Why I am not a Socialist

A fundamental error of socialism. Be sure to use the subtitles, they help with following the video.

Socialism is not the answer to an oppressive oligarchy of rich capitalists. To see this, let’s examine the central idea of Marxism first.

This is the basic premise of Marxism. As time goes on and people use their property and resources to gain more, some people will have more than others. These resources will then be reinvested to gain more and more wealth until eventually a small group of people will own everything. This small group of people will be the employers for the rest of the population. Also, everyone else will have to purchase whatever they need from this small group. This wealthy elite provide nothing of value to society. They simply own the factories, money needed for investments, etc. Marx said that eventually the laborers will rise up and take over the means of production, and create a socialist utopia. While this hasn’t happened in the well over 150 years of socialist theory, many today believe we are living in the last days of capitalism. It’s probably all over your social feed if you know what to look for.

There is some merit to this view. The fundamental principle that under girds this is a transcendent truth. It does take money to make money. The more you have, the more you can make. For example, when I turned 16, my mother bought me a small truck. I used this truck to go to work. I made minimum wage which was $4.75 per hour. 5 years later, I was in college making $8 per hour at the same grocery store as before. A friend of mine was 16 and got a job. But he was poorer. His parents shared one vehicle. He had to work for less than minimum wage because there was only one job opportunity for him in walking distance of his home. He made $4.75, even though the minimum was now $5.15. This small example illustrates how wealth can accumulate and benefit some. Over time, a small group can hold so much wealth that they hold all the power. Capitalists argue that over time everyone becomes wealthier. But socialists respond by saying that it’s the percentage that really matters. As long as a tiny elite hold the lion share of the nation’s wealth, they can control the means of production by buying out everyone else.

As true as all of this is, there is a big flaw. In other words, this Marxist view is only half of the truth. It leaves out a glaring fact. There are multiple rich guys. For example, if you are not being paid enough, then go work for the other rich guy. If the first boss is ripping you off and profiting greatly from your labor, then his or her competitor would be delighted to steal you away. In this way, it’s a free market that allows you to be paid fairly. Your freedom to quit any job and the employer’s freedom to hire whoever he or she likes assures that you will be paid the true value of your work. Of course it’s difficult to simply switch jobs. So your employer can rip you off, but only to a point. If the boss is scamming all of the laborers, then that same boss will lose them to the competition.

The same thing applies to consumers also. If you feel that the products you’ve purchased are no good, then you can buy from the other store down the road. You don’t have to take bad treatment.

Of course what if one rich guy is so successful that nobody can compete? What if he becomes the only person who sells what we need? Well in the United States, this is called a monopoly and we have laws against this. Bill Gates had to deal with this in the 1990’s. Microsoft was so big, that he had to give a share of the market to his competition, Apple. Apple soon rebounded from virtual destruction, creating the Ipod and later the Iphone.

Socialists’ response to this is really nothing all that interesting, but it is imaginative. They just offer a conspiracy theory. They claim that the rich guys are all working together and they have paid off the government. There are such a small number of super rich guys. Socialists argue that a corrupt government has already enslaved us to an oppressive oligarchy of wealthy capitalists. They push the conspiracy to all sorts of places. The government is allowing the rich to steal from the rest of us, instead of enforcing private property laws for the common man, and many other such claims. But this conspiracy theory has the same fatal flaw as all others like it. There is no evidence to support it. Neil De Grasse Tyson once said, “The only difference between a conspiracy theory and a call to war is evidence.” If what you say is true, then perhaps we need to seriously consider a revolt! We should at least protest right? But until you have evidence, then you may as well believe anything. For example, Joseph Stalin did commission a program to impregnate a human woman with the semen of a chimpanzee. The failed program was intended to create a soldier with the strength of a chimpanzee, the intelligence of a man, but also the crafty soulless selfishness of an chimp. Some argue that the manpanzee was born, and was so evil that he soon took over the world, but secretly. The manpanzee is the real cause of all of the world’s problems. If only we could know the exact whereabouts of the manpanzee, then we could stop all of the world’s evils. Here is the point. The Marxists’ conspiracy theory and the Manpanzee conspiracy theory both have the same amount of evidence, which is zero.

This would be different if someone was able to provide actual evidence for their theory. At that point, you’d have a bunch of people on your side, willing to do something to stop it. But what is clear is that simply giving the government all of the nation’s wealth won’t solve anything. Of course modern socialists don’t want to give the government every dime that everyone in the country has. They just want the government to take that share that the wealthy capitalists have. In other words, they argue that it’s the overwhelming percentage of the total wealth that makes the capitalists able to oppress us all. A problem with this should be really, really, really obvious. This is replacing an all powerful oligarchy with an even more all powerful government. How exactly do we ensure that this government won’t abuse it’s power?

In the united states, the abuse of power is managed through checks and balances. For example, any law that congress passes can be declared unconstitutional by the supreme court. But supreme court judges can be impeached by the congress and have to be voted in by the congress. Thus each group has some form of power over the other. Your own personal wealth is a form of power. If you are unhappy with your products, then you can spend your money somewhere else. And if your company is mistreating you, then you can go work elsewhere. Modern socialists don’t want to put all the wealth in the hands of government like they used to push for. Let’s just say that such a thing probably wouldn’t go too well perhaps? Do you really trust any politicians with all of your money? Probably not.

But even if the government just held the lion share of the nations wealth with high taxes on the rich, it would still hold too much power. That would mean that it would become the monopoly on who exactly gets to start what business. The goverment would hold the factories and investment money that creates the places where people can work. So instead of having choices of who you want to work for, you are always working for the government. This is because they would now hold so much wealth that the capitalists need for loans and resources to start businesses. With this, the government would own the capitalists. Therefore, you’d just have one option of who to work for. Theoretically you could still vote for who actually runs the government. You could vote for who’s in congress and who is president. But you can do that now, as long as you leave out ridiculous conspiracy theories. I

n this socialist future, the government is actually the only game in town. So what you do with your time and labor is now no longer something you have control over. You just work for the government. And on top of this, you are only buying products from the government as well. Don’t like the cars they have at your local dealership? Don’t bother going across the road. The other guy works for the government too, just like you. Do you prefer Japanese cars over American? Forget about it. Everything you buy is now American. You have no options. You have no way to put inferior companies out of business.

This problem alone completely removes socialism from the set of say, remotely plausible forms of government. They way they sell this idea today is by telling you what they will do with the money. For example, they tell you that if you vote for them to take the capitalists wealth, then they will give you better stuff for less. They also claim they will give more money to the poor than capitalists. Charity is a noble virtuous thing. And lots of people give lots of money to charity. But the government of socialism will supposedly do it better once they control everything. Here is the problem. If you are a fan of conspiracy theories where a powerful elite oppress the masses, then why on earth do you support giving a greater share of the power to a smaller group of people? How is that remotely a solution to any problems whatsoever?

Now that we have covered the basic premise, we can see how a lot of communist ideas come to be born. For example, communists hate intellectuals and academics. They slaughtered them when they took power in the past.

