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When Socialism Substitutes for Religion

Man’s Spiritual Nature.

This all just happened? Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay 

It is a part of the nature of homo sapiens that we desire to understand where we fit in the universe – to understand where we came from, why we are on the earth, and whither we will go when we leave mortality. Whatever the answer to these questions, it will instinctively be perceived as being related to the question of the existence of a divine Creator of the human race.

 

The desire for religion and for worship is so natural and so strong in mankind that in many individuals it expresses itself as a commitment to worship the Creator. Thus, one finds various forms of worship and religion in all historical cultures.  It is the reflective individual’s nature to sense a more spiritual side of man. This spiritual nature makes man receptive to a different set of values from those of his secular world in general and from those of politics in particular.

A later and arguably higher expression of this human spirituality takes the form of Christianity. Many, like Karl Marx’s followers, have objected particularly to this religion, presumably because it does not provide natural support for a revolutionary movement. In spite of its strong advocacy for relief for the sufferings of the poor, it nevertheless teaches adherents to be patient and to avoid being preoccupied with one’s material conditions. Those doctrines and advocacy were not favorable from the perspective of Marx.

The Decline of Religion in the Secular Western World

The secular intellect has been so concerned about the development and splendors of scientific endeavors it has not had time for much concern about organized religion, although until recent decades many of the great lights of physical science were very religious and acknowledged a higher power at work in the creation and operation of the universe.

Charles Darwin

A particular set of critical intellects, however, has been inclined to push back against the traditional ideas of religion in Western culture.  Marx, Darwin and others have provided intellectual leadership for secular atheism and their influence has been profound, even though the “scientific” thought of these two towers of intellectualism have had their works thoroughly debunked in most of the particulars of their thinking. But their ideas have demonstrated remarkable staying power among those who don’t pay much attention to their actual theories.

Karl Marx

How has this worked out in our culture historically?  The allegedly scientific ideas of these social forces have fixed themselves in secular programs of education that were not ingrained in the schools of my earlier generation. Back then, religion was not taught in secular schools, but the moral values of Christianity were inevitably present in the curriculum.  Over time, the anti-religious movement made socialism the ideology of most of our schools. The natural, inherent need of our children and our youth for a spiritual expression of religious feeling was to be satisfied by the message of socialism. In many cases this school-promoted ideology became the primary basis for personal conviction, since no religious training was undertaken in secular households.

The secular religion substitute argues somewhat as follows: That which is good in human society is that all individuals are valued, thus man’s greatest need is for equality. Virtue has to do with overcoming the poverty of too large a part of the human race. Moreover, every individual has rights, and the powers of governance should therefore be employed to guarantee the individual’s common wants and needs, which must be seen as “civil rights.” In this environment, freedom is no longer taught to be the avoidance of external forces to limit the exercise of the citizen’s liberty.  “Freedom from” is no longer a concern.  The concern is that the individual should be guaranteed “freedom to” pursue the realization of personal desires at the expense of the state.

The individual citizen thus expects to be enabled by a principle long accepted in western society as an intermediate solution to the problem of inequality, which is the governmental practice of the redistribution of income, the transfer of wealth to those who do not create it. But one retains in constant remembrance that when the socialist revolution is completed, society will produce (mostly by machines) goods and services which the government will distribute. Until then, with the government not yet in charge of the entire economy, it merely redistributes privately produced products. Students receiving this socialistic ideology are encouraged to be actively engaged in promoting political developments that will transfer economic activity from the private to the public sector.

Street Religion

The triumph of this ideology is very recent in our society and has taken form only in the last decade or two, becoming apparent with the advent of the current generation of millennials on our social and educational scenes. Preparatory propaganda goes back at least to the 1960s however.

This ideology has little appeal to those of earlier generations. Previous cohorts of mankind have watched historical disasters, mostly associated with the Cold War, grow out of early socialist attempts to achieve the political panacea. Their children and grandchildren are easily convinced by their socialist mentors that one need not be disturbed by past disappointments. Now that the more intelligent generation has arrived, they will simply be responsible for getting socialism right as soon as it can be adopted in its permanent utopian form.

Spiritual Beliefs of the Antifa

Now permit me, please, to review very briefly, first, why socialism can’t work and second, what might be done for the younger generation’s natural religious needs currently being diverted into a deceptive and dangerous religion substitute – socialism!

Why Socialism Inevitably Fails.

I have answered this question from numerous perspectives through the publication of four volumes that have reviewed the historical evidence and its interpretation by the greatest minds who have understood the economics of socialist countries.

The two main problems are that socialism, first, divides the nation between the factions of those who are productive and those who are basically little more than consumers. It pits the haves against the have nots. People are basically in agreement that redistribution of incomes is humane, compassionate, and civil as it enables the care of the poor.  It is a positive and appreciated force in society UP TO A POINT!

Socialism has great appeal for those who know nothing about it.

When it is extended to socialist extremes, people become quickly weary of socialist largesse.  When even the middle class are called upon to give up their own property to the all-powerful state, they quickly tire of socialism. At some point they may be prepared to support the counter-revolution feared by the socialists.  Ownership of resources becomes the cause for warfare, and the socialists will introduce military control to maintain their power.  They may be elected into power, but they will not willingly abandon all their struggles to gain political power, to restructure the entire economy, to own and manage all the country’s businesses, and to ensure their retention of power.

Bureaucracy, fountain of red tape, is often the result of trying to do too much.

The second main problem of socialism is that it is impossible to replace the millions of plans of consumers, farmers, small businesses, corporations and multinational corporations with the single, nation-wide plan of the socialist administration. Socialism is an economic overreach by the government, which insists on owning and managing the millions of firms, large and small, in a plethora of economic locations. It must order a planning bureaucracy to organize and control everything that is done in the economy. The bureaucracy is subject to all the tremendous problems of information management and logistical control that no socialist administration has been able to manage. Moreover, the introduction of planning and state management is destructive of incentives and productivity so that equality is reached at the level of social poverty.

When the computer was developed, planners hoped for a time that everything could be calculated almost instantaneously with computers, which thus represented a panacea for the planning process. But they soon learned that you must have good information to calculate a good plan. Under socialism, the actors are often motivated not to provide good information. Moreover, the information must be gathered and entered into the computers. Gathering all the information for an annual plan would probably take five or ten years, as the Soviets found out.

Socialism: Origins, Expansion, Decline, and the Attempted Revival in the United States.

I could actually substantiate and validate these points carefully on paper.  Wait! I already did that in the publication of the three individual volumes that became Socialism: Origins, Expansion, Decline and the Attempted Revival in the United States and in its sequel, Socialism Revealed: Why Socialism’s Issues Have Never Permitted Success in a Real Economy. In these works I elaborated on the points suggested above and provided thorough documentation.

Is Socialism and the Socialist Religion an Inevitable Outcome for our Children?

What could be better than teaching the victims of our schools that we should engage spiritually for social equality, human “rights,” and the elimination of poverty? The current religion substitute advocates that the pupil join a movement against all the owners of property, the managers of small businesses, the millions of stockholders of public corporations. It advocates hatred for all those who don’t understand group think, and that human wants and needs should be satisfied through governmental provision of subsidies paid for by someone else who pays taxes.

The substitute for this might be supplied by a revised religious form, some of the characteristics of which have been a part of our cultural heritage. The ancient contemporary religions of Christianity distorted and lost the original message of Christ in the New Testament. To restore that doctrinal purity the individual would have to be taught, first, that she or he is actually related to the Creator of the universe.

Since I am an economist, formally trained and experienced over numerous decades with the economic system of socialism, I will not elaborate on this potential return to a form of religion far more genuine than socialism. A set of four simple propositions will suffice for my purposes.

1. There is a God who actually is a parent of each human spirit – we are all his children and are, therefore, brothers and sisters.  He has counselled us to love each other as siblings should. Therefore, we might recognize the brotherhood of the whole human race and commit our lives to helping others voluntarily, so that there need be no poor among us.

2. God sent his own son to the earth in the person Jesus Christ to save mankind from the sins which beset all of us and which would keep us from returning after this life to our Heavenly Father. If we learn to overcome our negative behaviors and accept the offer of Jesus Christ to save us from our mortal imperfections, we can indeed return in a future life to our spirit home.

3. Jesus established an organization while he was on the earth and taught its leaders how to guide his followers. He gave them authority and power and guided them through divine communication, through revelation, to lead his church and take it to all the nations. As had been prophesied, this church was lost through apostasy in the centuries following the crucifixion and the resurrection of the Savior, Jesus Christ. The church became politicized and corrupt, with the rich priests and popes purchasing their offices and the original teachings being perverted and lost.

One can actually learn how to read this!

4. Also according to prophesy, the time came when the Lord restored the original church organization and teachings through a prophet such as Moses, Isaiah, or Moroni. The complete, divine religion of Jesus Christ was thus restored.  For an individual this can be important in the acquisition of truth and happiness, which any interested individual might pursue by reading more here.  For us as a society, the important values associated with these truths could be taught to our school children and youth in a purely secular form by teaching the values of independence, general concern and love for our fellow beings, self-reliance, honesty, appreciation of real freedoms, and good, old-fashioned patriotism for whichever is our own nation and culture.

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Karl Marx, Father of “Scientific Socialism”

Karl Marx has been the hero of socialists and the deity of communists.  My book, Socialism, addresses the life, the writings and theories of Marx in some detail, since his thinking is basically the foundation of socialism.  Even the socialist who claims he is not a follower of Marx generally follows the same principles and evinces the same preferences as other socialists who do follow Marx.  I introduce this topic here with a synopsis of a chapter on Marx from the book.

