“The Pagans celebrated the solstice by cutting down holly and ivy and dragging it into their homes along with a giant yule log that they’d set fire to. It sounds rubbish, but with no app store to speak of, killing trees and plants was as good as entertainment got. Even at Christmas.” – Cunk on Earth
Or, as every person forced to live in communism called him at Christmas: “Hungry Santa”.
One of the things that I have done many times over the years is note that communism (Leftism) is a religion. It’s why the joke about “Real Communism has never been tried” is funny – the people who say that actually believe it. Beyond that, they actually believe, deeply, in communism.
It’s their faith.
Just like Christians believe in Christ returning to do stuff and then give us paradise, commies really believe that when Real Communism is finally implemented, the world will be safe for losers like them.
Communism depends on the rank and file believing that they’re not the problem, everyone else is. If everyone realized what a great talent they are, well, that stupid high school quarterback would be happy to clomp back into the mines and fields and factories humming the tune the loser wrote. The loser believes that centralized processes are better: if it works for me, it should work for everyone.
Apparently, the Soviets did one thing right: they made the best bread in history. Why, people would wait in line for days just for a single piece.
So what if a few million peasants starved? That’s a small price to pay for the coming workers’ utopia. There can be no compromise in our vision of the exact same prosperity for everyone, since our vision is perfection!
Yup, that’s communism in a nutshell. It has no real empirical evidence that it could ever work, yet it gets trotted out by the losers again and again. The problem isn’t with the plan, it’s that:
- The people sabotaged it!
- Foreign countries sabotaged it!
- The time wasn’t right!
- We ran out of people to kill!
- I swear, the dog ate the economy!
The result is always the same, a priestly class who aims to reeducate (convert) everyone to the religion of materialism. The end result of this – unless it’s stopped by a Stalin – is the endless Leftist Purity Spiral where there is no Leftism so far Left that it can’t be exaggerated further Left, and anyone to the right of this Left position is a heretic. As I mentioned, this was happening in the Soviet Union until Stalin just shot all the people on the far Left to stabilize the nonsense.
I was going to tell an awful bowling joke, but I’ll spare you.
One side note: I was watching the comedy Silicon Valley several years ago, and one of the characters said he followed the “left-hand path” which is a loser way of saying, “Satanist”. Just noting, Leftist, left-hand path . . . I’ll leave that there for you to draw your own conclusions.
Regardless, a lot if not all, of the problems we face in society today is due to Communism or it’s kid brother, Socialism attempting to put a central control on everything we do and think to conform to their current Narrative.
But I’d like to take a step back, since often libertarians (or Libertarians) make the same error: they equate magical powers to the market.
I remember my parents telling me, “I’ll give you something to cry about” when I was a kid. I expected a spanking, but instead they ruined the housing market.
And, yes, I’ll agree. The free market is so much better than the planned markets put together by commissars in Central People’s Warehouse No. 49, and has historically provided an abundance of “stuff”. Milton Friedman famously said, “In capitalism, goods wait for people; in socialism, people wait for good.”
It’s true. It’s also true that, just as communism is a poor religion, so is capitalism. Capitalism isn’t a religion, it isn’t a force, it has no morality, it’s a mechanism for distributing points.
Capitalism doesn’t care what it creates, as long as the points are properly distributed.
Probably the most free-market period in the history of the United States was during the frontier. Don’t want money, well, you could move out west, fend mostly for yourself, farm, and not worry (too much) about needing money. If you wanted money, you could get it by mining, trapping, killing buffalo or making railroads. Nobody stopped you doing almost anything if you were far enough out in front of civilization. But after towns sprang up?
When I was leaving home today, I had the feeling I’d forgotten something. Then I remembered. The Alamo.
Your friends and neighbors had a vote. Capitalism and free markets were constrained by morality, specifically Christianity. Was there booze? Drugs? Prostitution? Porn? Yes, those things were with us and have been with us.
But society was more cohesive at that time, and would shun the immoral, if they didn’t deal with them in extrajudicial ways. Laws weren’t required to constrain capitalism, the morality of the people constrained capitalism – actual religion took the place of economic religion.
Real capitalism isn’t a religion, and it won’t solve problems. And, yes real capitalism has been tried and is very successful when practiced by a more-or-less moral people, though the version that we have here in 2024 isn’t real capitalism. Examples?
- Regulations
- Taxation
- Labor Laws
- Federal Reserve Interest Rates
- Federal Reserve Cash Printing
- Welfare/Transfer Payments
- Government Spending (Education, infrastructure, defense)
- Unchecked Immigration
The last one is favored by many Libertarians. They note that in a market free of all of the other bullet points, well, just let anyone in. My response is that most people in the world don’t really want to be free people living in freedom: Most people in the world would just rather have free stuff.
Boeing®, putting the “final” in final approach.
That means creeping centralization and an amoral government bent on taking from one group to give to another, and the same material god that is worshipped by communists everywhere. But no one can say that the far Left is in a hurry – they keep Stalin.
