Not even a fart in my face
The environmentalist left wingers gave us a perfect demonstration of the depth of their intellectual gravity and their communication skills when one of the Line 9 protesters awaiting a hearing in a Hamilton courthouse eloquently farted into the face of a Sun news reporter. Not surprising. When confronted about the ill-informed stupidity, the hypocrisy or the harmful and immoral nature of their ideas, the leftists have only a few strategies: ignore, shout down or insult and offend; if the cause is juicy, riot and use violence. The only thing they never have is a cogent and coherent argument. My questions were designed to expose the stupidity and hypocrisy of socialist ideas; I did not really expect any answers. I do not think that socialists can give answers to my questions. At the end of my post, I promised that I will eventually answer them myself. I got no reaction from the left wingers. Not a peep. Not even a fart in my face. Faith Goldie is way ahead of me. Maybe she is just more difficult to ignore……. In any case, here are my answers. If you just got to this blog, keep in mind the continuity. This is a follow up to posts I made previously: 20 Questions to socialists & Let me be fuzzy. The first, the 20 questions, was itself a response to 19 answers but you do not need to read that one for continuity.
1. What should be the limit of democracy?
This is indeed an excellent question assuming that socialists do believe in democracy. Most of them do not or do so only as long as it serves their interests. When they win, it is democracy, when they do not it must be foul play. What they do believe is the superiority of their ideas that should prevail at any cost, and since the essence of their ideas is that they speak for the whole of society they do believe that anybody opposed to those ideas are the enemies of the whole society and therefore legitimate targets for their venomous contempt. The democracy of the socialists is the ‘people’s democracy’, a system where a small but vocal and powerful minority claiming to speak for the majority ruthlessly oppresses any opposition to their ideas and policies.
2. If socialism is such a great idea, why do you need guns to make it happen?
Because no socialist idea can ever compete in a truly free market of ideas. No socialist policy ever produced better results than competing free market policies. There is no country on this planet where more than 5% of the people would choose freely a socialist type living or working arrangement such as the Jewish kibbutzim or the Basque worker cooperatives.
3. Communism has killed millions of innocent people. How many more millions do you have to see dead before you can agree that it has been tried enough? Every socialist policy is a failure. How many times do we need to try them before we can all agree that they just don’t work?
As many times as it takes to make it work. Admitting failure is not an option. The left will never take responsibility for the untold amount of damage their ideas have caused in the past and still causes today. In a recent interview on Democracy now, Rachel Grady, the co-director of Detropia says that Detroiters feel "abandoned by Corporate America". Not once is it mentioned that the city is run by socialists for over 50 years by now. That it was promoted as the model city of socialism. That just recently it received massive taxpayer bailouts. Socialism failed Detroit but that will never be acknowledged by the left. The glory of socialism is always in the future. Past and present never counts.
4. Does the end justify the means? Any means?
The answer is clearly yes, but socialists do not like to answer this question in public. Larry Grathwohl, the FBI infiltrator of the Weather Underground died just a month ago. His chilling testimony from a documentary made in 1982 makes it absolutely clear that leftist radicals would have no qualms about killing 25 million people in the name of the glorious end-goal. The difference between the terrorists and the more peaceful socialists is just a matter of degree.
5. Should good intentions excuse failure?
For the socialists, the promise of a better future should excuse any failure in the present. The failures should serve as motivation for trying the same with even more determination. Since the ideas, the ideology CANNOT be questioned, the cause of the failure must lie somewhere else. The above question cannot be seriously asked from a socialist because it already predicates the recognition of the possibility that the ideas borne out of the good intentions were faulty.
6. Who should decide what the greater good is and how can it be defined?
The ones Marx described as ‘self aware’, the ones with ‘class-consciousness’, the ones with unquestioning belief in the ideology. In a socialist/communist society one’s chances for social advancement are directly proportional with their zealotry, with their professed dedication to the ideology. In the real world, socialist or communist, the greater good usually turns out to be political opportunism and expediency.
7. Is equality possible?
With enough power, the socialists believe, anything is possible. The problem is that they have a fundamentally different concept of equality. While I am all for equal treatment, they insists on equal outcome which, as pointed out in the Hayek quote, are mutually exclusive. Only similar things can be equal, that is why the left is pushing so hard for conformity and uniformity. The only way equality can be achieved is through the creation of sameness which can only be accomplished through the unequal treatment of natural differences.
8. If discrimination is bad, what makes reverse discrimination good?
A discrimination, conflict and poverty free society is not good for the socialists. They need them as excuses for their power-grabs, justification for the ever expanding machinery to control these problems. It isn’t just that socialists would not want get rid of these problems, they are putting efforts into keeping them alive, to make problems worse. Socialists thrive on the problems they claim they want to solve. Discrimination is here to stay.