For some examples, I’ll just quote from wikipedia’s article on anti-intellectualism. But first allow me to explain fascism and communism. To the best of my understanding, these two subdivisions of socialism are connected. Communism emerged first as a new form of socialism that envisioned all of the nations of the world under one huge and peaceful socialist government. Fascism emerged as a response against communism. The fascists preferred to put their own nation first and to combine the nation’s efforts and unique national identity under one socialist government that would then rule the world with it’s own way of life. Additionally, the Nazi’s are yet another offshoot from fascism. The National Socialists Party based their government on the spread of one nation’s racial identity. They pushed for the spread and dominance of one race.

Here’s wikipedia:

"Totalitarian governments manipulate and apply anti-intellectualism to repress political dissent.[2] During the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) and the following fascist dictatorship (1939–1975) of General Francisco Franco, the reactionary repression of the White Terror (1936–1945) was notably anti-intellectual, with most of the 200,000 civilians killed being the Spanish intelligentsia, the politically active teachers and academics, artists and writers of the deposed Second Spanish Republic (1931–1939).[3] In the communist state of Democratic Kampuchea (1975–1979), the Khmer Rouge régime of Pol Pot condemned all of the non-communist intelligentsia to death in the Killing Fields”

I prefer to define the right as people who are more concerned with their own family and people, and the left as those who are concerned with the forgotten families and people. So the socialist conspiracy theories applied to the right end up in groups like Nazis, who think the evil bourgeois are oppressing the German race. Socialist conspiracy theories applied to the left end up in communists, who are concerned that the evil bourgeois are oppressing all the forgotten peoples of the world.

Once we have dismissed the conspiracy theory of evil rich people who secretly oppress us all, then we have to ask why on earth we would have a problem with someone who devotes his or her life to knowledge and study. Yes these people will end up having great influence on culture, but what else did you expect? The entire thing really boils down to whether the conspiracy theory has any evidence to back it up. So let’s take a look at the clergy.

If you aren’t familiar, the clergy simply means the religious officials like priests, bishops, preachers, ministers, reverends, fathers, etc. In the case of the French revolution, the government was oppressing the people and it led to a reasonable justification for revolution. So in that case it wasn’t just an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory. For example, the French writer Voltaire visited England before the revolution. He wrote that he was astonished the English people aren’t afraid to put a new and better roof on their houses or buy a second team of oxen to farm more land. He didn’t understand why the English citizens weren’t afraid their taxes would be raised. In France the getting any money meant hiding that you had it. An Englishman visiting France before the revolution was amazed at how they farmed with the worst tools they could find. Apparently they were so worried about getting taxed more that they wouldn’t invest in improving a business or living conditions.

In France, the church held massive political power. Let’s take a look at the history. In the early middle ages, the Catholic church focused it’s conversion efforts on ending Viking invasions. They thought that if everyone could be converted, then it would put a stop to war. Additionally, they targeted conversion of the royalty. The theory was that the faith of the nobility would trickle down and eventually convert the commoners. This didn’t exactly happen. Various reports tell us that most people didn’t really go to church in the Middle ages. The people blended Christian teachings with their own traditional pagan beliefs. But the kings of course were now Christians, and they wanted to do things for the church. So they built churches and performed various works for the church. All of this was funded with government money, as in, taxes. In France every single person, noble or common, had to give ten percent of his wealth to the church. This system was common across Europe and is, amazingly I might say, still in place today. While European nations have freedom to believe what you want, they still have churches that are funded by the government with tax dollars. In pre-revolutionary France, the government was oppressing the people, and the church held a lot of power. Therefore it’s off with the preacher’s heads too when the Revolution comes.

Of course every culture and nation in every time and place is not equivalent to France of that time. In the United States today, no particular church can get government sponsorship. It’s written into the Bill of Rights itself. Religious groups have to get money from people who actually donate voluntarily. One writer wrote in pre-revolutionary France that no person will be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest. And the communists saw themselves as the proper follow up to the French revolution, because that’s exactly what Marx wrote. So the notion of considering the church leaders to be part of the rich guy conspiracy continued. It’s estimated that in the 20^th century communists killed about 23 million people for religious reasons. But the problem is the same as before. Yes religious leaders are leaders. So they do hold more power than other people. But does the holding of power mean that you should be executed? To those who follow the ideas of Karl Marx, yes of course it does. The conspiracy theory justifies this simply because anyone who holds power must be in on the scam. That’s how the theory works in the end. But again, where’s the all important evidence? Or should I begin searching for the manpanzee?

So the idea of a secret wealthy elite that oppresses everyone goes round and round looking for evidence. Anytime a group of people isn’t as powerful or wealthy as others, this is taken as evidence of the conspiracy. One often repeated example of this is Feminism. As best I understand it, feminism was a legitimate push for women’s rights in a time when people realized that voting should be for everyone, not just the landowning elite. Then as technology eliminated most of the rigorous household work, women naturally wanted to get jobs outside of the home. But for communists, this isn’t enough. The conspiracy theory cannot die. So since women don’t hold many political offices, they must be oppressed by the rich guys. Feminists use the term “patriarchy” for Marx’s traditional conspiracy theory. These feminists say some incredible things sometimes. They argue that women are oppressed because they are taught not to exercise like men are. Thus this is the devious way that the evil Illuminati keeps women weaker than men. It’s amazing, but people actually say this. Are we really expected to believe that the ability to create new people in one’s belly will have no effect on a person’s body in other ways? Are we really to believe that this conspiracy is so effective that no women have ever just exercised and realized they are as strong as men? And, speaking as a man, are we really to believe that all men actually exercise on anything remotely approaching a regular basis? Let me tell you a secret ladies. Most guys never ever work out. Think about it. How many gyms are in your town? Do bedroom dumbbells have cobwebs? Boys might go at it for a month and then it’s over. But we are told that gender differences are a social construct. Well of course that’s what they tell us. Don’t you know who really runs everything? If you know his whereabouts, act quickly.

The question of the oppression of women runs into other problems as well. To the best of my knowledge, for every problem facing women, you can name another that faces men. Women in general do not make as much money as men. But men are more likely to commit suicide, die in combat, on the job, or just plain die somehow. I have no idea which group is suffering more and it doesn’t matter anyway. It certainly doesn’t matter to the communists. Instead of considering that the explanation of this might be something fairly complicated and at least in need of more research, they just go back to the old idea. It’s the evil rich guys who are both oppressing women as well as these men. If only we could know the whereabouts of the manpanzee, then we would be able to stop him.

What solution do communists propose to all of this? That’s easy, communism. What else? Take all the money from the rich guys and give it to the government. Problem solved! Then they will give everyone the same amount of money and a job. Some communists have proposed that all children should be raised by the government. Karl Marx was one of those people. The entire idea that women would raise their own children is just another part of the conspiracy by the evil rich guys. Women are tricked into thinking that they are supposed to do this by the manpanzee. At the very least, we need to convince women that they can abort their pregnancies. Abortion is the only way women can have some freedom until Capitalism finally dies. Those women who oppose abortion are in bed with the bourgeois. Those church leaders who teach against it are in bed with the bourgeois too. Women giving birth and raising children is a form of oppression. It’s unthinkable that a person who creates a child in her own body might actually have some sort of bond to that child and take great care in the child’s development. Perish the thought. Women are just oppressed yet again by the bourgeois and their toadies in the churches. All children should be raised by the state of course in government homes. It’s the only way this system of oppression can be truly stopped.

