solidarity, which is only an unjust displacement of responsibility. (from here)
Still, should we not have a social safety net, at least a little bit of Socialism that prevents the worst societal ills? No. As Bastiat observed: “I have no hesitation in answering, Law is common force organised to prevent injustice;–in short, Law is Justice.” That is, the Law exists solely to prevent us from infringing upon each others rights. How can we trust the people who administer the Law both to protect our rights and to step on our rights?
Nothing can be more clear and simple, more perfectly defined and bounded, or more visible to every eye; for justice is a given quantity, immutable and unchangeable, and which admits of neither increase or diminution.
Depart from this point, make the law religious, fraternal, equalising, industrial, literary, or artistic, and you will be lost in vagueness and uncertainty; you will be upon unknown ground, in a forced Utopia, or, which is worse, in the midst of a multitude of Utopias, striving to gain possession of the law, and to impose it upon you; for fraternity and philanthropy have no fixed limits, like justice. Where will you stop? Where is the law to stop? One person, as M. de Saint Cricq, will only extend his philanthropy to some of the industrial classes, and will require the law to dispose of the consumers in favour of the producers. Another, like M. Considerant, will take up the cause of the working classes, and claim for them by means of the law, at a fixed rate, clothing, lodging, food, and everything necessary for the support of life. A third, as, M. Louis Blanc, will say, and with reason, that this would be an incomplete fraternity, and that the law ought to provide them with instruments of labour and the means of instruction. A fourth will observe that such an arrangement still leaves room for inequality, and that the law ought to introduce into the most remote hamlets luxury, literature, and the arts. This is the high road to communism; in other words, legislation will be–what it now is–the battle-field for everybody’s dreams and everybody’s covetousness. (from here)
A battlefield? Does that not describe this year’s elections? A war of words verging on violence? As the cartoon above indicates, when we give the ruling classes more power than is needed just to protect our rights, they soon begin to abuse that power and demand more, often using their own failures as an excuse. It is just a matter of time before voting will not matter. What will matter is power, who controls the military and police forces.
OF A POST TO COME promised to compare the governing approaches of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton with respect to two issues.
The growth of the power of government.
The protection of our rights.
The Growth Of The Power Of Government
Why is it a problem when government is powerful? Government exists to protect our rights. Yet the power we give our government makes government itself a threat to our rights. Therefore, we must choose between giving the government just enough power and giving it too much.
To give our government the resources it needs to defend our rights, we must give our leaders the authority to tax us and spend our money. Nevertheless, the more we allow our government to tax and spend, the more we work for government instead of ourselves. At some point, we risk slavery.
Some decisions which effect a people must be made jointly. Thus, government must sometimes make decisions we would otherwise make for ourselves. So it is that in a nation of free men and women, we have laws that restrict us from harming each other (traffic laws, for example). In a nation of slaves, however, the laws just list a few trivial decisions that the leaders permit the people to make for themselves.
Here is a table that summarizes where the candidates stand. Not certain the information is correct? Then check their web sites. I have only provided links where their positions are not available on their own websites.
United States Declaration of Independence (from here)
What is the defining issue in our elections, including the elections of 2016? We essentially have two opposing causes: those who would further increase the power of the state and those who would only use the power of government to protect individual rights. Who is winning? Since the power of the state has grown hugely over the last century, we must conclude that the Statists are winning.
An Appropriate Label?
We know people who call themselves Conservatives and Tea Party activists, people who say they favor constitutional, limited government. When we apply these labels, do we always use the expressions Conservative and Tea Party activists correctly? No, but the expressions do mean something, and there are plenty of people who identify as Conservatives and Tea Party activists, but who calls himself a Statist? Almost no one.
Nevertheless, large numbers of people call for government-run this, government-run that, and government-run everything else. Such people often call themselves Progressives, Liberals, or Socialists, and they argue that at least some aspects of government must be socialist in character. Hence Progressives, Liberals, and Socialists and their sympathizers advocate Socialism.
