Guest authored by DemocracyRules
Continued from Part 1 at
http://ginacobb.typepad.com/gina_cobb/2007/10/lies-the-leftis.html
7. Socialists Help Others
Some say that, “Even though most Socialists are middle class, they want the poor, the proletariat to have money.” It is true that most Socialists are middle class, both Marx and Engels were. However, Socialism mainly benefits the Middle Class, not the poor. For example, Socialized Medicine involves taking money from everyone (but more from the rich) and giving it back to everyone, to pay for health care. However, because the middle class is by far the most numerous class, they benefit the most.
Socialized Medicine does not actually take money from the rich and give it to the poor. Consider Socialized Medicine in Canada. About 85% of social spending in Canada, including health care, goes to the middle and upper classes. However, it costs a lot to collect and redistribute all that money. For every dollar collected for social spending, very roughly 50 cents is spent on administration costs. Most of these administration jobs are held by the Middle Class. Therefore, for every dollar collected for social spending, the Middle Class gets roughly 50 cents of it as salary and benefits. They have to pay taxes on this income, but it is still the case that the Middle Class are double beneficiaries of social spending. They receive salaries to help administer the money, and then they are the main beneficiaries of the spending itself.
In Canada, as in most countries, civil servants tend to vote for governments which support social spending. If the Canadian government grows in size, most new expenditures will be made directly and indirectly to middle class civil servants and government contractors. Thus, as government grows, support for Socialism can also grow.
http://www.williamgairdner.com/the-trouble-with-canada/
Another surprise is that the left gives LESS to charity than the right. In the US, “In 2000, households headed by a conservative gave, on average, 30 percent more money to charity than households headed by a liberal... The differences go beyond money and time... In 2002, conservative Americans were more likely to donate blood each year, and did so more often, than liberals.”
Leftists under 30 are particularly less generous emotionally. “Liberal young Americans in 2004 were also significantly less likely than the young conservatives to express a willingness to sacrifice for their loved ones: A lower percentage said they would prefer to suffer than let a loved one suffer, that they are not happy unless the loved one is happy, or that they would sacrifice their own wishes for those they love.”
http://www.arthurbrooks.net/excerpt.html
8. Socialists Defend the Weak
This ‘narrative’ claims that Socialists do this by (1) advocating cooperation instead of competition, and competition leads to selfishness, fighting, and conflict, and (2) advocating ‘power to the people’, where the average person has true economic and social freedom, and the government is organized from ‘the bottom-up’.
However, (1) both co-operation and competition can be either good or bad. In WWII, the Nazi’s cooperated among themselves to exterminate Jews. The Chinese Communist Party cooperated actively to impose tyranny onto all of China, and between 32 and 62 million died. Violent Islamists co-operate and share a great deal among themselves.
On the other hand, great and wonderful things come from music competitions, science competitions, and many corporations who compete among themselves to make consumer goods less expensive, which then become affordable to the poor.
Walker, Robert L., The Human Cost of Communism in China (1971, report to the US Senate Committee of the Judiciary) "Casualties to Communism".
http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat1.htm#Mao
Nissan plans $2,500 car
(2) It is laudable to want ‘power to the people’, and liberal democracy also strives hard to achieve this. In real practice Socialism does not grant power to the people. Because competition is an innate characteristic of all living things, strong social control is needed to suppress human competitiveness. This requires a highly controlling and interventionist ‘top-down’ structure which must enforce rules and laws with obsessive rigour.
9. Religion Is Bad
In “The Communist Manifesto”, Marx and Engels, 1848 wrote, “In the conditions of the proletariat, those of old society at large are already virtually swamped. The proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with the bourgeois family-relations; modern industrial labour, modern subjection to capital, the same in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped him of every trace of national character. Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests...
“When the ancient world was in its last throes, the ancient religions were overcome by Christianity. When Christian ideas succumbed in the 18th century to rationalist ideas, feudal society fought its death battle with the then revolutionary bourgeoisie. The ideas of religious liberty and freedom of conscience merely gave expression to the sway of free competition within the domain of knowledge...
"There are, besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice, etc. that are common to all states of society. But Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical experience."
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/61/61.txt
OK, I understand that Marx abjured religion because it represented a competing social authority. But except for that, what exactly is wrong with religion?
10. Globalization Is Bad
Marx hated globalization. From “The Communist Manifesto” again:
“The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe...
“All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed... In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes...
“The bourgeoisie ... has agglomerated production, and has concentrated property in a few hands... it has also called into existence ... the modern working class... who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital. These labourers, who must sell themselves piece-meal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.
“Owing to the extensive use of machinery and to division of labour, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him. Hence, the cost of production of a workman is restricted, almost entirely, to the means of subsistence that he requires for his maintenance, and for the propagation of his race.”
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/61/61.txt
So, the Anti-Globalization Movement is nothing new. It’s a case of ‘old wine in new bottles’, or perhaps ‘new wine in old bottles’, or perhaps just a lot of un-bottled whining. In any case, it’s not much different from mainstream Socialism. The bourgeoisie who chase “over the whole surface of the globe” are making the world rich at a faster rate than any other time in history. This acceleration includes poor countries that permit free enterprise.
http://futurist.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/07/economic-growth.html
Chinese Economy Grows by 11.5 Percent
11. The New Left is Different From The Old Left
How, exactly?
12. True Democracy Defeated America in Vietnam
This is a pathetically ironic claim. The Vietnam War led to allied Cold War victory in the long-term. The Soviets lost the Cold War partly because they wasted massive resources on helping the North Vietnamese military. To Socialists, North Vietnam ‘won’ by converting the whole of Vietnam into a Stalinist state. Genocide, ethnic cleansing, political persecution, and grinding poverty ensued. In a painful paradox, once Vietnam achieved Stalinism they soon began to abandon it. Like China, they have adopted many free market reforms. Millions of South-East Asians died for Socialism, but how, exactly, was that a benefit?
http://www.nysun.com/article/47639?page_no=1
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/vm.html#Econ
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