One funny thing I’ve noticed is how communist anti intellectualism can be more agreeable to churchgoing Christians. As someone who enjoys Christian apologetics and giving reasons for what I believe, I find that I sometimes get a lot of push back from Christians. In conversation with these people, I soon find that they don’t have a problem with apologetics. They have a problem with intellectuals. They don’t like universities and people who wear glasses. Then it dawns on me to ask the right question. Does this person think that evil rich guys are ripping us all off? Usually, the person does. It’s quite simple really. The idea that the rich people we all work for and buy stuff from are ripping us off is a powerful idea. It can really color how you see everything. It can come in many forms. To me, the best combat for a bad idea is a good idea. And my good idea is this. Do you have any evidence?

But of course all the problems can be explained by this evil bourgeois. Therefore we could solve virtually all of the world’s problems by giving absolute power to the government. This brings us to another fatal problem of socialism. How do we know we can trust the government? For example, let’s do socialism. First everyone will give me all of his or her money. Then I will make sure everyone gets a fair deal. So yeah that seems pretty dumb. But if you don’t give me all of your money, then you don’t care about helping the poor right? This makes about as much sense as a Facebook post that reads “ Like and share if you love Jesus, keep scrolling if you are going to Hell.” You need to be a little bit dumb to fall for this one.

The issue is well addressed in the Bible, in the book of Acts. The early church in Jerusalem is so filled with the Holy Spirit, that they all begin living communally. They all give all their money to the church, and it is distributed fairly. This leads to the end of hunger for all members of the church. This was 2000 years ago and we still don’t seem to be able to pull this off today. But this miracle is only possible because of a high degree of trust that is the result of the congregation walking with the Holy Spirit and thus God’s miraculous defeating of the sinfulness of the human soul. Then it gets messed up. A husband and wife in the congregation give the money they made from selling some land to the church, but lie and say it is the total amount when they really kept some. The book makes it clear that they could do whatever they wanted with the money. But lying to the church about it is a very big sin. They are struck down dead on the spot. This is because they ruined the miraculous level of trust that existed in this church. They didn’t lie to people. They lied to God because the church was so filled with the Spirit. Of course, the trust isn’t too ruined, because they dead.

The point of the Biblical text is clear. Living in a communal lifestyle is a heavenly and holy thing. But it can only be accomplished by the miraculous work of God. Humans are not capable of being worthy of that level of trust without this. And of course the communists demonstrated this. Instead of being filled with the Holy Spirit, they said that all religion is illegal and forced the schools to teach something called “scientific atheism.” The communists literally just didn’t address the trust problem. Rather, they focused on the conspiracy theory and distrust of the wealthy bourgeois. Without addressing the trust problem, millions died. The estimate is something like 100 million people that were executed by a brutal communist government in the 20^th century.

Perhaps this is a good time to discuss the socialism of those who are commonly called hippies. Anarcho-socialism is a view that recognizes the foolishness of replacing an oppressive bourgeois with an even more oppressive government. So they take a different approach. They argue that a rich guy who has lots of wealth and won’t share it with a poor person is a big bad jerk. So the poor should just be able to take his wealth. These socialists disregard private property rights, and support anyone just taking whatever they need from anyone at any time. Of course this brings up the obvious trust problem. Hypothetical examples are great. But in real life, how do we know the person taking your stuff really needs it? All too often, people are greedy. For all you know, the person taking your stuff might already have more stuff than you. If you adhere to a conspiracy theory where the rich are ripping off the poor, then why on earth do you think this wouldn’t go on even more if there were no laws to stop the rich from doing this?

And if someone is poor, then why can’t that person get a job and have the protections of a free market economy? If he can work or at least learn to work, then is it really fair for that person to just expect free stuff that someone else had to work for? Most of us would quickly agree that a person who could work should work. But what if a person really is unable to work, and a rich person really won’t share his wealth? This is of course a real problem. While the free market forces the wealthy person to give good pay and services to others, it doesn’t force him to give to charity. But the problem with any socialist solution to this is that same old trust problem. So who exactly decides who really needs what money? Who exactly decides that this money should be taken from this person and given to this person? Socialists love to create hypothetical scenarios where what should be done is obvious. But real life isn’t a hypothetical scenario where you just define people’s thoughts and intentions in how you set it up. In real life, you don’t really know who needs what money. Many charities are bogus. And many poor are really on drugs and the worst thing for them is cash. Anarcho-socialism literally does an even worse job addressing the trust problem than the Communists did. They just argue that anyone can take whatever he or she wants at any time. Yes that won’t be abused will it? The only hope is for people’s hearts to change willingly and for people to build real effective trust. Then we could give to charities without fear and make a real difference. But of course Marxists think that the real problem is the evil manpanzee of rich guys. If we eliminated them, then there would be no trust issues to overcome. It’s as though they think the wealthy come from another planet or something.

At this point, we need to talk about some specific talking points from the socialists, like here’s two of them. Bernie Sanders has championed raising minimum wage of 7.50 to a living wage of 15. He also says that we should have medicare for all, which means that we are all taxed for a government healthcare plan. If you are too poor, then you get it for free. Of course, we already have free government healthcare for the very poor. So this is tends to confuse a lot of people. The United States already has free healthcare for the poor. What it doesn’t have is free healthcare for everyone else. Most people have their own healthcare plans through the company they work for. But if you are self employed or work for a small business, then you can’t get on these large group plans. The Obamacare plan did not promise to get healthcare to the poor, it promised to get it to the working poor. That means people who work for small businesses. It didn’t really work and Obama’s promise that insurance costs would be cut in half or possibly one third didn’t come to pass.

So what about socialized healthcare? The other question is whether you want one entity to control the healthcare industry. Right now you have options. While you might not like them, at least people have to compete. And we do have medicare, which provides free healthcare for those who can’t afford it. So we come back to those working poor Obama made promises too. I am one of those people. I live in Georgia. Before Obamacare, I had healthcare that was only catastrophic coverage. His plan literally tripled my cost for the exact same plan, which was the cheapest possible. It went from 300 per 3 months to 200 a month.

Socialists always tell us that socialized healthcare works in so many other countries. But it doesn’t exactly work. They have problems. As I understand it, Scandinavian countries have really good socialized healthcare, but the taxes are through the roof to pay for it on all taxpaying citizens. Countries like Canada and England have really cheap programs, but then they have wait times that are so long people are protesting in the streets.