To understand why the spirit of Marxist socialism is bitter and negative, one should know a little bit about Marx’s life. Somewhat surprisingly, it was founded upon a secure childhood. Since he never held a job, Marx was never an exploited worker. As a student he studied philosophy and religion, but thought very little of religion. He married Jenny von Westphalen, the daughter of Baron von Westphalen, but there was little class struggle in the marriage.  For political reasons, he was not able to become a professor, so he went into journalism. Because of the opposition engendered by his radical views, he spent time being expelled from various places in Germany, France and England. For quite some time, Marx’s unwilling parents supported him and his family. As a library researcher, writing radical tracts and tomes on economic theory, he received no salary. But he did receive some help from his friend and colleague, Friedrich Engels. He owed that help to the textile factory of Engels’s father and to its exploited workers. From them Marx received a pittance, which, tragically, was insufficient for all his family to survive.

Marx’s most famous writings were The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital, the latter being a three-volume critique of capitalism. The first volume of Kapital took him ten years to complete and the next two volumes were published posthumously by Engels. Critics tend to believe the publication postponement beyond Marx’s death was a result of the author’s dissatisfaction with his own attempt to resolve the incongruities in his theory of value.  He never could free the theory of contradiction.

Marx wrote about a large number of philosophical and political issues, presenting theories he mostly borrowed from other scholars. He always found flaws in the theories others had developed, but he generally modified or embellished such theories rather than develop many of his own.  He came to economics a little later and that topic became the foundation of his multi-volume work on capitalism,  Das Kapital. 

In Marx’s day, working in a factory was not for the faint-of-heart!

 

 

 

 

 

 

He ultimately devoted the bulk of his time to the study of economics, trying to resolve inconsistencies in his theory of value, which was outdated from its inception.  He focused on Ricardo’s labor theory of value, emphasizing that labor created value and that the capitalist stole that value from the workers. The laborers contracted with the capitalist to work a given (large) number of hours at a wage that would give them no more than a subsistence level of living.  They agreed to work a twelve-hour day, for example, but could produce enough output in eight hours to earn their pay. Anything they produced in the last four hours of the day’s work Marx called surplus value. Naturally the capitalist pocketed all of that value for himself, letting the workers earn only enough for their subsistence living.

Marx’s writings and actions were filled with the spirit of hatred for the capitalist.  He considered the writings of previous socialists as “utopian socialism,” based on optimistic hopes that things would go better for workers if they voluntarily joined communitarian organizations.   His own writings he considered “scientific socialism,” and they were based on the theoretical necessity of working men uniting in revolutionary action to exterminate the entire bourgeois class, thus eliminating the class struggle and opening the way for a future communistic society.   Marx’s most striking achievement was to transform the utopians’ movement of love into a movement of hate.

To become an expert on Marx’s life and economic theory, as well as the modern theories stemming from the Marxian foundation, you are welcome to purchase the book Socialism: Origins, Expansion, Decline, and the Attempted Revival in the United States. The page for purchasing a copy is at the top of the website.

Socialism: Origins, Expansion, Decline, and the Attempted Revival in the United States
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What is the Difference between Socialism and Communism?

Socialism combines policies of income redistribution and nationalization of all business firms. The state must own and control the “means of production.” “Communists” are those zealously endoctrinated with the necessity of such a system, but “communism” is a mythical situation in which the socialist dictatorship has created an enforced acceptance of all citizens of total state control of the economy. The state can then wither away and all men can, in peace, (the capitalist roaders of any counter revolution are either dead or in Siberia), work together to ameliorate the natural state of economic relations.

Most political pundits and journalists operate on the assumption that socialism may be innocuous, but communism is more extreme and possibly even dangerous. This they assume because they are aware of the disastrous effects of communism in the Soviet Union. That may be a good beginning for those who have no real knowledge of either system. Such pundits seem to have the same level of expertise as the millennials have on socialism.

Naive socialists in the United States often aspire to be democratic since they have not yet discovered that the implementation and maintenance of a socialist economy cannot be a democratic process. It requires political power and grim determination. True socialism, such as Comrade Bernie Sanders aspires to establish in his proposed transformation of our economic system requires state ownership and management of “property.” Of course socialists can own their own homes and “cars”[1]; the property restriction is on the private ownership of the means of production. 

East German “Trabant”, product of economic planning.

[1 ] Socialists have “cars” if you are willing to call such creations as the Trabant (East German) or Vlada (Russian) as genuine automobiles. The central planning nemesis of creating new technologies or appealing consumer products was never overcome in the socialist countries and socialist highways seemed populated with something other than real automobiles.

Was Moscow the seat of communism?
Stalin: the Spiritual Father of Central Economic Planning
Soviet planning was based on the power of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Marx insisted that true socialism requires the state to own and manage all the country’s businesses – the (Communist) Party ran everything related to production and distribution of the national product. Modern socialists, such as those in Europe, have experience enough to know that when the state overextends to this degree the result is economic disaster. When the state takes over all businesses, it must prepare a single economic plan to replace all the millions of economic plans pursued by individual workers, consumers, small and private businesses, corporations and multinational corporations, not to mention all the nation’s normal public, governmental business. The state determines everything that will be produced, what firms, factories, and farms will produce it, who will distribute it, sell it, and consume it, and how much each individual product will cost.

No socialist state has ever been able to do this satisfactorily. In the United States the government was incapable of rolling out effectively even a partial, introductory plan for about 16% of the national economy with Obamacare. After a number of decades of trying to meet the nationalization and planning challenge, socialism passed away from the European and central planning economies without a whimper.  The only thing remaining from the socialist tradition in these now-reformed capitalist economies was the practice of income redistribution. Countries continuing and expanding the redistribution practice still had socialist political parties, but had no genuine socialism.  Since most non-radical and even conservative political parties also approve of and actively engage in income redistribution policies, such policies alone can hardly be said to represent socialism.

Marx and Lenin

True socialism, including nationalization of industry and direct, state management of the entire economy, is what occurred in the Soviet Union. No informed socialist would call the Soviet economic system “communism.”  Those who suffered through this experiment called it “Marxist-Leninist socialism,” not communism.

Being tyrannical and dictatorial did not make Stalin’s socialism a communist system. Straightforward political and economic necessity caused Stalin’s system to be tyrannical and dictatorial. It will inevitably be so wherever true socialism is attempted for reasons I elaborate on frequently elsewhere. It is true that wherever Marxist economies have existed, and wherever Marxist advocates have been numerous, “communist” parties have been established. These have always advocated the revolution of which Marx dreamed with fondness. But the communist parties of Eastern Europe never came close to establishing a “communist” economy or country. They always established central planning and full state ownership of the means of production or “Marxist-Leninist Socialism.” That is genuine socialism, which is implemented by communist parties in “communist countries.”

Military Might: The Power of Soviet Persuasion.

So what is communism then?  Communism was the dream of Marx and his followers for the future.  They never fully described what it would be, but offer some supposition on how it might in some distant future era be achieved. As the Christian dreams of and hopes for heaven, the Marxist-Leninist socialist dreams of and hopes for the arrival of communism.

After communist parties have gained control, they must maintain it by preventing a counter-revolution of the bourgeoisie or former capitalist class. They must assure full compliance with the nation’s implementation of the national economic plan. The cooperation of all citizens and workers would be secured through the dictatorship of the proletariat under the “vanguard of the party.”  (You comply or get locked up or silenced in some cold part of the country.) Once that is accomplished and “people are no longer exploiting people,” society can then experience the “withering away of the state.” The state, as viewed by good socialists, is merely a police force to keep the unwashed “deplorables” under control. When society is working together in the harmony of a communist utopia, there is no more need for a political state. Central government can then disappear.

Exactly how that will work, nobody really knows. Karl Marx was so busy trying to stoke up a revolution of the working class that he had no time to write about any vision he might have had regarding the utopian future communists still believe to be indefinitely far away. Marx was too busy trying to solve the microeconomic transformation problem that befuddled his years of trying to be an economist in the British Museum; he never had time to explain to us his vision of reaching communism, if he really had one.

The British Museum where Marx studied economics.
Is this the communist utopia? This is a sight common in markets of the west, but never seen in the Soviet-type planned economy.

Thus, communism is the distant dream of those who find the only solution to the human problem of poverty to be the extermination of all capitalists, the dictatorship of the centrally planned economy, and the passage of enough time for people gradually to become nice again, to work together to overcome the challenges of nature, and for the state to shrivel up and go away. Thus communism is not what communist parties do – they establish centrally planned socialism, not communism. Marx always hoped communism would be achieved automatically after the communist parties had slaughtered enough of their recalcitrant subjects to make the world nice again. Presumably, citizens could then gradually go off to enjoy a life of video games and recreational drugs.

Socialism: Origins, Expansion, Decline, and the Attempted Revival in the United States.

If you order a copy of Socialism: Origins, Expansion, Decline, and the Attempted Revival in the United States, you won’t read much about communist fantasies. But you can learn a ton about the socialism you are just beginning to really understand. A pdf or Kendall Reader copy of the book ordered from Amazon costs next to nothing, and even the hard copy is only a fraction of what Palgrave Macmillan would have sold it for.

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The 2019 Coup of the Trump Administration

The First Strictly-Partisan Impeachment in U.S. History

I don’t mind long titles, but if this review were to assign the appropriate adjectives to the word “coup” in the title, it would become longer than even I can accept. The coup should be designated “the Socialist/Democratic Party ‘Resistance’/DOJ-FBI Deep-State Bureaucratic/U.S. Mainstream Media Coup.”

Because of the active role of the media, U.S. Democrats have heard a steady, fire-hose diet of insults and name-calling aimed at President Trump for over three years now. They have not received reports of the many surprising political and economic achievements of the President. The media have no time for the complete story of what is going on. They have repeated their mendacities so many times about the alleged vices, crimes, immorality, corruption, dishonesty and depravity of the president that around half of the American public have come to believe, to assume, and to contend that the smears are really true. This applies equally to educated and sophisticated people who “don’t closely follow politics.”

I add this blog because of the important role played in the impeachment of President Trump by the Socialist/”Democratic” Party, the socialist “squad” in congress, and socialist advocacy in general in the U.S. House of Representatives.

