From Lawrence W. Reed on FEE.org (Dec. 4, 2022):
Here’s a question for a PhD dissertation: How did something so radically anti-social ever get the name, social-ism?
I leave that vexing matter to whoever wants to write it up. Meantime, I can assist the project by offering some of the reasons why socialism is a self-evidently anti-social contrivance.
First, what is socialism? For a definition, socialists themselves offer numerous moving targets. For example:
It’s happy talk and sharing things even though under socialism there’s less to share and be happy about.
It’s free stuff until the bills come due.
It’s the welfare state, where the politicians get well and the rest of us pay the fare. (See “John Calhoun’s Mouse Utopia and Reflections on the Welfare State”).
It’s bread lines that bring us all together, somehow. Remember that Bernie Sanders once proclaimed that people lining up for food in communist countries was a blessing in disguise.
It’s government ownership of the means of production so the economy can hum with the efficiency of the Department of Motor Vehicles.
It’s when workers run the factories that somebody else invested in.
It’s when clueless elites tell the economy what to do.
It’s Scandinavia (which isn’t socialist).
It’s communal utopia where everybody gets an equal portion regardless of effort, until they nearly starve. The Pilgrims tried it until forced to replace it with private property. (See also “The Dark Side of Paradise: A Brief History of America’s Utopian Experiments in Communal Living”).
It’s Venezuela, or it was Venezuela until it didn’t work.
If it seems like socialists don’t really know what it is, that’s only partly true. In most cases, they just don’t want YOU to know what it really is. The best charlatans are always the clever ones.
Socialism is rightly and widely perceived as diametrically opposed to capitalism. So it can’t possibly be acts of caring, sharing, giving and being compassionate toward the needy. There is demonstrably more caring, sharing, giving, and compassion toward the needy under capitalism!
Even when it comes to foreign aid, capitalist countries are the donors and socialist countries are the recipients. You can’t give it away or share it with anybody if you don’t create it in the first place, and socialism offers utterly no theory of wealth creation, only wealth confiscation and consumption.
Another way to think of the distinctions between these two opposing systems is this: Capitalism is what happens when free and peaceful people are left alone. In that sense, it’s natural and spontaneous. Socialism is nothing more than the presumptuous plans of bullies and know-it-alls who impose their plans at gunpoint. In that sense, it’s unnatural, contrived, arbitrary and officious.
Socialists are math-challenged: They’re good at division and subtraction but are unaware of addition or multiplication. If your second grader tells you that 3 + 2 = 1, you know he’s a future socialist. Likewise if he tells you that taxes on cigarettes discourage smoking but taxes on investing, hiring or starting a business have only beneficial effects. The economics knowledge of socialists is even more dismal: They think supply and demand means the people demand and the government supplies.
In my book, Was Jesus a Socialist? I blew away the smoke bombs to reveal what socialism really is:
It is the concentration of power in the hands of the State, which then deploys legal force for one or more of these purposes (and usually all three to one extent or another): the redistribution of income, government ownership of property, and the central planning of economic life.
Note that socialists do not propose to accomplish their objectives by mutual consent. They do not advocate raising the money for their plans by way of bake sales or charitable solicitations. Your participation is not voluntary. From start to finish, socialism’s defining characteristic is not so much the promises meant to beguile but rather, the method by which it implements its agenda—FORCE. If it’s voluntary, it’s not socialism. It’s that simple. [read more]
Socialism is definitely evil. Anti-God.
Here are the reasons socialism is anti-social:
- The Plans of Socialists Are More Important Than Yours
- Socialists Are Know-It-Alls and Know-Nothings, Simultaneously
- Socialism Rejects Biological Science
- Socialists Call the Cops for Everything
- Socialism Is Anti-Capital
- Conflict Is Their God