It seems the only real problem in the United States are those working poor. Why is it so hard for only those people to get healthcare? I am honestly not really sure. It’s been argued that insurance hurts the free market by making prices higher than they really should be. Imagine it like this. Food is something you have to have for survival. Why not buy a food plan at a monthly rate? Then you will just go get food as much as you like. The problem is that you would never buy a hamburger. You’d get expensive steaks every time. It costs the same to you either way. If you were just charged more for the steak plan, then that’s the same thing as just paying for the food yourself. When you are on a plan like that, you naturally want to maximize your benefits. Because of this, it is very difficult for the imaginary food plan company to offer a cheap plan. They only way they can make the food plan cheaper is by increasing your costs each time you get the more expensive food. But if you do that, then you are just back at the old way of paying for the food you want and the food plan becomes a pointless middle man.

So imagine the same thing in healthcare. Let’s say your doctor wants you to change your diet because you have diabetes. But you are paying for an expensive healthcare plan that comes out of your paycheck whether you like it or not. So you tell him to put you on some pills. For this, they have to do regular blood tests, as well as keep checking your status. A weight loss diet does not require this. On the pills, you might go into a worse condition and need different pills or even die. But imagine that you had to pay for all of those tests every time. Imagine that you had to pay for all of those expensive pills and checkups. It’s a miracle of modern science that we even have those pills, which are usually developed in America. So what happens if you have to pay for the cholesterol, blood pressure, diabetes and all the other pills? Suddenly, you’re gonna be very motivated to take the doctor’s advice about diet and exercise. You really are. I have a friend who is a physical therapist. He tells me that most back pain can be solved with exercise, and even just a better attitude about it. And yet how many people want prescription pain killers (narcotics) to be paid for by the insurance plan instead?

The obvious question here is why haven’t the insurance companies been put out of business with diet and exercise? Well that’s simple. Health insurance will never go away because there are tons of things that can happen to you which cannot be prevented. There are accidents, infectious diseases, etc. But it seems that the nation’s healthcare costs are driven up by preventable diseases. What usually kills people are preventable diseases like stroke, heart attack, diabetes etc. Losing weight can almost nullify your chance of all of these.

Some healthcare sectors operate outside of insurance. These include things like plastic surgery or lasik vision correction. I remember a woman paying about $12000 dollars for breast implants in 1998. Today the average is about $3700. I remember a friend paying $4000 for lasik in 2006. He bragged that he paid in cash and got it for $3800. Today the average is $440.

So these are nonessential things that insurance doesn’t cover. But preventable diseases are in a gray area. While obesity related problems can be easily prevented, they are also catastrophic to one’s health if left unchecked. But here’s the real kicker. These preventable diseases are mostly related to obesity. The nations where socialized healthcare is working don’t have obesity problems and they never did before they went to socialized healthcare. In other words, the American problem with healthcare may possibly have nothing at all to do with insurance plans, drug companies, or anything like that. It may be a problem with how Americans live and deal with food. In other words, those countries that started their socialized healthcare plans were doing great with healthcare before they did it. They were already eating like they should. The real question in America is why we don’t diet and exercise.

This is my view on those things. The communists will tell you that the fast food chains are poisoning us because they work for the manpanzee. They might even spin some recurring myth about McDonald’s and M.S.G. But what happened in the United States is that women got jobs in the 70’s, and we replaced mothers with fast food. This is exactly when the obesity epidemic occurred. Think of it. 50% of the population is in food production and this is totally changed in ten years. How will this not have side effects? It’s ridiculous to think it won’t.

Personally I am a fan of women having jobs. Maybe I’m just accustomed to food coming from other sources, but it makes sense to me. But Americans have taken the choice of what to eat away from their mothers and into their own hands. And we aren’t handling it as well as out mothers did. I also think there isn’t any going back. Today’s mamas are obese too. Personally, I think that we just need to become wiser about how we eat. For now, we just want our insurance plan to cover everything. Perhaps if plans started refusing to cover preventable diseases, especially in early stages, then things would get corrected real fast. I think one of the problems is that we often don’t realize we are at risk until we have major problems. People should be educated and aware of how to measure body fat levels. Why is something so simple to measure also something you have to go to college to learn. I can only hope that nowadays they just teach kids this in school but that wasn’t the case for me. I think a lot of men and women think they are healthy when a simple reliable measurement would show otherwise.

Personally, I found a way to lose weight only after I found a way to measure my own obesity. Once I found a measurement, I soon learned that I was at double the risk of heart attack than the average person. Honestly sometimes I think losing health insurance was one of the best things that ever happened to my health. But so many people are on plans where you are not penalized for overeating like I would be. When those pills cost you, you might put that cookie down. If you have a plan where you are really charged for the pills, you may as well drop the pointless plan.

Here’s an example. I know a woman who is prone to diabetes genetically and has always been overweight. Like most women, she carried weight in her hips before thirty, which is healthier than in the waist. After thirty, a woman can eat the same amount but the fat moves into the much more dangerous belly region. So by her 50’s she was on a slurry of pills that costs about $20,000 a year. She does not have that kind of cash. But she has an insurance plan. Do you see why the plan costs so much? She found out that for $12,000, she can get her stomach surgically reduced and lose weight. Then she would be able to go off of the pills. The plan wouldn’t cover it, and her husband was furious. He claimed that the insurance company just wanted to waste their own money. So he paid for her to get the surgery out of his own pocket. Afterwards, she lost weight and was off almost all of the pills as well as in a completly new wardrobe. But she soon began eating and eating. Eventually, she expanded her stomach again and is now back on all of the pills. She gained back all of the weight. It’s as though the surgery never took place. This example is fascinating. You are telling me that you preferred to pay $12,000 and undergo surgery instead of just eating less? Why is it so hard to eat less? This really is an epidemic.

One problem is that most diet and exercise companies are here to make you sexy, not healthy. Sex is just not as strong of a motivator. It comes and goes. You’re in the mood right now. A couple hours later you don’t care about sex but do want cookies. So what do you do? Simple, you just eat and eat. Personally, I found that I cannot lose weight without a strong motivator. I think some skinny people haven’t really learned to eat the way obese people have. They think they eat a lot, but they don’t light a match to what most of us are eating. Once you go there, it’s totally a drug. But the way to get things right is there if you want it. Good diet advice is there for you and you can make a change. The real question is when Americans will finally replace mama control with self control. That’s what makes socialized healthcare work in other nations. The lack of that will keep it from working here. We would just have huge taxes because people have diabetes. Either that, or the government would crack down on what we eat, and there would be protests. Maybe they would put a high tax on soft drinks. What if a box of Frosted Flakes costed $15? But I think people would just find a way to make their own sugar in the backyard garden. What I do know is this. Losing my health insurance was the best thing that ever happened to my own health.

Here’s a summary of the situation. Insurance companies are trying to make money. They cover your medical costs in the hope that you don’t have any problems and just pay the bills regularly. The customer is then motivated to have healthcare problems. From the perspective of the customer, the point of insurance is to get out of paying for medical costs. But nobody is going to cut his own leg off or purposefully give himself tetanus. And if it was just that, then healthcare would perhaps work whether it was socialized or not. Although I have heard that the implementation of socialized healthcare is possibly creating the obesity problem in other countries. The real issue is that problems caused by obesity are health problems that people want to have. We have tons of really expensive pills and expensive tests to make sure you can take them. So be fat and take a pill, you have to pay for the insurance anyway. Thus insurance costs go up and up.