9. Is it moral to rob Peter to pay Paul?
In the name of social justice? OF COURSE IT IS! The view that if Peter has more than Paul it must be Peter’s fault is probably the most fundamental to socialists. The notion that even if Peter did not do anything wrong, he still owes something to Paul and therefore it is just and moral to rob him for Paul’s benefit is the essence of social justice. In the morality tale of Lafontaine the cricket learns his lesson and mends his irresponsible ways. In the world of the socialists, the ants are not praised but penalized and the cricket gets all the sympathy.
10. If ‘goodness’ must be enforced by the threat of violence, can it still be called goodness?
Of course it cannot but this does not matter to socialists who consider obedience, the submission to the common will the only necessary act of morality. Paying your taxes and voting for wise representatives to do good on your and your community’s behalf is the definition of goodness. They only need to enforce it for the sake of fairness. It would be not just if only the good people would bear the burden of social responsibility.
11. Is collective morality possible? Isn’t collective morality a sum of individual moral decisions?
Analyzing the idiocy of Rousseau’s ‘volonté général’ is beyond the scope of this post and I am afraid it is also beyond most leftists’ ability to contemplate. The idea is ludicrous and I find it puzzling why it receives so little attention. In the socialist mind, the collective, the community, is some sort of mysterious entity with a will and morals that are independent of that of its individual members.
12. If you do not practice your individual morality, how can you have any at all?
The point of these last three questions is to demonstrate that morality is individual and that it is impossible to learn it without practicing it as an individual. The worst harm socialism and communism does to society is depriving its members of the opportunity to practice their individual morality by slowly eliminating the spheres where it can be practiced.
13. You say that we collectively have to take care of those who cannot take care of themselves. How can we determine who needs care and how much care is adequate?
The material well-being of the poor in the developed world in the 21st century would be the envy of our grandparents it is the envy of the real poor in the third world. “Poverty” is a moving target that socialists constantly redefine to suit their own needs, their own political aspirations. Defining poverty in relative terms is disingenuous, as it creates an absolute that we can never get rid of. We will always have a bottom ‘X’ percent; no matter how well they are doing in absolute terms.
14. Should the government be in the business of running businesses?
Let’s just see again: Can government do a good job at running a business? No. So why do socialists insist on it whenever they can? Because it is politics. Because government enterprises are free of the laws of reality. Because they create entrenched interests. Because they create dependencies. Because they create socialist constituencies. Socialists love government enterprises because they give power to socialists. The rhetoric about it is always warm and fuzzy, touchy feely, the socialist sentiment of doing something together, collectively for our common good without the evil capitalist profit motive. The argument is the importance of the service, the inability of the free market to provide it efficiently, fairly or affordably. It always ends up costing more than the free market alternatives but that should be discussed in a post on its own.
15. 100 years ago, Government's share of the GDP was 7%; today it is over 40%. Where should it stop?
I cannot even imagine a left winger answering this better than our CINO friend. The government’s share of the economy will grow as long as it can, until it kills the economy completely. No leftist will ever draw a line or can defend one. There always are special circumstances; there is always the possibility of an unforeseen need that requires more government involvement. There is no limit, only some are too blind to see.
16. If we do not let people learn from their own mistakes, how can they possibly ever learn?
Socialists believe that their benevolent, paternalistic condescension will do the trick. Give them a few years of communist indoctrination at our rabid leftist universities and they will honestly believe that it is their mission to lead the stupid backward rest of us to the bright neo-communist future. All we need to learn is to follow their advice.
17. Just because some people are irresponsible, stupid or immoral, why do we need to treat everybody as if we all had the same shortcomings?
In the name of fairness, of course. To make sure that the losers do not feel singled out for their bad behaviour. To show the immoral that we are treating them just like everybody else. The real answer is, of course, power. The victims and the villains of a free society are just excuses to take freedom away from the whole.
18. How can the collective be smart if its members are stupid?
Socialists have no respect for people and they do not see the irony in being of the people. They do not really consider themselves part of the ‘people‘ Their progressive vision, their concern for the well-being of others, for animals, the planet, the universe, the future make them better than the rest. It is not the collective that is smart, it is the vanguard elite that speaks for it. I am afraid that Bastiat’s argument is way over the head of just about any left-winger.
19. If you cannot be trusted with decisions about your own life, how can you be trusted with the decisions about the lives of others?
This, like the other two questions before it still refers to the arguments presented in Bastiat’s book and the answer is the same as it is to the previous question. Left wingers are always more equal than others.
20. Aren’t public service unions incestuous?
But of course they are. Public service unions represent a fundamental subversion of democracy. I think we should have issues even with the special powers afforded to private business unions, but they can at least work themselves out of business. Reality can keep them in check. Unions are not simply parasites; they are like cancer that will grow out of control until it destroys its host. But socialists know that. It is no accident that left leaning politicians get most of their support from the very same public service unions that will ‘fight’ them for more money and privileges. All in the name of providing better service for the people, of course. All of the questions and answers above would deserver more serious consideration, but in the end, there is only one question, the 21st question, the question of the 21st Century which I will ask in my next post.