From a moral standpoint, Donald J. Trump may be no less perfect than most other Americans. If you look at his record of accomplishments as U.S. President, however, you must assume that he has been far too busy as president to spend nights being driven around in police cars in pursuit of illicit personal relationships. Has he been less morally pure than the average American?  There is no evidence that the many negative assumptions and prevarications of our mainstream media are true.

The President has been subjected to a 24/7 smear campaign by the media for three years.

My candidate for the presidency in the Obama era, Mitt Romney, thinks President Trump is morally inferior, having labeled the President as a “phony, fake, and fraudulent con-man.” I am absolutely convinced that Romney, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has retained moral purity and faithfulness to his one, admirable wife through his entire married life. He was also a model of civility in his comportment throughout the 2012 presidential campaign. Unfortunately, he was smeared by democrats as a “vulture capitalist” and many other such things; he put up little fight against their unfair and untrue denigration, and he lost in the election. President Trump, whose support was solicited by Romney, observed the nastiness to which Romney was subjected in that campaign and decided firmly and irrevocably that, should he run, he would not take such treatment passively.  If he was a fighter before, the democrats transformed him into a warrior.

Senator Mitt Romney, former presidential
candidate and moral judge of President Trump.

Some of the president’s fights produce tweets that are distasteful and which I don’t particularly enjoy. True it is that, although many of his tweets are not strident, the President catches more flack for them than he deserves. But Pastor Jeffress of the First Baptist Church in Dallas made an important point about President Trump on Fox News. [1]) Jeffress emphasized that he did not vote for President Trump to be his pastor. Rather, he wanted him to be his president and, in working for the American people, to represent American values. President Trump does that admirably. Nor are Senator Romney’s moral complaints as appropriate for Trump as for many on the other side of the aisle, where Mitt often seems remarkably at home.

Pastor Robert Jeffress with President Trump. Jeffress “voted for a president, not a pastor!”

This would be a good place to mention an important letter regarding the impeachment, which President Trump sent to House Speaker Pelosi. That letter was smeared, as expected, by the perpetual, name-calling democrats as being an “unhinged rant.” But among the many valid points the letter made is an impressive list of Trump’s achievements as president. He sees many of those achievements as being the greatest in U.S. history. Probably a few of them may be only the second or third greatest achievements of their type since the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Even honest democrats have to admit that the Trump economy is the strongest we have seen in the last half century.[2]

The Actors in the Coup

The Socialist/Democratic Party Resistance.

Interestingly, Speaker Pelosi and Minority Leader Schumer announced at the beginning of the Trump presidency that they would resist everything the president tried to do. That seemed quite natural to Trump haters.  But for what purpose are representatives sent to Congress?  What if the president tried to do something of actual benefit to the American people?  What if he solved political problems with which numerous administrations have unsuccessfully struggled?  What if he made all Americans better off?  What if he enforced the laws?  Should all of that be resisted?  At least Mitt Romney on becoming a senator announced that he was going to speak out only about the things President Trump does that don’t meet Romney’s supernal moral standards. But Pelosi and Schumer demonstrated that they would resist everything President Trump might attempt.

Minority Leader Schumer and Speaker Pelosi who vowed to resist everything President Trump might attempt to do as President of the United States.

Shortly after the impeachment, Pelosi insisted it wasn’t an action of hate. She averred that she prayed for the president.  If she was publicly committed to resist everything the president does, is she then praying that her own negative, destructive efforts will be frustrated and go for naught? That doesn’t seem very likely. Perhaps she prays that he will immediately be taken up to heaven, as were the prophets Enoch and Elijah.

La Resistance usually relates to the activities of a nation’s patriots resisting an invading and occupying foreign power. But here in the United States it is a group of elite (if not intellectually so) politicians and bureaucrats determined to undermine and sabotage anything undertaken by a(n “illegitimate”) president who was actually elected by many millions of us “deplorables” in the electorate.  When la resistance is undertaken by domestic forces that should actually be the loyal opposition, but who are trying to sabotage and destroy, one wonders when our discussion becomes one about the term sedition.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her impeachment squad of radical socialists.

The Squad. Socialism also has to do with the arrival in congress after the 2018 elections of the self-proclaimed socialist “squad” of four congresswomen who, under the leadership of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, openly declare their advocacy of socialism and especially of the impeachment of the president. It seemed apparent that it was the pressure of the “squad” that pushed Speaker Pelosi into the decision to impeach the president. Pelosi understood the political hazards of impeachment and knew that it must be a bi-partisan exercise if it were to be legitimate. Observing the results of the impeachment, it is clear that the exercise is best described in terms expressed by President Trump.

What’s Behind the Impeachment?

The impeachment itself consists of only two articles.  First, President Trump is found guilty of abuse of power.  The “abuse” consisted of a telephone call to the new President of Ukraine. It was assumed that he called to offer a quid pro quo , viz., he would release promised military aid if an investigation into Vice President Biden and his son Hunter would be undertaken by the Ukraine.

When the President heard the quid pro quo charge, he immediately issued a transcript of the telephone call. The requested investigation related to former Vice President Biden’s son. Hunter, collecting somewhat more than a handsome income to be a member of a Ukrainian corporate board without any apparent qualifications. (Hunter Biden himself suggested in an interview played with some frequency on television that he had often enjoyed various benefits as a result of being the Vice President’s son.) President Trump knew very well that Ukraine had been a very corrupt country. His interest was in assuring that American aid would not be squandered through corrupt, politically-motivated payouts. When President Trump was informed by his staff that the new government could be trusted to clean up the corruption, he released the funds. Such military assistance was never granted at all under the Obama administration, which was willing to give these adversaries of Russia no more than some food and blankets.

It was not President Trump’s fault that a potentially spectacular instance of corruption happened to come from the former vice president of the United States. The President indicated that he was acting in the interests of the United States, being morally obligated to protect American taxpayers by assuring that their funds were not being fraudulently used for corrupt purposes. In my view, he was not simply seeking support for a potential political campaign. But the Democrats required no evidence as to the president’s motives, since they inferred he simply wanted to smear the former vice president and his son for electoral purposes.

Anyone who knows Trump can hardly imagine him fearing Joe Biden as a serious political opponent. It is hard to imagine that a nation of rational democrats could abuse one of their former political heros in his advanced years by actually selecting him as their presidential candidate.

Here we have another instance of psychological projection. Democrats had sought aid from the Russians and Ukrainians to sabotage the Trump political campaign and presidency. From their perspective, why shouldn’t Trump have done the same thing?

Hunter and Joe Biden

Trump stated that he applied no pressure to perform the investigation; he simply wanted Ukraine to do the right thing. President Zelensky said he felt no pressure in his communication with President Trump and U.S. military aid was released without any investigation from Kiev.

Of this affair, USA Today wrote about Biden’s interference in Ukraine when he was responsible for the firing of a minister Shokin who was investigating corruption in the firm that had hired Hunter Biden for its well-paid Board of Directors, even though Biden had no experience with Ukrainian business, the Ukrainian language, or the firm’s business. So one read in USA Today on October 3rd, 2019:

“Biden has boasted about his role in getting Shokin fired. During a 2018 speech at the Council on Foreign Relations, he said he withheld $1 billion in loan guarantees for Ukraine in order to force the government to address the problem with its top prosecutor.

“I looked at them and said: ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well, son of a bitch. He got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time,” Biden said. 

To me, this appears to be a quid pro quo — fire this investigating agent or you will not receive the promised assistance (of food and blankets). 

No crimes were cited in the two articles of impeachment, since the Democrats could find no proof of any crime at all. The second article of impeachment was “obstruction of congress.”  The congress had demanded an inordinately large amount of personal information from the president. This is not unusual for an obstreperous congress, and it has not been unusual for presidents to claim executive privilege and deny the request for unnecessary and potentially damaging personal and official information. What happens next in the conflict of the political powers is that the congress goes to the official referees between congress and the administration – the courts.  Because congress was in a big hurry to get the impeachment done before too far into the 2020 election cycle, they did not go to the courts to try to get their subpoenas. So they then claimed that the president should be cited for “obstruction of congress.”  News flash:  congress is not a national dictatorship. In the division of powers the president cannot obstruct congress. A refusal to honor a court-issued subpoena (not a congress-issued subpoena) might obstruct justice.  But one might ask, if the congress denies the president the traditional and legal executive privilege without recourse to the courts, should the congress be impeached?  No one is above the law! Not even congress!

The DOJ/FBI

James Comey, former Director of the FBI, has been very busy lately trying to spin a recent report of Inspector General Horowitz on the DOJ/FBI surveillance of both Candidate and President Trump. The report found deep problems – corruption is the appropriate term – in the Comey team’s protection of presidential candidate and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. An alliance between the Clinton presidential campaign and the DOJ/FBI leadership initiated a spying operation against President Trump’s campaign, and later against the Trump presidency and administration. Their surveillance against Trump was enabled by the FBI operating under the aegis of the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) Court, which approved of the spying action because of the lies and the omissions supplied by the investigators. The Obama administration’s agents undertook activities involving a British spy, the Russians, and possibly also the former Ukranian administration[3] to surveil and smear the candidate, and later President Trump. 

Former Corruption Director at the FBI, James Comey

It is a comment on the Obama Administration that when emails were being exchanged between FBI officials Strzok and Page, it was mentioned that POTUS wanted to know everything they were doing in the FISA-spying of the Trump campaign.  One can only hope that the investigations underway in the current DOJ under the leadership of AG Bill Barr will reveal the parties and agencies that were working together to spy on and undermine the president, both before and after the 2016 election.

Under the previous administration the FBI and the Department of Justice were led by dishonest partisans apparently lacking morals or conscience. Through their gift of projection, they first spied on the Trump campaign and solicited foreign assistance in their intervention, then they accused Trump and his team of what they themselves had been doing. This led to the Special Council of Robert Mueller and the report that failed to discover any coordination between the Trump campaign or presidency and the meddling Russians.  Well, the Russians did indeed meddle, but it was with the Clinton campaign. It has been thoroughly investigated and demonstrated that they did not coordinate their meddling with Trump’s team.