Now we may wonder why catastrophic insurance is still expensive since it doesn’t cover the pills. But the problem is that things like obesity and smoking will eventually cause catastrophic problems. Insurance companies know that most people are at least obese. Therefore, they just won’t catch the problem early enough to get on the pills, and the company will have to cover really expensive surgical procedures later on. I just don’t think a government healthcare plan can make this thing any cheaper until the health problems get under control. I really don’t think socialized healthcare versus privatized healthcare has much to do with it anyway. I do fear that if we get on a government plan, then we won’t have the right to be fat anymore. As unhealthy as it is, isn’t that your own choice? But what if we as taxpayers are expected to pay for it? The way things are, this is what’s driving up insurance costs for everyone isn’t it?

With all of that said, the relevance to Marxism is simple. Socialism is not a solution to this problem because it wasn’t caused by capitalism. Americans want expensive healthcare because they want obesity related health problems.

So what about that minimum wage thing? This issue is a bit easier to tackle. Bernie Sanders and others want the minimum wage to be raised. This is because they believe that the rich are oppressing us. If your boss is making one hundred thousand dollars a year from your labor, and yet only pays you twenty thousand, then you would soon quit. Soon, you’d be working for his competitor, who would be happy to pay you twenty five thousand and profit seventy five. But then someone else would steal you up by offering you more money. Eventually, you’d end up being paid pretty close to what you are worth. This is a basic element of free market capitalism. But to the socialists out there, this market is not free and will never be free. They think that the oppressive oligarchy of rich guys conspiring together to oppress us all is actually an inevitable result of free market capitalism. To the socialist, you can never avoid this. To them, government intervention is the only way to prevent the oligarchy. So right off of the bat, you see the problem with raising minimum wage.

But it gets worse. Raising minimum wage hurts the poor. The easiest way to get a job is to be willing to work for less money. If you lower the pay you are asking for, then people will be more willing to give you a job. This is especially important if you have no skills. Once you have a job, then you are able to get better at doing your job. On the job training still tends to be one of the best forms of training. Certainly, you will be more valuable than someone who has no experience at the job. At this point, the boss will be motivated to pay you more if he or she wants to keep you from going to the competition. Over time, you can learn to do other jobs and increase your pay even more. In other words, low paying jobs are training and experience that you actually get paid to do.

Notice this comparison. What is a college degree? It is training for a job that you actually pay for. In other words, it’s job training that is really expensive. Minimum wage jobs are job training that you actually get paid for. So college is a ridiculously low paying job. In college, you don’t even make minimum wage. Rather, you actually pay for the training. Hopefully, this degree will get you more money in the long run. But some people cannot afford college. For them, a low paying job is a foot into the door of a company, and from there they can increase their pay.

Socialists of course just want to give everyone free college as a part of their social program. This will of course have to be paid for by everyone’s work through tax dollars. They imagine a country where everyone can go to college for free and get a high paying job. Alternatively, people already get training for work right now with low paying jobs. So which program is better? The question is really a different one.

Two hundred years ago, northeastern states and even when they were colonies, instituted programs to make sure everyone had an education. To form a legal town, you had to have a school. As a result of this, the northeast US became one of the best educated places in the world. This led to technological and economic superiority in later years. But what were they learning exactly? They were learning how to read and do basic arithmetic. This was the classic fifth grade education. A four year college degree is not the same thing as a fifth grade education and requiring everyone to have a four year degree may not have the same effect. This is because the value of things like being able to read and do basic math is an obvious improvement over a society where people can’t do those things. But as education progresses, you get into unclear waters.

By the time you are in college, you learn a lot of things that are specialized. Only certain people will need to know what doctors and nurses know. Other people might need to know how to engineer a proper foundation for a building. Furthermore, some education is more luxurious. A degree in literature is a good thing, but it isn’t as clearly good for every person in society to have as basic literacy and math skills. It’s more of a luxury. Furthermore, there’s the problem of controversial college degrees. Currently the book that is most often required reading in college is the Karl Marx’s communist manifesto. A strong case can me made that the university system is perhaps the nation’s greatest stronghold of really bad ideas as well as being a source of good education at the same time.

The clear point is that there comes a point where higher education isn’t so obviously a good thing. Basic literacy and math are obviously good and everyone should have those skills. But highly specialized skills, luxurious knowledge, and controversial knowledge are not obviously good for everyone to have. The problem is really quite simple and here you can see the crucial point. The only real purpose of going to a university is to learn specialized, luxurious, or controversial knowledge. Anything else you learn in college is just a basic education. If a case can be made that the public education system of kindergarten through twelfth grade isn’t teaching all of the obviously good skills, then we have a good reason to make college available to all. But that might be more of a failure of the public school system than anything else. Maybe we need to improve high schools instead. In addition to that, many specialized skills are not really something that is covered in college. For many careers, a technical school or even on the job training is by far superior. A job in retail is probably best learned by working in retail and moving up the company ladder. One doctor I know argues that nurses know nothing out of college and learn everything on the job, but he was a little drunk that night.

The defenders of socialized college argue that people with a four year degree will make more money than those without. But that is a statistic that’s based on the current system. Currently, we don’t have socialized college. Therefore, people with the money and desire to go to college are the people who end up making more money in their lifetime. In other words, people who currently go to college would probably make more money in their lives even if they never went to college. They probably would have made more without it. People who don’t go to college either don’t have the money or desire to be part of that. For example, every year shark attacks increase when ice cream sales increase. Shark attacks go down when ice cream sales go down. Therefore, if we force everyone to stop eating ice cream, there will be no shark attacks. But it just doesn’t really work like that. Ice cream sales go up because it’s hot outside. The heat also drives more people to go swimming in the ocean. It’s the summer heat that’s really causing the shark attacks. And good luck trying to stop summer from happening. So just because people with college degrees make more money, it doesn’t mean that the degree is causing them to make more. Intelligent people with money and other resources are going to make more money. Intelligent people with money and resources are also more likely to go to college. Here’s another example. 30% of people who go to college are female. But going to college does not actually make you female. Well some communists insist that it can, but that’s another issue.

The other problem is that if college is given away for free to absolutely everyone, then a lot of people will just go who don’t really want to be there as much. This is not the same thing as giving a scholarship to a hard working student. This is giving free college to everyone. It’s obvious that a lot of people would just go because it’s free. You’d end up with more people who have specialized skills, but they really needed to learn other such skills either on the job or at tech school. All of the career options need to be on an even playing field. If not, then a bunch of people will go into the one where you give it to them for free. Instead of learning other skills, the person went to college because it was free. They wasted their time because they ended up doing something else. This would would make the economy worse off overall. If college was on an equal playing field with these other forms of specialized knowledge, then it would remove this waste.

