Why socialism is so popular with governments, and such a failure throughout history.

"From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."

The failure is built right into the manifesto.

From each according to his ability, that’s fine, that’s actually natural, capitalistic even. It’s the ‘to each according to his need’ part that seeds the failure in the system. Harmless enough on the surface, it is easy to fall victim to such a utopic ideal, but let’s focus on the word Need.

Need is not a concrete term. You can not build a philosophy on a meaningless word, especially when the philosophy is meant to govern and better the lives of a diverse and dynamic population.

Who’s need?

That's the obvious question, to which of course the creed answers, “each persons need.”

Individually?

Each person?

That's a very nice idea, but a little childish in it's simplicity. The question it leaves unanswered is “who decides who Needs what?”

This is why socialism and communism, (Marx himself recognized that socialism was only a side track on the road to communism) are so popular with governments. It is the same reason why Keynesian economics, a terribly flawed concept, is so popular with governments. As with socialism, governments love to sell it as the answer for one simple reason. It gives the government a role in society. It gives them the opportunity to be our savior. And hence, get our votes.

It is one thing to be a governor, sitting in a big room, being the governor. But there isn’t much power in sitting. One must engage the citizenry, point out their flaws, and offer ‘solutions’ by their own hand (with our money of course). Otherwise, we the people will just busy our selves with making business and lifestyles out of thin air for ourselves. We would likely only approach the ‘authorities’ when some line of conduct had been breached by one or more of us. We would tell the authorities what displeased us, and they would act to restrain said activity. But that would be far to passive for any practicing political narcissist.

The way it is presently, and ever more persistently, the authorities are in our face daily, telling us what we are doing wrong, and how they are going to fix us, stealing our ability to make lives for ourselves, and claiming they are trying to help. That is a far more powerful position for those we call politicians. It is not suitable to the narcissism of a politician to simply wait for issues to come up.

It was clear in Obama’s Farewell Iraq speech, when he steered way off subject and began campaigning to basically say, “my job is to fix you.” That should make it clear that he and many involved in government today see their role as doctor of all ills. Whatever the issue, they think they have the power to do something about it, and act with impunity to enact such reforms as necessary to further establish their control over the situation, as it slowly falls apart further.

But why? Why does it fall apart further the more they try to control it? Don’t they have the best intentions?

Well, their intentions are debatable, but that is not the point of this article. There is a very specific reason centralized decision making fails in all accounts. One person can not make 300 million decisions, each second, 24 hours a day. 300 million interchanging decisions each with infinite potential. That is why man remained in bondage until capitalism (the natural existence of man and nature) was nurtured into a social frame work.

From feudal England to Castro’s Cuba, whenever one man, woman, or elite group of men and women as we face now, attempts to manage a diverse and dynamic socio-economic body, the machine runs inefficiently, leading to rationing and shortages at first, and then later to despotism and possibly even land clearances at the expense of millions of lives. As in Stalin’s case, when you find you can’t govern such a large body politic, you simply have to massacre many of them, so you have a better shot at managing the remnants.

Each person has a very different idea of what they need. As soon as you decide that you know better what someone else needs, you have introduced despotism into the system. Despotism leads to collapse. Always has.

The only way to distribute the needs of the people is by doing so ‘to each according to their own ability’. Marx should have just combined his maxim and stopped there.

How about a new manifesto: “To each according to their own ability and charity towards your fellow man.”

Government as God through Science

As the government uses the public education system to promote the sciences, it inherently degrades the importance of spiritual principles in the mind of it's people.

This is not an accident.

Facts are fleeting and entirely corruptible depending on who is in power. The more a person is led from "feeling" to "fact", the less morally upright a people they become, leading to a less independent people more easily led into slavery.

The very freedom of our country was founded on ethics and personal responsibility not found in any government scripture prior to America’s founding, but through far more spiritual guidance. Once the spirit is squelched, once dependence on government is thoroughly established, there is very little that can arrest the snowball into feudalism.

Controlling our health care, re-distributing our production, dictating our education. The real battle between rich and poor does not exist on the battlefield of corporate soil, the greatest war is being waged between the political elite and the working man, all the while, without their own moral compass, the working man champions the government as their savior.

The rule of one man over another has become the goal of our government, forcing people only to unite in cause behind armies of lawyers and lobbyists to exert power and extort freedoms from one class or another for one cause or another. The idea of making your own world work for you is being purposefully eradicated from the American psyche through the use and support of labor unions, social services, protectionist rulings, public education, and an ever increasing bible of laws-of-man, whose sole purpose is to restrict the rights of one for the benefit of another.

Religion has played many parts throughout history, some dark and some enlightened, I do not propose that organized religion is some cure all, it isn't. I am talking about spirituality and the ethics that come with a higher understanding of our place in the universe. In today’s world, the ethics of personal responsibility are being forced out of existence by a pseudo nanny state who uses its entrenched “public service” systems to fool us into believing it is working for us, all the while enslaving us, one law at a time.

With our moral compass purposely being eradicated by the entrenched elites, we are losing the precious and short lived American experiment of freedom and personal responsibility that led people of many nations to the promise of freedom, a promise we now willingly give up in hopes of some great king that will take away the fear and responsibility of being free.

Wages of Power

Not only does the minimum wage not help whom it is intended to help, it actually hurts their prospects at finding a job. It also hurts those that have already found success beyond government mandated minimums. Lets look at the ‘evil’ corporation for example. If a chain of burger joints, (one that has been deemed evil let's say) is so evil and profiteering that they are only focused on their profit margin, wouldn’t it stand to reason that they would charge as much as possible for their burgers? You know, really stick it to everyone, just get every penny they could? Maybe $20, or $30 dollar burgers?

By the standard of the pro-government, pro-union, pro-minimum wage folks, that should be exactly what they are doing. But they can’t, there is this little thing called competition.

As of yet, the government does not run all business. They are using the current economic downturn to try and accomplish as much of that as possible, but at this point, there is still competition… therefore, even the ‘evilest’ of burger joints can only garner a certain price point for their burger, because if they could charge more, by the very nature of their evilness, they would.

Now, let's force them to pay their employees more, with either a government mandated minimum wage, or through a government protected union sponsored contract “negotiation." With these false price pressures, in the face of a now globally competitive market, any company, from a burger joint to a car manufacturer will have only three choices: raise the price of burgers, find technology to replace the now overpriced worker (if the union will let them), or close up shop and send everyone home. No one in their right mind would operate for any foreseeable period at a loss (proving again that government is not in its right mind).

So with the newly instituted wage increase, either the price of Things, everything, not just burgers, remember it is a mandatory minimum, goes up to cover the difference and keep everyone working, but now with less purchasing power because even though they make more, everything costs more, or, the company seeks out and implements some new technology that can do the job cheaper and people get laid off, or the company goes out of business and everyone gets laid off.

How will that help anyone raise their standard of living?

The only possible good answer is that once replaced by technology, the workers can now advance into a more lucrative and rewarding career, perhaps working for the new company that displaced their old job, but that is only likely for those earning the minimum wage that should have been: students and immigrants. These groups arrive, begin to work, and grow into greater things. Someone who has never amounted to more than minimum wage, even as those around them have moved on, or someone who has no desire to do anything more than the union wage contract said they had to do, if they are not willing to step up into job training or re-education, they will not be benefited by this technology displacement, they will simply go on the dole.

This is the best outcome possible from falsely standardized wages.

The most likely outcome is a short honeymoon for the politician that promised the new wage pressure, and then more inflation for everyone else, everywhere. And no new buying power for anyone the new wage was meant to help.