Wow, that is like reading an abbreviated version of Sowell.
Spolier alert:
Here come the quote I found particularly insightful
“It is too big - he said - too big. At the top, it is too small. It will not work. In Moscow there are only men, and man is not God. A man has only a man’s head, and one hundred heads together do not make one great big head. No. Only God can know Russia.”
Socialism only works in small, voluntary groups in which each member is kept in check by censure and peer pressure, and where each member personally knows and can expect to help and be helped by the others.
On this same plane of actuality, no State, no Government, exists. What does in fact exist is a man, or a few men, in power over many men.
" A government is body of people , usually notably ungoverned"
Political revolution reduced or destroyed the power of the State, the kings, so that common men were more nearly free to do as they pleased. But this economic revolution concentrated economic power in the hands of the State, the commissars, so that the lives, the livelihoods, of common men were once more subject to dictators.
Every advance toward personal liberty which had been gained by the religious revolution and by the political revolution, was lost by the collectivist economic reaction.
When I considered facts, I could not see how it could be otherwise. The communist village was possible because there a few men, face to face, struggled each for his own self-interest, until out of that conflict a reasonably satisfactory balance was arrived at. The same thing happens within every family. But the government of men in hundreds of millions is another thing. Time and space prevent a personal struggle of so many wills, each in personal encounter with each of the others arriving at a common decision. The government of multitudes of men must be in the hands of a few men.Americans blamed Lenin because he did not establish a republic. Had he done so, the fact that a few men ruled Russia would not have been altered.
I quite like the juxtaposition of economic vs political revolution. We are trying to preserve the Politicl revolution of 1776 - they are trying to instigate an economic one.
A republic is not possible in the Soviet Union because the aim of its rulers is an economic aim. Economic power differs from political power.
Politics is a matter of broad principles which, once adopted may stand unchanged indefinitely; such principles as, for example, that government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed. From such principles are drawn general rules; as, no taxation without representation. Such rules are embodied in law restricting or limiting political power; as, The sole right to levy taxes is vested in Congress and only Congress may spend the collected tax-money. This most concrete application of political principle does not touch the intimate detail of an individual’s life. We may carelessly give Congress its head, we may neglect to jerk back sharply on the bit, we may yip when we have to borrow money to pay our taxes, or we may lose our farm or house if we can’t and still our personal freedom of choice is ours.
Economics, however, is not concerned with abstract principles and general laws, but with material things; it deals directly with actual carloads of coal, harvests of grain, output of factories. Economic power in action is subject to an infinity of immediately unpredictable crises affecting material things; it is subject to drought, storm, flood, earthquake and pestilence, to fashion, and diseases, and insects, to the breaking down and the wearing out of machinery. And economics enters into the minute detail of each person’s existence - into his eating, drinking, working, playing, and personal habits.
Russia’s State capitalism and the faint beginnings of free enterprise in Russia were destroyed, and the people controlled the national wealth. That is to say, in actual fact a sincere and extremely able man, Lenin, was in power, devoted to the stupendous task of reducing multitudes of human beings to efficient economic order, for what this man and his followers honestly believed to be the ultimate material welfare of those multitudes.And what I saw was not an extension of human freedom, but the establishment of tyranny on a new, widely extended and deeper base.The historical novelty of the Soviet government was its motive. Other governments have existed to keep peace among their subjects, or to amass money from them, or to use them in trade and war for the glory of the men governing them. But the Soviet government exists to do good to its people, whether they like it or not.And I felt that, of all the tyrannies to which men have been subject, that tyranny would be the most ruthless and the most agonizing to bear. There is some refuge for freedom under other tyrannies, since they are less thorough and not so remorselessly armed with righteousness. But from benevolence in economic power I could see no refuge whatever.
My contention is that good men (not bad men) consistently acting upon that position [imposing “the good”] would act as cruelly and unjustly as the greatest tyrants. They might in some respects act even worse. Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under of robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber barons cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some points be satiated; but those who torment us for their own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to heaven yet at the same time likely to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on the level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals. - C.S. Lewis - God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics (1972)
For twenty-seven years the men who rule that country have toiled prodigiously to create precisely the society we dreamed of; a society in which insecurity, poverty, economic inequality, shall be impossible.To that end they have suppressed personal freedom; freedom of movement, of choice of work, freedom of self-expression in ways of life, freedom of speech, freedom of conscience. Given their aim, I do not see how they could have done otherwise. Producing food from the earth and the sea, making goods from assembled raw materials, and their storing, exchanging, transporting, distributing and consuming by vast multitudes of human beings, are activities so intricately inter-related and inter-dependent that efficient control of any part of them demands control of the whole. No man can so control multitudes of men without compulsion, and that compulsion must increase.It must increase because human beings are naturally diverse. It is the nature of men to do the same thing in different ways, to experiment, invent, make mistakes, depart from the past in an infinite variety of directions. Plants and animals repeat routine, but men who are not restrained will go into the future like explorers into a new country, and exploration is always wasteful. Great numbers of explorers accomplish nothing and many are lost.Economic compulsion is, therefore, constantly threatened by human willfulness. It must constantly overcome that willfulness, crush all impulses of egotism and independence, destroy variety of human desires and behavior. Centralized economic power endeavoring to plan and to control the economic processes of a modern nation is under a necessity, either to fail or to tend to become absolute power in every province of human life.“It doesn’t matter what happens to individuals,” the communists say. “The individual is nothing. The only thing that matters is the collectivist State.The Communist hope of economic equality in the Soviet Union rests now on the death of all the men and women who are individuals. A new generation, they tell me, had already been so shaped and schooled that a human mass is actually being created; millions of young men and women do, in veritable fact, have the psychology of the bee-swarm, the ant-hill.This does not seem to incredible to me as it once did. There may yet be a human bee-swarm in Russia. It would not be unique in history; there was Sparta. There was Sparta, unchanging in its rigid forms of standardized behavior and thought until it was destroyed from without. There is the bee-swarm, static, unchanging through untold generations of individuals who ceaselessly repeat the same pattern of action devoted to the welfare of all. If there is progress in life, that it not life; it is a kind of animate and breathing death.”