Free college would also end up with people who have more luxurious skills. There would be more people who have degrees in literature and advanced math but also never use those skills. Perhaps this would be a good thing, but it’s not like anyone is stopping you from learning those things on your own without college. Additionally, you’d end up with people who have more controversial knowledge. You’d end up with more communists. This doesn’t really seem like a better outcome. Sometimes controversial ideas turn out to be right, but it’s not clear that we should really push everyone in society to be educated in these ideas. For people who really want to learn, libraries have been around forever and now many college courses and tutoring are available for free online. Many college professors are not telling students to just go watch tutoring on youtube instead of using the school’s tutoring system.

The university was really created for the sake of controversial knowledge. The Greeks had places called “academies” which were really schools. Each school focused on the teaching of their founder’s way of seeing things. Then in the middle ages the university was created. The goal was to bring all the different schools of thought into one place, bringing a unity to the diversity. From the outset and still today, the purpose of the university was to advance knowledge. It was to go beyond what was known and to learn new things. This project is obviously going to engage in controversy. But it’s also clearly not something for everyone. It runs contrary to the function of a university to also be a place to give basic education to the masses. It’s obvious that neither college nor the university are for everyone. Therefore, a free education should be provided for people who really want to go. It makes more sense to give scholarships and assistance to students who really should get it. It doesn’t make sense to try to get everyone to have a degree. You might argue that the first two years of college are just a general education and obviously good for everyone to have. But that’s far from obvious. If such a case can be proven, then by all means society would be better off if everyone had it.

But this still doesn’t tell us whether the whole system should be socialized. For example, Scandinavian countries like Sweden have a voucher system. Any student can go to any school for free through the government. The schools that get more students get more money from the government. About half of the schools are for profit private schools and half are government run. What they say there is that anytime a private school opens next to a public one, the competition improves the public one. As long as the government is protecting a fair and free market, competition will make things better.

But in the US public schools get lots of government money and others get nothing. Every student who goes to private high school is also paying through taxes to go to a public school. In the south where I live, this makes it hard for private schools to get the necessary money to compete. They sometimes can’t even pay teachers more than $20,000 a year. Teachers tend to go to public schools where they can make much more, retire, and earn a little money working at a private school in later years. But the public schools are often a terrible option for students. The education isn’t good. In the US, the government is protecting an unfair and unfree market for schools. In the northeast US, they have segregation instead. Schools tend to be two miles away from the home. Getting into a good school is a product of getting into a rich neighborhood. Again, students can’t go to any school they like, even if it’s just five miles away instead of two. In other words, the US school system is more socialized than that of Scandinavia.

But would things be better if all of the schools were private? That’s hard to say. People would have way lower taxes, and then more money to spend on school. Personally, I think giving people an incentive to get a basic education by providing it for free through the government is probably a good thing. But favoring certain schools with millions of government dollars while penalizing others is a really bad thing. Such a program can’t help but make education worse. I think it’s safe to say that education in reading and math are good for everyone.

So then lets move to the communist hatred of religion. To them, religion is the attempt of the poor to deal with their poverty by focusing on heavenly wealth. One flaw of Marxism that should be obvious at this point is that they include religious leaders such as priests, preachers, reverends or any clergy as a group who are in on the larger conspiracy theory. To the Marxist, anyone who holds any power is in on the thing. People cannot hold power and yet be a separate person of power from other groups of power. That would create competition among the powerful and therefore fairness for the workers, which the Marxists think does not exist. But with religion, Marxists claim that the religions of the world offer other-wordly benefits. So things like the offer of heaven are just a lie created to keep the poor from revolting. Although the poor are ripped off, the poor are kept in control by a big set of religious lies.

There are a lot of people who believe this theory. For example, did you know that Africa south of the Sahara is about 90% Christian with the highest rate of weekly church attendance? It is. But when I tell this fact to people, they tend to respond by telling me that these Africans are only religious because they are poor. Ask yourself, do you think the poor tend to be more religious? How many Marxist views do you already hold? In the case of the poor and religion, Marxism’s theory has failed empirically. Wealthy people generally tend to be more religious, and most new religious movements are started by wealthy people. Yes it’s true. Did that one blow your mind? Hopefully not. Wealthy people have more free time to devote to questions like “What is life all about” and “What is the destiny and origin of the universe.” Many of these movements involve the wealthy being upset with their own wealth and taking vows to live as a poor person. For example, two founders of the world’s biggest religions, Muhammad and Buddha came from wealthy backgrounds. They then moved to a more impoverished lifestyle as part of their religious views. Buddha was born into royalty and left it. Muhammad married a very wealthy older woman, and then began a religion that taught giving to the poor as one of it’s tenets. And the many religious movements of Europe had a tendency to be started by the wealthier classes.

A current claim of modern communist propaganda is that Scandinavia and Europe are socialist Utopias. The Scandinavian countries include Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland. They are commonly referred to in the United States as the place where socialism has worked. This is not true. I will use Sweden as a representative example. In Sweden’s there was a huge protest in the 1990’s to scale back the socialism that started there in the 1970’s. And it was scaled back. Today in Sweden, your income is taxed very high at 62% in 2019. But the corporate tax rate is very low at 22%. Compare this to the US where income tax is progressive from 10% up to 37%, depending on how much income you have. But the US corporate tax rate is 21% only after the largest tax cut in US history. Before 2018, it was 35% all the way back to the mid 1980’s. It was even higher before then. In other words, in Sweden if you want to take your money home and spend it, then the government taxes it massively and you get free college and healthcare. But if you want to invest your money in some profit making venture, then the government leaves it alone and tells you to have fun. It’s an odd form of socialism when it actually encourages capitalism. What’s more, as I understand it, the regulations on how you can do business are must less strict in places like Denmark and Sweden. So it’s easier to be a capitalist in other ways than just tax rates. The President of Denmark got not a little upset about Bernie Sanders calling Denmark a socialist country. He referred to this statement from Sanders as a “Socialist Slur.”

A major flaw in modern day socialist thought is perhaps best demonstrated in a common meme. The meme has two cartoons which involve three people that want to watch a baseball game. One is short, one is medium and one is very tall. All of them have a box to stand on. But only the tall one can see the game while the other two cannot. The word “equality” is written at the bottom of the cartoon. The second image has two boxes for the short person, allowing him to see the game. The tall person has no boxes but he is tall enough to see without them. The medium person has one box, allowing him to see the game. The word “justice” is written at the bottom of this cartoon.

This common cartoon is flawed in at least two ways. The first has been pointed out by many. Height is an easily measured thing. But the cartoon isn’t really about giving boxes to allow short people to watch baseball games. In reality, you are supposed to pay and peeking over the fence is usually not allowed. The cartoon’s real purpose is to suggest giving money to people who have less privilege, not boxes to people who have less height. A person’s level of privilege is sort of the level of advantages in making money the person has. For example, recall my friend whose parents could not buy him a car at 16. He had to take a lower paying job than I did because he only had one option within walking distance. I could simply apply else where and had many job opportunities all over town in driving distance. Therefore, my car was a privilege that he did not have. With this in mind, the problem with the meme is clear. A person’s level of privilege is difficult to quantify. It is not like measuring height. We all have a wide variety of resources to choose from and it is confusing. For example, you might be surprised to find that when my friend was seventeen, an older friend of his gave him an old car. But his father immediately pawned the title, presumably because the ownership of the vehicle would reduce welfare checks. Or does it not work like that? My real point is that a person’s level of privilege cannot be accurately quantified. This leads to lumping people into groups, which can tend towards racism.

