The myths that inspire socialists and "progressives"

If someone told you they wanted to introduce a new system of government that would

•  greatly restrict individual freedom;
•  would murder or imprison millions if they objected;
•  would drastically reduce your standard of living; and
•  would encourage children to spy on parents and report them to the government

...most rational people would tell that person, in very direct terms, to f-off.

This is why the people who push socialism--including so-called “progressives”--cunningly wrap their proposals in inspiring myths and propaganda.  Not surprisingly, despite the ghastly failures of socialism, millions of Americans of all ages accept most or all of these myths as true. 

Filled with socialist slogans, and dreams of a glorious future in which everyone has plenty and no one has to struggle, those who accept the myths and lies have become a major source of Democrat-party votes and power.

Yesterday two guys published an analysis of these myths.    I've edited those below, but it's well worth your time to read the original.

The coup that marked the start of the Russian Revolution happened on Nov. 7, 1917.  What came next was the real revolution, as the communists abolished private propert--and with it, individual rights.  All authority and decision-making power rested with the communists.

In the novel Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak provided an unforgettable description of the process:

Everywhere there were new elections: for the running of housing, trade, industry, and municipal services. Commissars were appointed to each-- men in black leather jerkins, with unlimited powers and iron will, armed with the means of intimidation and revolvers. They knew the shrinking bourgeois breed, the average holder of cheap government stocks, and spoke to them without the slightest pity and with Mephistophelean smiles, as to petty thieves caught in the act. These were the people who reorganized everything according to plan.  [Everything] became "Bolshevised."

The result was that civil society vanished into chaos.  But to the communists this wasn't a bug, but a feature.

One of the core myths of communism is that it's superior to capitalism.  At this point, people of average intelligence should be moved to ask, "Superior how, exactly?"

The usual response from the communists is that communism would "bury capitalism," thru greater economic output.  This claim was the core of Marxist / Leninist theory:  When the workers "threw off their chains" — freed from exploitation under greedy capitalist bosses -- the state would take care of everyone’s needs.  Workers would no longer have to struggle to find a job, or pay for food or housing or medical care or transportation or education, because the Party would provide everything.

And of course the Party would treat everyone equally.

One of the keys to this economic marvel was the miracle of central planning.  As Marx and Lenin saw it, the free market was horribly inefficient, in part because there was no brilliant central authority telling all those companies what to produce, and how much of each of tens of thousands of goods should be produced to make everything come out right. 

Marx and Lenin were convinced the free market was no better than randomly-moving molecules.  What was needed was a central planning authority that would organize things.  And to people who didn't understand Adam Smith's "invisible hand," that notion made perfect sense.

And yet it didn’t work.  Right from the start, it did not work--partly because in a command economy there's no feedback mechanism telling producers that people want more of X but less Y.
Faced with severe bread shortages, Lenin ordered farmers (peasants) to turn over their harvest to the state — at prices so low they couldn’t cover their production costs.  Lenin was surprised to find that the peasants responded by planting less, and selling as much of their product as they could on the black market. Many traveled to nearby cities and towns and sold food from sacks on their backs.

Lenin ordered that such “bagmen” should be shot on sight--and still the black market grew.  To starving people, hunger and starvation were a greater threat than a policeman’s bullet.

As food production continued to fall, Lenin relented, endorsing a New Economic Plan that, at least temporarily, allowed peasants to sell produce on the market. 

If any communist apparatchik realized that the profit motive and free-market pricing are very at matching supply to demand, and that the profit motive drives innovation and spurs people to work harder, no one was willing to risk telling this to Lenin.

By huge contrast, with the State providing everything, there was no thing to motivate anyone to work hard and be creative.

Think of how different that is from the voluntary exchange in a free society — where people compete with one another to satisfy the needs of others.

Another powerful propaganda piece of socialist dogma is that all profit was theft, and thus served no useful purpose.  It followed that the only way anyone could amass great wealth was by exploiting workers.  Certainly both these points struck the average low-information citizen as perfectly logical.  What the communists never mentioned was that profit was a huge motivator.


One of the nagging little unresolved problems of communism was how many people the system either exiled to Siberian jails ("the Gulag") or simply executed outright.  But the leaders had a good answer: Because "everyone agreed" that communism was the best of all possible worlds, it followed that anyone trying to block its implementation must be an enemy of the state.  Because the stakes were so huge, it was worth killing or exiling those few "enemies" who refused to go along.  Right, comrade?

As comrade Lenin put it, you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs.  The fact that the “eggs” were actually human beings was never mentioned.

The same logic was used to justify having school teach kids to "inform" on their parents.  As the leaders saw it, this wasn't even a negative, but was a necessary step to achieve the perfect socialist state as quickly as possible.

Communists tout China's booming economy as proof of the superiority of communism.  But China's economy didn't start growing after Deng Xiaoping opened China to foreign investment and global markets.  He took an even bigger step in 1984 when he allowed peasant farmers to sell in the open market.

But the trifecta was when Deng denounced one of the core concepts of Marxism: that profit was theft.
Instead Deng said “To get rich is glorious.” He and other Chinese leaders since then have systematically freed ownership of the means of production in many other areas.One upshot of that: China has been producing new billionaires at a faster rate than any country in the world and — according to Forbes— will soon have more billionaires than the United States. But the still more important upshot is this: In both India and China, rapid business formation has driven rapid economic growth… and accounted for the greatest anti-poverty program in recent times — lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty over the last couple of decades.

Every form of socialism — from the mild to the murderous — depends upon government coercion and the curtailment of liberty — including the forcible redistribution of wealth and demands for an ever-growing list of “free” services by government.  It is more than a little disturbing that so many Americans have jumped on the progressive bandwagon.