Freedom for the modern liberal is freedom from insecurity- from material want - from personal responsibility to provide for yourself. It is the freedom to control the economic produce of others. The security of living as a herd animal. Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz. Well they have finally made a swarm here... not of productive drones, but a swarm of locusts, and how will that serve them when the bees are dead?
It was impossible to know France without knowing that the French demand order, discipline, the restraint of traditional forms, the bureaucratic regulation of human lives by centralized police power, and that the fierce French democracy is not a cry for individual liberty but an insistence that the upper classes shall not too harshly exploit the lower classes. I saw in Germany and in Austria scattered and leaderless sheep running this way and that, longing for the lost security of the flock and the shepherd.
Emphasis mine.
Why will you talk about the rights of individuals!" Italians exclaimed, at last impatient. "An individual is nothing. As individuals we have no importance whatever. I will die, you will die, millions will live and die, but Italy does not die. Italy is important. Nothing matters but Italy."
This rejection of one's self as an individual was, I knew, the spirit animating the members of the Communist Party. I heard that it was the spirit beginning to animate Russia. It was the spirit of Fascism, the spirit that indubitably did revive Italy.
And what did Italy do then?
No one who dreams of the ideal social order, the economy planned to eliminate waste and injustice, considers how much energy, how much human life, is wasted in administering and in obeying the best of regulations. No one considers how rigid such regulations become, nor that they must become rigid and resist change because their underlying purpose is to preserve men from the risks of chance and change in flowing time.
Americans have had in our country no experience of the discipline of a social order. We speak of a better social order when in fact we do not know what any social order is. We say that something is wrong with this system, when in fact we have no system. We use phrases learned from Europe, with no conception of the meaning of those phrases in actual living experience.
Well, we do now.
But if this chaos were replaced by a system, a social order so perfect that there would be no trace of selfishness in it, an order perfectly functioning for the sole purpose of serving the public good, these men must be replaced by a bureaucracy. And a bureaucracy is expensive, too. The bureaucracy that is necessary to controlling in detail, and according to a plan devised by men possessing centralized economic power, all the processes of business, industry, finance, and agriculture in a modern state is stupendously expensive. Such a bureaucracy is costly not only in ever-increasing payrolls but in human energy. For it must take great and ever-increasing numbers of men from productive activity and set them to dreary work amid coils of red tape and masses of papers recording what other men have done and may perhaps be permitted to do, and ordered to do.Also bureaucracies are stupid and sluggish impediments to the whole range of human activities, as anyone knows who has struggled to move under their clogging weight in Europe. Bureaucracies slow down, impede and postpone the realization of the multitude’s desires because they are not compelled, as in this American chaos business and industry were compelled, to serve those desires or perish.
And there goes your "absence of profit" savings moron leftists - all while actually gettign rid of ANY incentive to improve because everyone does it the same way - and must by law.
"It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, ... doctors, hospitals, medication and a government bureaucracy to administer it. .." - Thomas Sowell.
I read also that a hundred years ago 80 per cent of our population owned property and that today the percentage is 23. Such an expropriation, if it has occurred, is alarming. But it seems to me even more alarming that many American minds accept this statement as true upon no better proof than that they have read it, and from it conclude, first, that “something must be done,” and, second, that the proper thing to do is to take ownership away from individuals and have property administered by The State; which means, by autocratic rulers giving orders through an enormous bureaucracy.
It may be that American kindness had grown from each American’s sense of insecurity.
There is nothing new in planned and controlled economy. Human beings have lived under various forms of that social security for six thousand years. The new thing is in the anarchy of individualism, which has been operating freely only in this country for a century and a half.
Americans are still paying the price of individual liberty, which is individual responsibility and insecurity.
From the parrot-intellectuals came a din, “Everything’s changed now, there’s no more free land,” and “Freedom - for what? Freedom to starve?”
What I can’t understand is, how can anybody figure now that the government can support us, when we support the government.”
Americans (of both parties) who stand for American political principles therefore have no means of peaceful political action. A vote for the New Deal approves national socialism, but a vote for the Republican Party does not repudiate national socialism. Defeating the New Deal at the polls might possibly check our country’s back-sliding, but it is not enough to set America on its forward way again. The collectivist state was not invented in 1932. The New Deal’s political principle comes from Plato through the Dark and Middle Ages to various developments by Machiavelli, Rousseau, Fourier, Hegel - who defines freedom as “submission to The State.” Karl Marx adopted this ancient lie from Hegel, and founded the First Socialist International upon it. Marx wanted Hegel’s “freedom” for “the working classes.” Bismarck took the idea from Hegel and Marx, used it to crush the German liberals, and founded upon it his Socialpolitik, which is now called Social Security here.
They called it “liberal” to suppress liberty; “progressive” to stop the free initiative that is the source of all human progress; “economic freedom,” to obstruct all freedom, and “economic equality” to make men slaves.
We have now been backsliding for a century, and the number of individualists has dwindled, and they political system has become so corrupt that no legitimate vote could be had even if individualists numbered more. But history is made by interested minorities, and we are not yet disarmed.
" If this is to be our end, then I would have them make such an end as to be worthy of remembrance."- King Theoden.