When the Inspector General’s recent, lengthy report came out, Comey tried to take control of the narrative, claiming he had been exonerated by the report. That was explicitly and immediately denied by IG Horowitz. Then Comey tried to claim that he was surprised to learn of the “sloppy” work of the FBI.  But the FBI work was certainly not mere carelessness; it was a deliberate, criminal effort to spy on and bring down President Trump. Former Director Comey then explained that he could not, at the head of this large organization, know what was going on numerous floors below where he sat. But that cannot be accepted! Ten floors down the agents had no clue at the time what the Director and his minions were doing to the integrity of their proud tradition. Comey and a relatively small number of the top FBI leadership were lying by commission and omission to the courts, and Comey signed the FISA warrants, not the folks ten floors down.

An outraged, abused and persecuted president of the United States wanted to know who these people were who were working so hard to bring him down.  He is, as we have observed, a fighter.  As President of the United States and Commander in Chief, he is the policymaker for our country’s foreign relations. The deep state, intellectual “elites” who bureaucratize foreign policy are not in charge. They are the consultants, perhaps, and analysts, and agents of our foreign policy, but President Trump is in charge. It is obvious that he would want to know what had happened to his candidacy for the presidency and to his administration after the 2016 election.

The “Deep State” Intelligence and Other Agencies

Wikipedia tell us there are 17 separate United States government intelligence agencies. They work separately and jointly to support the national security and foreign policy of the United States. I have every hope that Clapper, Brennen and Comey will receive the legal justice they richly deserve for their unlawful interventions in political affairs currently under criminal investigation.

I have not researched these agencies individually, but on the basis of the research I have done on bureaucracy and organizations generally, I can assure you that this number of agencies is larger than we need. If we had two or three bureaus, perhaps with five or six departments each, that should almost suffice. Such bureaucracies, of course, cannot be adequately overseen by the administration or the congress. The current intelligence agencies spend much money and employ many individuals – so many that they apparently must look for things to do. We have learned recently that they exist to assure the United States that a rogue president shall be reined in to keep from undermining our national security and destroying our country! Such is apparently the conversation of our civil servants.

I call for the immediate freeze on hiring federal civil servants in the United States, the consolidation of our agencies, and the geographic dispersion of the bureaucracy throughout the country.

The U.S. federal bureaucracy is far too large (See the book, Socialism: Origins, Expansion, Decline and the Attempted Revival in the United States on the issue of bureaucracy and the organization of the Obama Administration’s management of welfare policy, taxation, and the economy.) A hiring freeze should be in place for, perhaps, a decade or longer so that the agencies can shrink by attrition through retirements. There should be fewer agencies and they should be placed throughout the country rather than in proximity to Washington, D.C.

The U.S. Communications Media

President Trump has discredited the “fake news” of the mainstream news sources in the United States. Starting with journalism majors in U.S. universities, students are indoctrinated not only into socialism, but also into the notion that as bearers of “news,” they are morally obligated and privileged to convince the public of the virtues of socialism and the abuses of conservatives. For our faux journalists, every reportage is an opportunity to advocate for their cause. But President Trump’s favorite media targets, CNN and the New York Times, have most notoriously been leaders in the campaign to denigrate all things Trump and they are unafraid to bend, distort, and mutilate the truth in their continuous, ongoing smear.

Presently, 66% of Americans say most news media fail to perform in separating fact from opinion. As recently as 1984, only 42% of the populace expressed this conviction.[4] The level of confidence of America in the mainstream media has for some time been in continuous decline. The bias of the “news” sources is apparent, and it comes across as outright bigotry when President Trump is the topic of discussion.

All the forces for impeachment have worked together in the revolutionary spirit of Marx. Socialists have stirred themselves up to a fever pitch in their denunciations of Donald Trump. Perhaps if he had meekly and mildly refused to tweet about his political renunciation of the Democrats, he would have been less harshly and stridently assaulted by the media. But the loathing of the resistance was not really so much a result of anything done after the election as his having the audacity to win an election they all knew was already in the bag for the Democrats.  I personally suspect that if he had been meek and civil, the democrats would merely have added adjectives such as “weak”, “feeble” and “lame” to their list of insults about him.

One hopes that in America’s political future impeachment will not simply be added to the politician’s arsenal of weapons. But it would be so easy for any opposition party with a majority in the House to find some egregious offense, e.g., jaywalking or using the wrong fork on a salad at a state banquet, summarily to impeach the president.

[1]Fox News has been regularly smeared by democrats and the public media, but those who want socialistically uncensored news, Fox is its only cable news carrier. Another unbiased mainstream news source is the Wall Street Journal and its editorial page, where one finds the opinions which  are not injected editorially into the rest of the paper. Most of the socialists’ political reporting is filled with bias.

[2] The statement on the strength of the Trump economy is anything but facetious. By way of contrast, I wrote extensively about the Obama economic disaster in Socialism: Origins, Expansion, Decline, and the Attempted Revival in the United States.

[3] Journalists have asserted falsely that Ukrainian interference in the Trump campaign and our election has been “debunked,” although Politico and the New York Times  have reported on Ukraine’s election meddling. Which Democrat or democratically biased institution would seriously investigate Joe and Hunter Biden?  The Ukrainian interference hasn’t been “debunked,” even if assertions have been made about Biden’s quid pro quo. See the Washington Examiner of December 20, 2019. As of publication, the referenced article is still on line.

[4] This is taken from a major report of January, 2018 from the Knight Foundation on the public’s eroding trust in the mainstream media. See GALLUP PODCAST, January 16, 2018, How Much Confidence Do Americans Have in the Media?

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The Capitalist, Market Vision

Adam Smith, Father of the Discipline of Economics
Markets bring people of trade together.

Capitalism, or the market system, is realistic and eminently applicable, because at its core it is so much simpler than socialism, and is free of the perverse incentives of socialism. It goes back to the simple elements of exchange with which Adam Smith began his analysis.  Market activity derives from the very human propensity to “truck, barter, and exchange.”  In a primitive society, as in a modern, complex one, an individual begins with the simple intention to get something to eat, something to wear, and a place to sleep. He will do that, perhaps, by making and growing these things for himself. But that is difficult for a normal individual because he (and I will say it here but leave it respectfully implicit hereafter) or she may not have the time or the skills to do everything the comfortable life requires. Thus, people quickly learn about specialization and develop a system featuring a division of labor. A person skilled in growing vegetables can grow more than what is personally needed, and the excess vegetables will be exchanged (perhaps through the convenience of money, so the inconveniences of barter can be avoided) for clothing, a roof, furniture, meat and possibly even such things as stamps for a stamp  collection.

Alfred Marshall, the great Victorian economist who taught “the ordinary business of life,” or the market economic system.

Having produced something others want, the creative individual can be expected to exchange his output for other products and services. This will be greatly facilitated by the introduction of money. Thus, superimposed on a system of free exchange, we will have a market economy. Note that this economy is neither intended nor designed to solve the social problem of finding healthy and lasting personal relationships with others. Nor will it solve other problems such as acquiring education, enjoying cultural activities, pursuing charitable projects, enjoying religious associations, and many other non-commercial, personal and private interests. Those things are left to the individual’s personal tastes, aspirations, and desires, and are a part of the private sector left to the enjoyment of free individuals in a free society.

The East German (German Democratic Republic) Flag

In a research stay in East Germany, when it was still under communist rule, I had an interesting host at a University of Economics in East Berlin. He had labored his entire career as an academic for the East German government training the managers of corporations. He was involved from the early, difficult days of building socialism in East Germany after the Second World War, and he had sacrificed much willingly to build a governmental and economic system in the spirit of Marx. He often talked with me about life there and my life in America. Living in a socialist country, he was aghast at the thought that the economy of the United States performed nothing more than commercial functions. Americans, according to his perception, could pursue nothing more in their professional or work life than strictly materialistic ends.

What my friend failed to recognize, being a socialist, was that all the other humanitarian activities outside pure commerce or economics can be done by private parties in the private sector. Socialists fail to recognize that free individuals can organize and implement cultural, social, religious, educational, charitable, and other activities and projects on their own without the state’s assistance or direction.

Socialism from Marx on has always wanted to manage and control all aspects of life. Socialists want to organize all traditional activities that guide citizens in their entertainment, in their leisure time, in their educational pursuits, in their worship (not religion, of course, since they are convinced that all good Marxists and moderns are atheists, required only to worship the noble socialist state), and the state wants to direct all other activities you can think of.

East German socialists controlled movements of their people with the Berlin Wall.

The socialists of today want no less control of their subjects’ lives than the East German communists did. True socialists are prepared to invest their whole lives in establishing a new social order.  After having struggled to obtain power, they are prepared to battle to keep it. They will not permit some political personality or political party to push them out of office and throw over the whole social system they have fought to establish. The Soviets, for example, followed the Marxian advice of setting up power under the vanguard of the Party in order to retain power for the dictatorship of the Proletariat by means as ruthless as necessary. As long as their subjects followed faithfully and quietly, the Party did not bother them. But if anyone stepped out of line, seeking to represent other ideas than those of the Party, or objecting to the Party’s administration of socialist justice, whatever the Party held that to be, the rebellious would be subject to quick correction. If you have not read Solzhenitsyn (whose name and history would justify a brief trip to Wikipedia), you cannot imagine how severe Soviet punishment could become. Deaths under Stalin’s watch made Hitler’s record of human destruction seem quite modest.

Soviets defending the empty shelves of socialist markets

Thus, in short, capitalism is a system of commercial freedoms designed to help consumers and businesses arrange their own affairs successfully as they work and prepare diligently during the work day. When that ends, they can return to their homes and freely pursue all the cultural, educational, charitable, religious, sports, and entertainment activities and projects they choose.  Because free people are motivated, they can build an affluent society that is beneficial for themselves and for their poor and disadvantaged children, neighbors, and friends. They will generally be taught morals and ethics in their schools, rather than socialism, safety, and self-concern, so that there is no necessity to learn socialism’s hate and hostility.