Here is an example of how those “Socialists” excuse their advocacy of big government. They abuse the definitions of the terms.
Statism: the principle or policy of concentrating extensive economic, political, and related controls in the state at the cost of individual liberty.
Socialism: An economic system in which the production and distribution of goods are controlled substantially by the government rather than by private enterprise
Socialism is mostly economic and Statism is both economic and political. All Socialists are Statists but not all Statists are Socialist (Case in point: Iran, Statist but not officially Socialist)
Therefore, Socialists object to being labelled as Statists because Socialism is only an economic model, not both a political and an economic model. Yet that is as dishonest as saying one is only a little bit pregnant. Both Statism and Socialism employ the same fundamental principle, that the state must define and provide for the rights of the individual.
Conservatives hold God gives us our rights, and these are rights that relate to body and soul. Because God created us and we belong to Him, we owe Him our service. Our obligations are to Him, and He has given each of us the choice of serving willingly. Hence we each have God-given Rights to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness (Declaration of Independence).
Statists, however, view rights as commodities, merely things given to us by the state. This, of course, is a materialistic and secular view of rights that leaves God out. Once we do that (leave God out), we start seeing each other as objects, and we start enslaving each other.
Even Atheists can see the difficulties of Statism. Ayn Rand is famous for her books advocating individual rights, including her definition of statism.
The political expression of altruism is collectivism or statism, which holds that man’s life and work belong to the state—to society, to the group, the gang, the race, the nation—and that the state may dispose of him in any way it pleases for the sake of whatever it deems to be its own tribal, collective good.
Rand blamed this sort of “altruism” on Christianity, but the Bible never speaks of involuntary, state sponsored altruism. Besides, Statism does not require altruism as an excuse. That propaganda is just peculiar to Communism and Socialism. The Nazis did not spend much effort faking altruism.
Nevertheless, both Theists and Non-theists reach the same conclusion. Whether we recognize our rights as coming from God or not, when we use the government to give people their “rights” (commodities such as food, clothing, shelter, transportation, an education, a job, and so forth), we must sacrifice the inherent rights of the individual to do so, and that adds up to Statism.
What Is Next?
Ideally, I suppose I would have come up with this series and happily used it to promote a specific candidate. Well, I am not entirely happy with any of the candidates. The only one I regard as coming close to being a true Constitutional Conservative is Ted Cruz. Unfortunately, I am not entirely certain the founders would have regarded him as a natural born citizen. I think Cruz believes he qualifies (see here).
How would the courts would decide? Because they would gag on the primary rationale for denying him his rights as a natural born citizen the courts almost certainly would regard him as one (Natural Born Citizen and Naturalized Citizen Explained). So I chuckled at the unpleasant irony and voted for him in the Virginia Presidential Primary.
Because, we have a dearth of honest Conservatives willing to run for public office — because no man is good — we have hard choices. We must choose between the least of evils. We cannot simply do nothing.
In THE BATTLEFIELD FOR EVERYBODY’S DREAMS AND EVERYBODY’S COVETOUSNESS, I cited Frédéric Bastiat‘s great work, Essays on Political Economy, to demonstrate the true problem with Socialism. There are no fixed limits to Utopian dreams. Instead of each of us pursuing our own definition of happiness, Socialism creates a battlefield, a bloody field of strife within we each strive to impose our own values upon each other.![Illustration shows a gigantic boar wearing a crown with "$" and a shawl labeled "Plutocratic Greed" and holding the U.S. Capitol dome labeled "Special Privilege", inverted to form a bucket from which it is sowing seeds labeled "Abuse of Power, Arrogance, [and] Contempt of Law" onto a field sprouting "Socialist votes". It is stepping on an American flag and a Liberty cap. (from here)](https://citizentom.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/puck_the_seeds_of_socialism_cartoon1.png)