Another problem with this is the trust problem, but it is partly related to the privilege problem. Essentially, how do you know a person really needs something? But more importantly, how do you know the government will redistribute wealth in an honest and charitable way? A gravy train is when each person pours gravy from his bowl to the next person. The problem with the gravy train is that gravy is sticky. So each person in the train keeps a bit of gravy, and the person at the end doesn’t get any. But when the gravy train is a government redistributing the nation’s wealth to help the poor, then the person at the end of the gravy train is person who the money is really for. The longer the train, the worse it gets.

We can’t say for sure that a socialist government would necessarily become a corrupt gravy train. But we cannot say that it won’t either. This is especially the case because other socialists governments have clearly had this problem in the past. Therefore it makes much more sense for charities to have to compete for our donations. If you want me to give money to your charity, then you need to show me that it will help people. The various charities act as a check on each other. If there is only one government charity, then there is no competition. There is also the larger question about whether it’s wise to trust an entity that is forcing you to give them charity funds. A socialist government would actually be taxing us by law.

For comparison, let’s take a look at the various charities out there. Can you really trust the organization you gave money to? There is actually a lot of fake information floating around the internet, especially in the form of memes, when it comes to this. Fortunately, a federal charity in the United States is required by law to disclose what they do with their donations. The Clinton foundation is famous for shenanigans. It’s goal appears to be whatever Bill Clinton wants it to be at a given point in time. Scandals include things like taking huge donations from Saudi oil tycoons and then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton making the US government move over for their needs. Whether this is true or not, a charity is a known way that people launder money. It’s a way of cleaning a paper trail. Reportedly, Bill and Hillary and Chelsea receive no salary for running the foundation.

Then there’s Kent Hovind. I grew up with Kent Hovind being one of the two big voices that defended the idea of a 6000 year old earth and a global flood of Noah. He was one of the main voices. And then he went to jail. His ministry was a federal charity, which most ministries usually are. Most of the people there were unpaid volunteers, working for the Lord. In other words, Hovind and his wife were not paying their staff and stealing the donations. And yet they got caught. His wife was taking nine thousand five hundred dollars from the charity funds and depositing it in a Mexican bank account over a long period of time every Friday. If you move ten thousand, there’s more paperwork and you’d get caught real fast. Eventually, they did get caught and Kent Hovind had to serve jail time for fraud.

The United Way is the world’s biggest charity, and focuses on improving both the health and financial stability of poor communities. But the American branch has suffered greatly once the head of that branch was caught for all sorts of fraud. He used the donations to fund his own lavish lifestyle for years, taking concord flights, paying teenaged mistresses, riding in limousines and inhabiting an expensive condo. National relief charity focuses on helping native Americans. And the president was arrested in 2013 for embezzling four million dollars over the course of three years. What he did was step down as president and then form a bogus second charity. He then convinced the National relief fund to give him the millions because he was going to do lots of good for the cause with it through his new organization. In February 2016, news reports alleged that the Wounded Warrior Project was spending lavish amounts on it’s employees. A year later, the Better Business Bureau completed an investigation and claimed the claims were false. Suddenly, they were a good charity doing good work again. But this is only after their donations dropped in half.

The lesson here is really as simple as can be. Giving to charity is a good thing. Giving to just any charity is clearly not a good thing. That’s the fundamental point that socialists today want ignore. They proclaim that socialism is good because it’s a charity. But look at the list of charities I just shared. Just because you say you are doing good work, it doesn’t mean you really are. It makes sense to have choices. Charities that don’t do their job get in trouble and lose reputation. Charities that do good work get a good reputation. Socialism is when everyone in the nation lives off of a government charity. But if we can’t trust just any charity right now, then how can we trust the socialist government? How would that work? Do you really think that a government run monopoly charity system would really be immune to corruption? And let’s be clear, it doesn’t matter so much whether socialism always fails. The point is that it can fail. And when you don’t have a choice about how to help the poor, you are stuck with the government charity. In soviet Russia, forced starvation was so common that historians think it played a part in how the Russians withstood the Nazis sieges of their cities. British and American soldiers often gave up a city after much less pressure from Nazis. The Russian people were already accustomed to harsh starvations from the Communist government.

Any discussion of socialism would be incomplete without mentioning the Communist Manifesto, written by Karl Marx. I recommend taking the time to read it. An audio recording of it only lasts an hour and a half. Too many people today are only willing to listen to arguments from the side they already agree with. This isn’t right. If you want the other side to listen to you, then you should listen to them as well. That’s the golden rule and yes it is in the Bible. What is so often the case is that giving your opponent a fair hearing actually increases your confidence in your own position. It increases your ability to persuade the other side as well since you are understanding what they are really concerned about.

Marx wrote in 1848 during the Industrial Revolution. He clearly didn’t expect something like modernization, which would come at the turn of the century. His primary argument against the bourgeois was focused on factories. He thought that as factories got bigger and better over the years, then the need for skilled labor would go away and people would get paid less and less. People would only be there to run the machines and would make no money. Reading claims like these, it is obvious that Marx wrote in 1848.

I see four major flaws with his reasoning here. First, he only examines supply and not demand. Factories make products cheaper. Therefore, the bourgeois makes lots of money from them. While the machine can be run with an unskilled and easy to find laborer, the potential profits motivate the bourgeois to pay the laborer more. The laborers may be a dime a dozen, but the boss will pay through his teeth for more laborers. In economics terms, supply as well as demand affect prices. Second, it would have been nice if Marx was right. If factories kept getting better and better, then prices for goods would have gotten lower and lower. Soon, nobody would need much money to buy everything they need. For example, if cars had improved in cost and capability as fast as computers, then cars would cost ten cents today. If that was the case, then buying a car would cost less than the twenty five cents for the parking meter. So just tow it. If everything was so cheap, who needs much money anyway? Third, Marx failed to realize that the advance of technology also created less expensive tools. Not all new tech was a huge factory machine. I know a girl who needs a few simple tools to run a healthy business repairing smart phone screens. I own an eight hundred dollar bush trimmer, but with lawn care tools like that, I am able to run a business that pays my bills. The turn of the century saw the invention of tools like the hand held drill and skilsaw. Tools like these empowered people to do construction on their own or for smaller companies. New tech empowers the little guy too. New tech isn’t all huge factory machines. New tech was almost nothing but huge factory machines in 1848, but then modernization happened. Plus any good new tech makes things cheaper. So the people don’t need as much money. In 1611, only King James could afford fresh ham and eggs for breakfast every morning. But with modern refrigeration, it’s literally no big deal. You don’t have to kill a pig for fresh ham. Think of it. A ham sandwich is so commonplace today that we often eat something else. We literally live like kings today, and yet we are supposed to be poor from all of the bourgeois factories huh? If the new tech is really better, then what mental gymnastics did you have to do to tell yourself it made everyone poor? Fourth, factories kept improving until they don’t really need many operators today. They aren’t filled with hundreds of workers slaving away. Many plants today are run by automated computer systems. People are there mostly to oversee the machine operations.