The “values” of an ideologically oriented political party are not the same as those of a cultural or social grouping of free people. The ethics and morals once casually introduced to children as they began their school years has been tragically dropped from America’s classrooms. They have been replaced by the “values” demanding that incomes be redistributed and that political “deplorables” be silenced. Rather than teaching individual responsibility and charitable concern for other human beings, our children are being taught to reject longstanding social traditions e.g., marriage, families, respect for the normal human genders, fair play, personal responsibility, etc. Of course human understanding, tolerance, and acceptance of ethnic and social diversity among people are highly desirable traits that may not have been so strongly emphasized, but were certainly welcomed in America’s past.

The Social Order of the Past. Our youth should be taught personal responsibility and that they have personal equality before the law. The fundamentals of citizenship in the institutions of federalism should be taught as they are laid down in the constitution. The mirage of “democracy” as a system of the ideological domination of a political orientation imposed upon free citizens is what we have developed in the United States in recent decades. The constitution was designed to protect the individual, establishing individual rights against the rule of men as may be imposed by an intolerant majority or by the government itself upon the free individual or upon political minorities.

The Social Order of the Future. The socialist vision is of a society in which political power devolves upon the forces that would suppress the “exploitation” of the working class by commercial forces. It is of a socialist world determined to achieve equality and the elimination of poverty through confiscation of the excess wealth of those who have it, redistributing such wealth to those who are ideologically qualified to receive it. The vision appears to be of a society which requires of individuals no participation in the production of commodities and services, but ideological qualification to pursue a life of leisure and sensory titillation. The political leaders of such a society are bent on making the decisions that will take effective control of the lives of citizens who are less capable of effective, personal decision making. The socialist attitude is that those rebellious citizens who wish to manage their own resources in defiance of social protocols should not be permitted to stir up anti-social sentiment with open criticism of social mores. Their silence will be secured so as to establish social consensus and social order.

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The Socialist Vision

The socialist vision is basically that scarcity need not longer exist. On the basis of new technologies, especially robots and artificial intelligence people will receive a basic universal income whether or not they have a job.  Since there will be plenty of everything, money will not be necessary to receive all that one’s heart may desire.  This is the socialist vision of the future based on “science”.

But the current prospects of production by robots and machines rather than human labor affect the universal basic income notion. Currently and for the forseeable future, If the income were to be universal, the society could not financially sustain anything more than an amount sufficient to cover the most basic personal needs of the recipient.  If a person were prepared to live at a subsistence level, there would be no necessity to work. Recipients of the basic income could live modestly without a job. Higher income taxpayers could also.

Socialists are enthusiastic about this vision of the future. Science and technology are seen as the engines to get us there. The only things standing in the way, according to their view, are the traditions of the past –- social and religious traditions and customs that stand in the way of progress. Society’s reactionary hold on institutions that limit man’s possibilities include religion, marriage, social relationships (which once even condoned servitude and slavery), sexual constrictions, and so on.

Envisioning the Future

The vision is much like the social world constructed by storytellers who can certainly not claim to be social scientists. Thus, they make such claims as that we can understand life and economics through the medium of Star Trek. Some modern fans anxiously peruse the films and literature to discover how to construct a Star Trek vision of an economy beyond scarcity and the need for money.

The modern party strategists who decry President Trump as anti-science, place their faith in their notion of the science of climate change. That science is deprecated by many genuine scientists who are not caught up in the politicization of “global warming” and who do not have a personal interest in promoting climate change ideas. During the presidential campaign raging in 2020, it was particularly irritating to hear totally unqualified political people berating the President’s attitude on science. He attacks phony science and scientists, not science per se. It appeared to me that in the presidential campaign of that period candidates were offering little more than senility, socialism, specious science, sedition, and silliness. But back to the issue of Star War science.

As society’s outputs of goods and services increase along with advances in science and technology, it does in fact become possible to produce the same amount of final products and services with less labor. Robots, as it were, work along with people, or perhaps in the place of some people, in producing a cornucopia of nice things.  Socialists anticipate that fewer and fewer workers will be needed to direct robots in producing the amenities of a wealthy society.  It is assumed that no human labor will be required because technology will eliminate all the jobs.

When robots do all the work, which robots will supervise the other robots?

That there may be a tendency in this direction is not to be denied.  We have been waiting, however, for this superabundance for a very long time. The Luddites come to mind. Luddites were groups of workers in England from around 1811–16 who were organized with the objective of destroying manufacturing machinery. These workers, afraid of being replaced by machines and losing their jobs, were utterly convinced that the use of machines reduced employment. They wished to sneak into factories at night and destroy the machines that threatened their jobs.

People laugh at their naivety today, because scientific progress doesn’t throw people out of jobs for long. We have observed over the last two hundred years since the Luddites, that as fast as technology eliminates some jobs, creative people wanting to make a buck (the nasty “capitalists” whom the socialists disdain) think of many new commodities and services which absorb the unemployed back into the market. As this is being written, unemployment in the economy of the Trump watch is at record lows in spite of the fact that we no longer need telephone operators, elevator operators, or many other workers of the past. The demand for highly-trained/educated people in business leadership is much greater than the available supply. Those with STEM skills in the economy also have no difficulty in finding high-income employment.

But the socialists can’t wait to “disemploy” most of us so that we can spend our time avoiding work, consuming drugs that were always frowned upon by reactionaries in society, and enjoying plenty of uninterrupted time with our devices. Younger generations appear to have no labor aspirations when there are pornography and video games to take up their time.

Millennials socializing in their leisure time.

Associated with the notion of technological unemployment/leisure is the now famous Universal Basic Income. The original idea was one that almost everyone loved. Conservative economists pointed out that an income simply handed out to the poor, unemployed, sick, etc., would save us the cost of a huge bureaucracy of lawyers, social workers, clerks, and other assorted public servants who are involved in getting and keeping needy people taken care of. We wouldn’t have to pay to test the incomes of the recipients, prove whether individuals were really disabled, or perform a lot of other services to decide on how to redistribute incomes.

When such income becomes universal, however, rather than directed to the poor and needy, it would take huge amounts of money for everybody to receive support. In other words, across the vast numbers of people in the economy with their vast needs and wants for commodities and services, there are simply not enough robots to produce that abundance, nor enough robots to supervise them in their productive efforts. Nor is there any likelihood that this picture will change in the foreseeable future.

These are the facts that underlie the addition of the word “basic” to the universal basic income notion. If the income were to be universal, the society could not financially sustain anything more than an amount sufficient to cover the most basic personal needs of the recipient.  If a person were prepared to live at a subsistence level, there would be no necessity to work. Recipients of the basic income could live modestly without a job. Higher income taxpayers could also justly receive this small support, even though their diligence in educating themselves and working at a regular job permitted them a more affluent level of living.

Of course, in a star trek environment as envisioned by socialists, future affluence beyond scarcity would have everybody living well whether employed or not. Again, the socialists are simply in too much of a hurry to arrive at their utopia. We are not even close to that situation yet. The socialist candidates for the U.S. presidency in 2020 have, in fact, totally lost their grip on reality. Their “vision” reminds me of the euphoria of socialist economists with the availability of computers somewhere after the middle of the past century. The Soviet economy, with its central planning, simply could not keep up with the calculations involved in managing a massively large economy with a single economic plan. Under the market system, everyone plans for himself or his firm, or his corporation, or his multinational corporation. But under socialism the government takes over all of those organizations and imposes a single national plan. Knowing precisely what every producer in every city and town in the whole country, and in every hamlet and farm is to produce next year, knowing everyone everywhere who will consume a part of the total output, knowing where everyone will work and how much with what equipment, etc., and what price everyone, everywhere will charge for every commodity and service produced is simply an impossible joke.

But with computers the economists all said: “Hooray, we can calculate everything at super speeds. What they didn’t stop to realize was that all the necessary data had to be gathered, sorted, and assembled for the computers to process. Moreover, it had to be good data, which was not distorted by agents who would gain from tilting it advantageously for their own purposes and private gain. After a year or two of trying to computerize the entire socialist planning system, they simply had to give up on the whole effort. It simply could not be made to work, even with the huge bureaucracy.

The socialists of the present are trying to change the world by having political representatives advocate thoroughly delusional ideas and policies. Modern socialists are as out of touch as the Luddites, or the Soviet economic planners.

The Green New Deal was presented as a ruse to get people to think in terms of the way socialists envision the future. The assumption that we must reduce man’s carbon footprint on nature suggests the wisdom of ending the era of the automobile, completely redoing the housing stock so that it consists of environmentally friendly structures, and much more. Perhaps at least part of the proposals for change reflect anticipated technological advances that will occur in any case. But the implementation of those changes  will occur gradually and most remain a long way off, if they are achieved by market forces rather than through planners’ preferences and hypercentralized techniques. If we proceed in destroying our economy with dumb ideas, it will not support the economic development processes that will one day give us a more high-tech world. Proposed, ill-considered changes would simply leave us with insufficient resources to maintain our current level of economic prosperity.

The socialists’ beliefs about finance are dangerously primitive. They suppose the implementation of foolish plans simply requires spending some money. We have all those billionaires out there who can fund anything if they just pay their “fair share” of taxes. Besides, the government can always print more money to pay for free healthcare for all (all Americans and any foreigners who want to come to California for a free ride through life). In my forthcoming book, as many economists have already pointed out, it will be shown that if we taxed all our wealthy people (say at incomes of $600,000 per year or more) not 70%, but at 100%, we would not come close to having enough money for everyone’s health care or the “Green New Deal.”

