From The Divine Sarah:
“Communism is a hot house plant because it originates from intellectual abstraction; because it doesn’t work mathematically; because, contrary to image, its biggest fans are always intellectuals of a certain type; because it can’t survive without leeching off functional systems, and because it can’t survive the free dissemination of information.”
If by “intellectual” she means “of the mind”, then I agree. But a socio-economic theory that cannot stand up to the most basic of questions is the province of the unutterably foolish, not of actual rational intellectual thought.
I’ve seen this bruited about as “a good idea in theory, doesn’t work in practice”
To which I respond BULLSHIT.
All redistributionist schemes are not good ideas in theory, they’re based on this childish, Sesame Street, concept that it’s “nice” to share your things with those that may not have as much as you, and that it is societies responsibility to iron out inequities, at gunpoint if necessary.
Which means that if the rewards from my labor is thrown into a pool (voluntarily or otherwise) I am now a slave, not a free man. There is no other way to whitewash it.
Spare me the crybaby horseshit about inequities and no-one starts from the same place in the race of life. Of course they don’t and they never have and never will. I’m not 7′ tall, I can’t play in the NBA, no matter what I do. That doesn’t preclude me from finding something useful I can accomplish well.
The real cost of course to all this collectivist spittle, is moral as much as physical. People who don’t HAVE to work for something, are content to sit on their ass while others support them, while people who are productive quit producing because what’s the point of seeing it stolen by the looters.
You can absolutely chart the decline of Great Britain with the advent of the Welfare state. Why carry bricks every day, when I can sit and drink beer, and live off benefits. It will happen here as well (as it already has).
That’s a really good summary. You could apply the same argument against libertarianism, by the way, except that the librarians don’t want to ship unbelievers off to the gulags and killing-pits.
Unless, of course, the Librarians are flaming Leftists. I know one who proudly told me that her father named her after the famous (infamous UCLA Professor Angela Davis.
The same thing that is said about men in Alaska can be said about women in the Sierra Club (perhaps everywhere in America now) “The odds are good, but the goods are odd. “