This brings up an important question. Whenever new technology comes along that replaces a human with a machine, people proclaim it is a threat. The machine took my job! This is a big myth that is all too popular. How exactly did the machine take your job? Let’s examine earth moving equipment like backhoes and bulldozers. They replaced men with shovels and wheelbarrows. They did this because one man with a backhoe can dig a trench faster than an entire football team. The machine does way more work for way less cost. You do need new skilled workers who can run the complicated machine as well as repair and build it. But that’s not the point. Because moving dirt is cheaper, then more dirt gets moved. It’s cheaper to build a road today than if you did it by hand. And so we have a ridiculous amount of roads that wouldn’t be dreamed of in 1870. In other words, the machine took away jobs by making things cheaper. So customers actually bought more of the stuff. Therefore, all of the guys who used to build ten roads by hand now build a hundred with machines. They all still have jobs. The problem is that we never dreamed just how much more work customers would demand if it was cheaper to do it. Did you know that in Atlanta the speed limit is ten miles an hour lower whenever work is being done of the road? Years ago someone asked me, “When are they not doing work on 285 in Atlanta?”

What is clear is that Karl Marx apparently based his communism in a misunderstanding of the advance of technology. It lead to the industrial revolution in his day. But communism today is similar but different. As far as I can tell, modern communism is heavily influenced by post modernism. It’s this post modernist version that links every powerful class as part of the problem. This movement from the 1960’s is really where this larger conspiracy theory evolved. They describe everything as a “power dynamic”. Religious leaders, males, whites, intellectuals and of course rich guys are powerful and therefore part of the problem. Less wealthy and powerful groups are the victims the communists are here to lead a revolution for. This leads to perhaps one of the more interesting strange bedfellows.

Post modern Marxism is the ally of modern day Islam. Islam is a religion that teaches those who leave it should be punished by execution. It is a matter of doctrine that the founder Muhammad is the example of the life we all should live. And it is also a matter of doctrine that he owned slaves, married one of them, and was polygamous. But in the world today, Muslims are less educated, less wealthy and suffer in many material ways. Therefore they are the less powerful and oppressed by the evil manpanzee. In some Muslim nations, homosexuals are punished by being thrown off a roof. So how could the defenders of all victims ever become allied with this?

This is a great way to understand Communism. Karl Marx said that ideas change only as material factors change. In other words, if the Muslims were wealthy, then their ideas would change to be good ones. This is a basic way Marxists see everything. Here’s another example. In the 900’s, Europe managed to abolish slavery. To Marxists, this cannot be motivated by a belief that slavery is wrong. Marxists insist that ideas don’t change culture. Money changes culture, and ideas are changed by the earlier economic change. Marxists claim that water wheels made slavery financially obsolete in the 900’s. People stopped owning slaves because the water wheels were cheaper. This led to people deciding that slavery is bad. This isn’t true though. The Romans had water wheels but preferred to use slaves. What changed things was the teachings of the Christian church. Slavery remained profitable all the way up to the American Civil war. Get this though. Marxists even claim that slavery in the United States actually ended because it wasn’t profitable any more. They argue that it was already becoming the case in the 1700’s. This borders on the insane. So why exactly was the Civil War fought then? Was the South really leading an early communist revolution because the North was actually wealthier?

A big flaw of Communism is that Capitalism itself is immoral. To them, Capitalism is the same thing as greed. This is what intellectuals call super dumb. Imagine that you have some money. You could spend the money on food, a vacation, or some nice commodity. This is called consumption. Under capitalism, you don’t do this. To be a capitalist, you restrain consumption and invest some of your wealth in productivity. Capitalism is the holding back of consumption for the sake of production. One may do this because he or she really wants to have more wealth for later consumption. But this isn’t at the heart of capitalism. At the heart, capitalism holds the belief that productivity is a good thing in and of itself. It’s good to produce just because it is a good thing in and of itself. Yes it can be done for future greedy consumption. Yes it can be done just for arrogance and showing off. But it need not be that way. My point is simple. Capitalism is not necessarily evil. It cannot be directly equated with greed. Capitalism can be a virtuous thing. It can be rooted in the basic moral goodness of hard work just for the sake of hard work.

One funny thing is how communists are constantly looking for evidence that they have found the manpanzee. Even a broken clock is right twice a day. If you call every rich person a corrupt member of the bourgeois class that’s oppressing us, then you are going to find some corruption some of the time. Of course some corruption always exists. Some government officials are going to be bribed some of the time by some rich guy. That in no way proves the large conspiracy theory. You can’t just point to some example where things were bad at some point in history or with some person today and expect it to magically mean that things are always only ever that way. Just watch the news. Listen to far left politicians. You will see them constantly finding examples of some rich ceo engaging in criminal activities. And of course rich guys that do bad things should not get away with it. But the communists are just seeing this everywhere. They also fail to ever recognize that poor people do bad things as well.

Of all the post modernist Communist ideas, the opposition to free speech is one of the most astonishing. They argue that people like Adolf Hitler only came to power because he spread his ideas. He wrote Mein Kampf, did speeches and led protests. Eventually the Nazis were running all of Germany’s media as part of their propaganda machine. The Klu Klux Klan held rallies, threatened blacks with death via posters, and made the world’s first blockbuster movie. Communists argue that such people should not have been allowed to speak, and therefore lynchings or the holocaust would never have happened. Actually, communists take it a bit further because they see oppression everywhere. For example, pretty girls in video games are a form of oppressive brainwashing because being attractive to men makes women subservient to the wishes of men. So we shouldn’t allow games to have sexy female characters. Of course being attractive to men also makes men subservient to the wishes of women. Men don’t pay prostitutes for nothing. How can she be your slave when you are the one giving her money? And it’s not like men and women never both enjoy sex. While communists are still upset about the supposed war on women, what about freedom of speech? Is freedom of speech really dangerous?

Well clearly the Nazis and the Klan demonstrate that it absolutely is. Ideas can be very dangerous. But banning freedom of speech is not helping. Communists argue that it isn’t immoral for them to want to take over all of the media and become police who punish everyone for saying something immoral. Their justification is the same conspiracy theory again. The bourgeois already controls everything. Unless the force of government is used to stop the manpanzee, then his evil rule will always emerge. Again we are still waiting for the evidence. At least tell us where he is.

Here’s a fact of life. You will never achieve perfect agreement with all people at all times. I hope no one is insane enough to really believe that’s possible. Therefore, some people will always hold bad and, really, dangerously bad ideas. How will you deal with this? There are only two ways, violence and dialogue. You will either talk your problems out or fight them out. Banning freedom of speech is the banning of peaceful resolutions of people’s differences. Honestly if the bourgeois is so pernicious that they keep nearly everyone under their boot, then how are we even having a conversation about communism in the first place?