It is also primitive and immature to think that printing presses could produce enough funds to accomplish unrealistic fiscal objectives and massive increases in output.  Consider the real economy (the productive resources working at any given moment in time, setting aside the money economy which pays for their use): increases in new infrastructure, housing, and other economic assets, can only be achieved when there are enough machines, laborers, and time actually to construct the new world. An increase in the money supply beyond what the productive resources of the real economy can actually produce will only result in inflation. More money would be chasing the same supply of available goods.   We wouldn’t get greater output from our productive resources as the money available increases, we would just get more expensive output as producers increase prices to ration out their products and services to money-holding buyers anxious to snap up what they can get. So the reality of what our economy can actually produce is not influenced by having the government produce more money.  Such simple economic facts are totally ignored by the unbridled, immature enthusiasm of socialists like AOC, who are able to convince other economically ignorant socialists that there really is pie in the socialist sky.

Capitalism: Origins, Expansion, Decline, and the Attempted Revival in the United States.
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Welcome!

Today’s Chaotic Political Scene

Many of us are unsettled as we see protesters in the street chanting for cops to be shot, or because we see political promises not being kept. Some are a little frustrated because they want to respond according to their own convictions and not according to someone else’s. The uncertainties about which candidates are honest ones or about which party is less threatening, can take a lot of joy out of political participation. You shouldn’t feel badly if you find it difficult to sort out legitimate political assurances from routine political hype.

The White House

The Purpose of this Website

This website is designed to bring knowledge and peace to those unsettled with today’s political landscape.  Both parties have their inadequacies and failings, but one has pursued a growing flirtation with socialism.  The democrats who have withstood or avoided that tendency, unfortunately a relatively small share of the party, are doing fine.  But having made a career-long study of socialism’s theories, history, and implementation, I can warn you that socialism presents issues that have proved disastrous in numerous countries.

I have published a book entitled Socialism: Origins, Expansion and Decline, and the Attempted Revival in the United States. The book has been well received and reviewers have been more than generous with their praise, which is sampled on another page of this website.

What the Book Socialism is all about

Socialism is all about the economics of socialist society, how it is organized and how it functions. The book is over 900 pages because it addresses all aspects of socialism. It first reviews the original ideas, sometimes ancient ones, in socialism’s history before and after Karl Marx. It also investigates the countries that have adopted socialist or Marxist-Leninist theories – the Soviet Union, some Soviet bloc countries, India and China.

It also reviews the attempt to establish socialist economies in the democratic countries of Western Europe in the century after Marx, down to the time that nationalization of industry and the centralization of economic decision making proved ineffective and an abject failure. It was then that socialism as an economic system disappeared.  

Finally, the book investigates socialism in the United States, discussing the reasons why it always failed at the ballot box; Franklin D. Roosevelt introduced a number of socialist policies and such policies were revisited with the presidency of Barack Obama. One can laud the good intentions of socialists, but this book explains why socialism has never succeeded and why it cannot succeed.

Reviews.  The book’s reviews were very positive and are found on this website.

The Berlin Wall. Combined with then available technologies, it kept people in.

The Author.  In 1961 I was living in Berlin when the wall was built! I saw the concrete, the barbed wire, and read of the people shot trying to escape to West Berlin and freedom. I went home to the United States to continue my studies, hoping to find out why a country must build a wall to keep its people from fleeing.  I took courses in Marxism as an undergraduate, and studied comparative economic systems, then went on for a PhD in economics at Ohio State. I became a professor at the University of Arizona where I taught economic systems, and international trade and finance.  Twenty years later I transferred to the Marriott School at Brigham Young University. Over that forty plus years of my career I researched socialist systems, spent sabbaticals and research time living in West Berlin, in communist East Berlin (Karlshorst), and in Marburg, Munich, and Duisburg Germany, Vienna, London, and Moscow.

Parts of the wall received notoriety for their graffiti.

In November of 1989 I attended a conference in West Berlin on German Unification in the 1800s.  During the week of the conference, the Communist Politbuero in East Berlin announced on the radio that the Wall open.  So I was present at the construction of the Wall and almost thirty years later for the opening and the subsequent demise of the Wall. 

The fatal problems of socialism

Note that the socialist economic system consisted of two primary tasks: First, to take over completely the private sector – the private economy – with its hundreds of thousands of businesses and millions of consumers – to own and manage the economy in detail. But detailed management of millions of workers, consumers, and firms is impossible even for a huge bureaucracy in Washington, D.C.

The second task of socialism is to tax money away from those who have it and to give it to those who do not.  These twin methods of nationalization and income redistribution constitute socialism.  But historically, when nationalization failed to work, there was nothing left for socialism but redistribution.  Nationalization and economic planning and centralization attempt to replace millions of individual, private economic plans with one over-reaching, overly ambitious government plan that becomes a bureaucratic nightmare unable to account adequately for the innumerable economic variables involved. Socialism thus exhausted its unique economic initiatives, since the other, non-socialist political parties also adopted income redistribution and welfare policies. Nothing original remained for the socialists to advocate in the field of economics except pushing redistribution to the extreme of financial failure.

  • The Huge Financial Problem that Socialism Ignores.  Socialism provides many subsidies, but there will never be enough funds to take care of all social needs over the long haul– the funds required to take care of a whole country from cradle to grave are far more than the total incomes of all the rich. lf we taxed away their entire incomes, receipts would not be enough to fund “Medicare for all!”, let alone all the proposals (including the “Green New Deal”) socialists will promote henceforth. For detailed evidence of the assertions I make here, scroll down from “Welcome, Friends” to the list of blogs that have been posted.  There, see “Socialist Spending Plans and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC)” and “The Seventy Per Cent Income Tax of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.”
Venezuela: Once a Beautiful and Rich Country

National Fiscal disaster waits at the end of the socialist road.  But there are additional unintended consequences of socialism. Dependence, frustration, and the loss of dignity and freedom are also the consequences of the tyranny required to establish and maintain control of the socialist system over time. A look at Venezuela today shows that socialism’s consequences can include poverty, hunger, hyperinflation, tyranny and violence.

Today, Venezuela is a battleground between a starving populace and an oppressive regime.
Chavez and President Obama. Both hoped to transform their countries.

Why Redistribution Stops Economic Growth and produces an equality of poverty.  Society’s very wealthy and even its relatively affluent households are continually saving for their future, for retirement and to leave something for their children.  These savings are a pool of money available to individuals and firms wanting to invest in new industrial equipment, new innovations, new technologies, and the things that produce new jobs and economic growth for the whole economy.  If society decides to confiscate through socialistic taxation all those savings for the purpose of free education, a universal income for those unwilling to work, and new, green housing, etc., all the funds available for investment and growth are simply consumed. They disappear.  It’s like eating the seed corn! The resources consumed in socialist programs totally eliminate savings and investment for new innovations, new firms, new technologies, new factories and equipment — and growth screeches to a halt. In the meantime, consumers, who get what they need through subsidies, no longer have an incentive to work hard, get training and education, save, and build for a bright future. They are prepared to relax and share an equality that turns out to be one of stark poverty.

Borrowing Money for Current Socialist Expenditures.  But that’s not all!  In the United States, if there is not enough money for a social project, the government simply borrows in the Obama fashion, spending more than they could possibly pay back.  But we reach a point where people and countries do not trust the U.S. Treasury and they will only loan to us at high interest rates. Gradually, most of our budget goes for paying the interest on our loans, which amounts currently to about $500 billion per year, and when the government can no longer meet its payments, the whole financial system collapses.

Overactive printing presses produce hyperinflation

Printing Money   If the government follows the American socialist idea of simply printing money, as Venezuela has done, you soon find that you have to pay a million dollars for a loaf of bread.  This we call hyperinflation.  On occasion the European Union has nightmares about this outcome as countries like Spain, Italy, Greece, Portugal, Ireland start to drift toward insolvency and financial collapse.  Venezuela is even further down the socialist financial path than Europe.

Humanity has always longed for freedom.

Consider now the loss of Freedom in socialism.  In the rebuilding period in Europe after the Second World War, Friedrich Hayek and others observed how the socialist attempt to implement economic planning and tight control over their formerly market economies leads to a loss of freedom.  The Nobel Prize winning Hayek called this The Road to Serfdom. 

Brutal oppression is necessary to avoid protests and riots once socialists are in power.

Socialists take over because of their loathing of markets and capitalists. They confiscate the property and wealth of the so-called bourgeoisie, the wealthy and affluent, then they install an economic planning regime in which a large government bureaucracy makes all the decisions. A dictatorship of the proletariat has the task of maintaining control and preventing a counter-revolution by those who don’t want to give up all their wealth, property and businesses to the government. People also complain about the arbitrariness and extreme inefficiency of the central economic planning. Then, when the party’s media have to control thought and speech, we find ourselves on the way to a virulent dictatorship. In the United States this will be a little different, since even before the revolution (or coup) the media have given themselves over to be a voluntary propaganda ministry for the socialist party. This occurred even before the main broadcasting stations and newspapers devoted themselves to full-time Trump hating.

The world has experienced tyranny before. Europe’s was nothing compared to that of Stalin, Mao, and other socialists.

If you observe the attitudes of socialists, their body language and their public statements, in their resistance of the office of the President of the United States today, you cannot help but see the hostility and hatred they exude. Can you doubt that such individuals will fail to use power, if they can get it, to enforce their own will without compromise – dictatorially?

What is my objective?

I would like to give encouragement to the talented and creative young people struggling with student debt and many others who are often discouraged about their future prospects.   Many have been struggling with joblessness and low wages.  But there is hope in this wonderful country as employment opportunities have increased surprisingly under President Trump. It will also become increasingly possible for people to get education and training and to qualify for jobs. Many are striving to seize the opportunity to work and to make something of their lives. Socialism offers to subsidize us with someone else’s money and with government goodies to take care of us.  I want people to realize that happiness does not come from a handout – it comes from having worked and succeeded in making something of our lives. And Americans want that. As the economy has recovered in the past couple years, people have been fleeing the welfare rolls, anxious to go back to work.

