E-Newsletter No. 116 August 2023
Last month, we discussed the slight difference between Socialism and Communism, which primarily relates to the process of distributing the outputs of a country’s economy to its citizens. This month, we will discuss the difference between Socialism/Communism and Free Market Capitalism.
Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels published The Communist Manifesto in 1848, decades after the end of the French Revolution. In their view, the French Revolution merely replaced the medieval class struggle between the peasant serfs and the nobility with a new struggle between the working class (the “proletariat”) and the bourgeois owners of capital. Marxists wanted their own revolution to fundamentally transform society, and so they pitted the proletariat against the bourgeois. However, when that class warfare didn’t ultimately pan out as planned (because of the success of capitalism) they have now had to change tactics.
Modern-day Marxists (BLM, etc.) have now switched to the issue of racism to stoke the fires of divisiveness. We also have transgenderism and the LGBTQ+ movement as another means to divide our country’s citizens. And Marxists will continue to wage war on religious liberty, because according to Karl Marx, “Religion is the opium of the masses.”
Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations in 1776, having concluded that individual self-interest within an economy (the invisible hand of the marketplace) led to a tremendous societal benefit, facilitated by a mutual interdependence between the producers of economic outputs and the consumers of those outputs. He advocated that nations would prosper if individual citizens were free to pursue their own self-interests in a free market without government regulations. This was one of our country’s founding principles under the US Constitution. The Tenth Amendment specifically restricted the scope of the federal government, leaving the issues pertaining to daily life to We-the-People.
So, why has Socialism / Communism failed so miserably in every single instance where it has been tried? Human nature. It is true that people desire “security” – the promise of being taken care of is very appealing (i.e., “to each according to his needs”). However, each person is an individual with unique talents and needs and wants. A centrally planned economy is doomed to failure, because elites (bureaucrats) will never be able to know what each individual’s abilities or wants might be.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t stop Marxists / elitists / bureaucrats from trying to control every aspect of people’s lives. The new class struggle has now become We-the-People versus “them”. More on that next month.
US Debt Clock – – July 1st – $96,500 per citizen / August 1st – $97,500