Finally, all of us need to learn what socialism is and the hazards it presents to our nation’s treasury, to our personal freedoms, and to our prosperity.

The market economy produced the American dream for the American family.

Friends, as you can see from the menu at the top of the page, this website has a link to “Order a Copy” of the book.  I turned down a prestigious publisher, who offered to publish my work as three separate volumes and charge $120 for each volume (or $360 for the whole set). Instead, I published all three volumes as one massive book with Xlibris so you could buy an electronic copy at a very low price ($3.99), or a paperback copy ($15.67 at Amazon) or hardbound copy ($23.88) at a very reasonable price. Check it out.  If you buy, your friends may think you are a genius.



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Dr. Sanders and the “Right” to Free Health Care.

An individual must study for about fifteen years to become an MD. He pays for his education or, perhaps, goes in debt to receive it.  He studies and labors valiantly year after year to gain the skills needed, to locate a position where he can sell his services in order to feed a family and pay off educational debts.

Should doctors be paid for utilizing their skills and training?

Such an individual has a “right” to sell his services, not to give them away because someone else has a “right” to claim them free of charge. Does a “right” to free health care give one the right to force a doctor to serve him on a pro bono basis?  According to Senator Sanders, doctors and all the other providers of health care will still be able to sell their services to the government after their industry has become nationalized. Then the government will determine all the prices charged for every health care transaction and also each individual who will receive any given health care service. The government bureaucracy will determine everything.

Democratic presidential candidate, Sen. Bernie Sanders, indoctrinated Marxist, “Democratic Socialist.”

Dr. Sanders, of course, says “Free health care means only that it’s free at the point of receiving the service.”  Of course it will be paid for by the government, which means that taxpayers will have to pay for everyone’s health care.  We will no longer be able to arrange our own services through our own doctor for procedures of our own choosing. Those medical procedures will not be financed by our private health insurance, or according to our ability to pay for such services.

Socialist health care will be affordable, we are told by Dr. Sanders, because health care customers will no longer have to pay for insurance contracts or deductibles.  We will only have to pay our taxes, which will be quite low, since tax revenues from billionaires will pay for all medical services.

Sweden, an egalitarian society, correctly calls itself a capitalist society. Here, everyone works and everyone pays taxes. It’s not as “democratic socialists” portray it.

The only problem is whether a few billionaires could actually pay for all healthcare for millions of Americans.  Let us assume that we tax away the entire incomes of all billionaires, all millionaires, and everybody who makes $600,000 a year or more. Assume they will not merely pay some generous portion of their large incomes, but their entire incomes – every penny of what they take in during the tax year. That total would not come close to the cost estimates for “Medicare for all.” These wealthy folks do not begin to receive enough income to pay for the $23 trillion estimate for the medical costs involved for ten years of socialist healthcare. (For more detail, see the my other blogs on AOC finance.)

“Come back in six months and we’ll bandage you up!”

So a lot more tax will be involved than Dr. Sanders wishes to reveal. Many more of us will find that our tax bill for “Medicare for all” will be substantially higher than we currently pay. The gracious bureaucracy will, as bureaucracies always do in socialist healthcare programs, spare us by making every effort to hold down the mushrooming healthcare costs. They will limit what doctors can earn with price freezes, driving many young doctors and would-be medical students away from the practice of medicine and older doctors into early retirement. This will mean an increase in medical costs as the demand for “free” services seeks to expand without restraint and the supply of services shrinks in the face of controlled, minimal prices.  With the increasing shortage of services, they will be rationed.  That means that we will have to wait in the public queue for healthcare for some time before receiving the more limited services available. 

Break an arm in March, get it set in September.  Friends of mine moving back to the United States from Canada related to me the case of a friend who, to the horror of my friends and their Canadian acquaintance, had this exact experience. It’s why Canadians who can afford genuine health care come south to the United States and willingly pay for their own health care). Get diagnosed with cancer in May and begin radiation treatments 14 months later.  This is the standard experience of socialized medicine.

Venezuela’s prosperity and social equality.

Bernie, like other socialists, will never explain In advance how they hope to avoid the health care problems of socialism. They merely assume that we have a “right” to free stuff, without understanding the simple economics which demonstrate the folly of their ideology.  They don’t learn economics, they simply learn ideology.  That’s why the beautiful country of Venezuela decided that socialism was the way for them to achieve paradisaical glory. They implemented the socialist ideology only to reap shortages, the resultant increasing governmental controls that are the quick first step to tyranny, the perverse incentives of “free stuff” and the declining production inevitably a part of socialism, the implementation of militarization to manage a dissatisfied and increasingly dysfunctional social order, and the ultimate results we have observed coming from Caracas – hyperinflation, social dissent and the militarization to counter it, extreme want, and violence.

Socialist promises are not delivered as economics lessons, but as ideology.

Bernie Sanders is not inclined to explain just what is implied in his saying that “Democratic socialism means we have an economy that works for all, not just for the very wealthy.” He receives cheers and whistles from his campaign audiences for a vague and sweeping statement like: Under Democratic Socialism  “the rich and the powerful don’t get to call all the shots when it comes to the economy.” He offers no explanation as to how the rich and powerful owners – to be explicit, those who have through their 401K invested in firms which they and other stockholders own –  will be forced to give up the rights of private property so that a socialist community can help “call the shots” of corporate America.

Bernie himself will probably continue to deny that his plans would put us on the path to Venezuelan economic life. But a recent Wall Street Journal Editorial (“All Bernie’s Socialists”) of April 9, 2018, reviewed published statements of four of his leading campaign aides and speechwriters. These Sanders socialists made it clear that they not only admire the Chavez/Madura creation of Venezuela’s socialist model, “by their own words, they want America to emulate it” (Page A16). Theirs is an aspiration for full-on nationalization and income redistribution, i.e., for Stalinist-style central economic planning and organization.

Socialism: Origins, Expansion, Decline, and the Attempted Revival in the United States.
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Communitarian Experiments in America, Part II

The Character of Community Leaders and Followers

Charles Nordhoff studied and visited the communes of his day. Writing before the end of the 19th century, his description of the social aspects of communal life was widely known. He found that those communes were often better organized than individual farms in the overall economy, with a more complete division of labor and a more thorough work plan. Nordhoff expressed surprise at the business and mechanical skill extant in every commune, and the ease and certainty with which the brains came to the top.

His significant conclusion was that the fundamental principle of communal life was that individuals must subordinate their will to the general interest: practically, that requires unquestioning obedience by the members toward the leaders of the society.

Communes were more efficient than the usual farm.

In Nordhoff’s view, the character of the communal leaders affects the development of the society over which they preside. The leader’s force and ability form the habits and even the thought of his followers. The communes of Nordhoff’s era were usually “quite democratic” with no member playing the role of a servant. Often, practicing managers were elected to be in charge of business dealings.

Historians reported that communal life was rewarding for many.

On occasion he saw the democratic aspect of the communes as a liability. Nordhoff referred to the community members as “communists,” for the word had not yet taken on the implications it assumed after communist parties were organized in Europe. He found his communists clean and tidy, if not fashionable. As neighbors, they were honest, reliable and good workers. As one would expect, they were as humane and charitable as their generally religious orientation suggested. Their animals were better cared for than those of many of their neighbors. Communal members enjoyed good longevity, eating well, retiring early, and refraining from alcohol (only Germans used wine and beer). When they were ill or grew old, they were tenderly cared for. They often lived to eighty or ninety years and remained robust and active. Communal life provided greater variety for daily labor, enhancing their versatility and abilities. They enjoyed a wider range of wholesome entertainments and leisure time activities with greater restraints against “debasing pleasures.” Nordhoff praised that life because it gave the participants independence, inculcating prudence and frugality. Self-sacrifice generally restrained selfishness and greed; increasing the happiness which comes from the moral side of human nature. Participants were shielded from the dread of misfortune or exposure in old age.

Nordhoff found the cultural interests and opportunities in the communes unnecessarily restrictive. Communes should own the best books, have music, eloquent lecturers, pleasant landscapes and fine architecture on their grounds. Too many were puritanically sparse with cultural refinements. Nevertheless, he concluded that the communist life was much freer from care and risk, easier, and much better in all material aspects. He sincerely wished the communitarian life would enjoy further development in the United States.

Another important scholar of communitarian life, Arthur Bestor, pointed out that the communitarians themselves, even the religious ones, liked to describe their proposals in terms of experimentation. He cites the view on experimentation of William Maclure, colleague of Robert Owen at New Harmony. According to Maclure, each township might experiment on everything that could enhance their happiness and comfort, so long as it did not interfere with the interests of their neighbors. Thus this great diversity of political, moral, and religious experimentation could add to the facility and utility of their manufactures and useful arts. Any failed experiment could only hurt the designers and implementers of the speculation, nullifying their mistakes and eliminating their errors.

The Marxists also pointed out this distinction, writing about it unfavorably, of course. They contrasted it to their own revolutionary approach, which they saw as superior. Thus Friedrich Engels wrote that the utopians attempted to wrest the solution of social problems arising from economic conditions from the human brain. For Marxists, it seemed necessary to discover a new and more perfect system of social order and to impose this upon society from without by propaganda. Bestor concludes that the communitarian’s faith in social harmony (as opposed to the Marxian class warfare) was obviously the preference of Americans in general. Communitarian emphasis on voluntary action corresponds exactly to the American conception of freedom. The experimental aspect of communitarianism had great appeal for a nation of experimenters, which viewed even itself as an experiment. And sensing no class warfare, American communitarians could fit into organizations with which they could identify with little difficulty.

We must recognize, of course, that successful, small scale experimentation may not transfer seamlessly to success at the national level. The small communal institutions may supply some inspiration, and even some instruction, but would successful leadership at the communal level have the same characteristics as national leadership in a socialistic country? Would the membership, work force, and voting-level citizenry in a successful commune have the same characteristics as those in a socialist nation? Are the financial, social and political characteristics of a successful communal organization identical to those of the socialist state? We sense after a review of the communal utopias of the past that we are better equipped to think about socialism at the national level; we know a lot more than we would have known if the utopias had never existed at all. The major issue remains, of course, the voluntarism of the commune as opposed to the governmental enforcement of national-level socialism. There is certainly a place for experimentation in governance questions.

Why would one invest in a commune?

Some of the experiments began with strong advantages: charismatic leadership, devoted and diligent followers, cultural, ethnic, and lingual unity, and the compelling and uniting force of faith in a benevolent Deity. But the united effort produced initially was difficult to sustain. Experiments without these benefits were difficult even to get started. Thus, the utopias did not prove to be a means for the reshaping of the world or of bringing about a society that might supplant the market system. If that is so and if the task of building a social system is difficult on a small scale, we are constrained to ask how a huge society’s economic experiment with socialism can be perceived to be as simple a task as winning an election and calling the party faithful to action. Asking an entire nation to work to sustain a system that requires huge taxes and sacrifice for one large segment of the social fabric and offers entitlements that ostensibly allow the cessation of personal labor, sacrifice and taxation for another large segment of the population may not be as simple as implementing legislative chicanery to pass a healthcare law.

Conclusions

The United States are a huge country of very diverse population; its religious points of view are divergent, its social unity shattered by the exploitation and magnification of ethnic differences by the very politicians who abhor unity while decrying its absence. Let us conclude by noting some of the more significant differences between local and national socialism, the former being some variant of the communitarian organizations we have been discussing.

Opting out of socialism at the national level would require fleeing the country.

First, socialism of the communitarian type is chosen by the participant, who can opt out. Socialism of the national type is chosen by the voters or the leader of the revolution and imposed on all other citizens. Individual communitarians are permitted to abandon a communal organization, but citizen socialists would have to flee the hosting nation to do so. Second, communitarianism is financed by the participants. If practiced today, the communitarians must pay for their own community, not to mention the taxes paid to fund the financial projects and activities of state and federal governments as well. That is to say that state socialism would be expected to “crowd out” attempts to participate in communitarianism, which is local socialism. Third, communitarians desire to demonstrate a better way for a society to live. Socialists are convinced that they already know the better way and wish to impose it upon their fellow citizens. Fourth, communitarians generally expect to contribute to their living by participating in some kind of work. Socialism has eliminated work requirements for citizens; those citizens who work very productively however, will be heavily taxed in the American model. This contrasts with the Scandinavian model of social welfare capitalism, which holds that all citizens should share in bearing the burden of taxation. Fifth, communitarians may opt for a purely secular lifestyle or a more religious lifestyle, depending on the particular organization they choose to join. Citizens of a socialist nation may only choose to be a part of a secular community. At this juncture, they may still choose to associate with a private religious group of their choice.

Capitalism: Origins, Expansion, Decline, and the Attempted Revival in the United States.
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Communitarian Experiments in America, Part I


An Evaluation of Private Sector Socialism*

Many utopian communities have been established in America since the 18th century. Relatively small groups of people would join together, acquire some land and form a community of people anxious to work and share as a kind of private, socialist family. A number were formed by groups that had fled religious persecution in Europe. They were often based on religious views by groups looking for a better way of life that would lead to personal salvation. Their leaders hoped their religious systems would play an important role in the redemption of mankind. Other utopian communities were viewed as laboratories of social experimentation motivated by secular and social purposes.

Many of the early communitarians were pursuing their religious beliefs.

Whether formed for sectarian or secular purposes, some of these groups were more revolutionary than the larger, working-class movements of European socialists. The communitarians were different from Europe’s working class movements in that they attempted to withdraw completely from mainstream society rather than openly revolt against it. They attempted to build ideal commonwealths so that the world might follow their example. They sometimes tried to eliminate sex or ethnic discrimination, and they sought to abolish private property; they sought to base human relationships upon fair-dealing and respect for their neighbors, as well as upon scrupulous craftsmanship in their business transactions.

Many hundreds of communes dotted the 19th century map of the United States.

But history demonstrated more failures than successes among such communities. Only a small number of them lasted longer than a hundred years. Many vanished within a few months of their founding.  These communes were early considered a “communitarian” movement because the community was at the heart of their plans. Communitarianism was seen as collectivistic, not individualistic; it was resolutely opposed to revolution, and was impatient with gradualism. The experimental communities aspired to be capable of accomplishing an immediate, thoroughgoing reform, and they hoped society at large would be capable of adopting the discoveries of successful experiments.

_________________________

*This blog is a summary of a long chapter on communitarian organizations in the history of the United States. I refer here to important studies of the communitarian societies. For the references and the details of such studies, see my book, Socialism: Origins, Expansion, Decline, and the Attempted Revival in the United States, Chapter 7, “Utopian Socialism in Communitarian America.”

The book Socialism reviewed a number of the most frequently reported examples of communitarianism in a substantial chapter on the topic. The reader is invited to learn more about Ephrata; the Shakers; the German Inspirationists at Amana, Economy, and Zoar; George Rapp at Economy, at Zoar; Amana; Robert Owen in America; Mormons and the “United Order;” Brook Farm, prelude to the phalanx; Fourier; Oneida; the Bishop Hill Commune, Cabet and the Icarians; the Hutterites; Cyrus Reed Teed; Henry George; and Roosevelt’s New Deal Communities as reported in my book. The communitarian groups are of abundant diversity, so a great deal can be learned from each case about how groups have functioned historically in various situations. Obviously, one can hardly make sweeping generalizations about how the experiences of those groups might provide insights into the functioning of socialist nations.

Many communitarians lived on the land.

We can observe, however, that socialism at the federal level requires the coercion that can overcome the opposition to income redistribution, to the confiscation of private property and businesses in nationalization schemes, to the elimination of various liberties associated with market economies, and so on. The communitarian schemes were important because they were seeking a way to permit individuals and groups to live communally without forcing an entire nation to adopt a sweeping form of collectivism. As already mentioned, however, the histories of the communitarian experiments seemed to demonstrate more failures than successes, for most groups failed to last more than a few months.

Karl Marx, spiritual father of socialism at the national level

One must keep in mind the huge differences between local and national socialism. The desire of communitarians is to demonstrate a better way for a society to live. Socialists are convinced that they already know the better way and hope to recruit by any possible means sufficient voters or revolutionaries to impose their desired way of life upon their fellow citizens. (Historically, they have often been willing to impose their views at the point of a gun.) Members of communitarian groups can opt out, but if the socialists can achieve a successful revolution or conquer via the ballot box, they can impose their will on society as a whole, except for those who can flee the country.

For more than a couple centuries the United States was almost uniformly convinced that market freedoms and individual liberties would best serve human happiness and prosperity. If a socialist regime had come to power only to demonstrate the standard liabilities of socialism, voters would have thrown that government out of office with dispatch.

Brutal oppression is necessary to avoid protests and riots once socialists are in power.

Today, given the numbers of those who seek entitlements, subsidies, and the fruits of social activism, the power to impose the will of minority groups upon the majority appears to be increasing. That growth may be enough to place in doubt the political viability of those who prefer individual liberties and an environment that provides the reward of prosperity for learning and labor. In the past, individual communities could withdraw from society to organize according to their own preferences. But under any future socialism under contemporary conditions of global economic integration it would not be possible for groups of other persuasion to withdraw from a socialist society to form a small, independent market community.

Scholars have rather arbitrarily agreed that a communitarian organization (such as a commune) can be considered a success if it lasts at least 25 years. From a sociological perspective, the survival of a commune depends on a value system shared by the members, as well as a number of other factors, especially the organizational leadership and the transmission of the society’s culture to children and converts.

In the United States, the driving motivations for communal organization have been religion, social reform, and escapism. If communes are to endure, they must retain shared values and must demonstrate economic adaptability to maintain effective, organized governance. One study observed that In Danish communes, where there is considerably less social opposition, failure of communes is much more frequently due to internal communal factors, e.g., the personal motives of individual members, their internal personal conflicts, their excessive individualism, the lack of effective communal organization and poor planning.  

Another study analyzed communal success in the United States in 281 cases from 1683 to 1937 as being functionally dependent on (i) being a pietist religious sect, (ii) leadership that successfully induces commitment, (iii) allowing some private property, and (iv) with some qualification, having anarchic governance. Political anarchism involves voluntary association of cooperative groups rather than normal, centralized governmental institutions. It is generally felt among scholars that success in communal endeavors depends on the commitment of the participants. Additionally, the likelihood of success is enhanced when leaders make some concessions to egoistic concerns of participants.  It was found that when continuance, cohesion, and control strategies are applied to solidify commitment, personalities are bound to social systems and their functions. When those strategies were employed, 19th century American utopian communities were generally successful, i.e., enduring.

When members of a communal organization are asked to sacrifice, i.e., to give up something as a price of membership, their motivation to remain will increase. Membership becomes more “sacred,” more valuable and meaningful if such sacrifice is made. Communion is defined as becoming an integral part of the self with the group. Homogeneity was also achieved through the general acceptance by the participants of the same communal conditions and the leadership’s demands for sacrifice over a period of time. Factors likely to produce homogeneity included, for example, common religious background; similar economic, educational status; common ethnic background; prior acquaintance of members; communistic sharing; property signed over at admission; signed-over property received while a member; the community as a whole owned land; the community as a whole owned buildings; the community as a whole owned furniture, tools, equipment; the community as a whole owned clothing, personal effects; communistic labor; no compensation for labor; no charge for community services; no skills requirement for admission. These are only part of the factors that can structure communal life in such a way as to enhance the feelings of commitment participants have for their communal situation.

With these considerations it becomes more readily apparent why achieving long-term success in such organizations is difficult and rather rare. But where communities did succeed by surviving for an extended period, observers found much therein to admire and hope to preserve for the diversity of social life.