Blog: Happy Spooky Month – Let’s Talk About Something Scary.

Ah, yes. October. That time of the month where almost every yard you pass has some sort of elaborate Halloween display up, pumpkin spice is in everything, eggnog is beginning to be stocked on the shelf, pumpkins are everywhere, the trees are becoming wooden skeletons and millennial women are jumping for joy. But there’s one thing that we need to talk about today that’s even scarier than any of the horror movies you’ve seen or the haunted houses you’ve been to. You might need to sit down for this one, because it’s…

Marxism and it’s various forms.

I can hear your screaming now. Yes, run in terror. That’s the appropriate response to this ideology.

But on a serious note, with how many horrible events Marxism has been behind in the past century and even today, I think it’s worth taking a look at it, and the two main forms that it comes in: communism and socialism. This will not be an in-depth look at this worldview, but I hope you’ll get the gist of it.

#1: Marxism

Starting with Marxism, this is the sociopolitical/economic theory/worldview from Hell that started all of this. Karl Marx and his buddy Friedrich Engels came up with this theory in the mid-19th century and what these two suggested was that society is built on economics, particularly labor and how labor is regulated. Because of this, human history went in waves thanks to class struggles between the proletariat (the labor) and the bourgeois (the capitalist “overlords”). When it would stop doing this is after the bourgeois is overthrown, the government is overthrown, and society becomes a classless utopia in which everything belongs to the community, and we sing kumbaya like a bunch of tree-hugging hippies.

The main problem with this worldview (other than it relies on a bunk idea of history) is that it ignores basic human nature, which is also one of the driving forces of economics. The main rule of economics is that people are inherently selfish and, in the end, will work and make decisions to satisfy themselves and their needs. In a free-market, capitalist system, we turn that selfishness into something good to benefit others. For example, we all want to make money. Thus, if you’re really good at something like writing, in a capitalist system, if you see a teaching job that offers $70k a year and a journalism job that offers $64k a year, you have the freedom to choose which one you like better and from there, you benefit the community by teaching people how to read and write. Or if you own an oil company, you may be richer than everyone else, but you benefit the community by providing jobs and selling your oil at an affordable price (which would be around the equilibrium point of demand and price).

The Marxist theory fails to take this into account. Under a Marxist system in which everything belongs to the community, and nothing is privately owned, human inclination to greed and laziness would make it so that only a few are actually working, and others are being lazy, taking more than is allotted to them, etc. And without a government to keep everyone working (because if you don’t work, they may kill you), it’s just going to be full on anarchy. That is the reason why for as many attempts as there have been to bring about this Marxist utopia through communism it has never succeeded at creating a classless society. Instead, all it’s succeeded at is dehumanizing people to the point where they’re almost animals, such as in North Korea where you never know if you’ll survive until the next day or even the next hour.

But more on communism in a minute….

[Author’s Note: It also fails to consider that humans are very tribalistic. Even without any sort of oversight, humans have a tendency to team up with whoever they best click with or will suit their needs. Think school cliques. The popular kids stick with the popular kids. The goths stick with the goths. The stoners get stoned together. All of this happens without the oversight of the teachers or other school authorities. Why? Because those are the tribes we feel suit us best, regardless of school rules.]

#2: Socialism

This is the first stage of trying to usher in Marxism. Socialism calls for the control of production by a community, the government, or a cooperative (i.e. socialized healthcare). This is then supposed to help society because it will help redistribute wealth through social programs and worker empowerment.

However, the issue with socialism is that it’s a completely inefficient system. For example, in the case of healthcare, while privatized healthcare is more expensive, the people running these hospitals know what they’re doing and if you don’t like one hospital because they aren’t good or are too crowded, you can go to a better hospital. Meanwhile, with socialized healthcare, because so many people are on the same system and it’s run by the government (which doesn’t know what it’s doing), it will take you forever to get treatment. We see a lot of this in the Canadian healthcare system, which is socialized, and is why so many Canadians come to the U.S. to get medical treatment.

Another problem with it is because the state or whoever is running everything is in charge of taking care of you, you lose incentive to take care of yourself. Again, turning to the healthcare example, if you have to pay for your healthcare and insurance, you’ll be less likely to engage in behaviors that could put your health at risk because you’ll have to pay more for help. However, if you have daddy government paying for everything and providing you with everything, why would you take care of yourself? You don’t have to pay an exorbitant amount for it. Your get-out-of-jail-free card for your bad life decisions is funded by taxpayers.

And worse, when no one’s working because in some cases it’s more profitable to not work and to live on welfare (i.e. welfare queens), who’s supposed to pay for all these handouts? If it’s the government paying for all of this, guess who also has an incentive to start killing people who are costing them too much? We’re already seeing this happen in Canada, where you can apply for euthanasia for pretty much any reason under the sun, thus helping alleviate the financial pressure on Canada’s welfare system at the expense of human life.

The third problem with this is that if everyone is being paid the same amount, it discourages people to do better. If there is no incentive to improve, people get lazy and demoralized. For example, under a capitalist system, if I’m working at a company and am doing a better job than all my coworkers, I would like to get a raise and possibly be moved up the ranks, and under that system, that’s perfectly possible. However, in a socialist system, if I’m doing the same amount of work as Mark, who’s an awful employee, and am being paid the same amount as him with no chance of moving up because that’s not “equitable”, then I’m not going to have the incentive to work hard.

#3: Communism

This is the bloody stage between socialism and Marxist utopia. This is the phase where the government seizes everything. All private means of production are abolished, and work is not distributed according to ability and talent but by necessity. I’m not going to go through all the problems with this because most of them are the same as earlier. The main one I’ll focus on is that if everything is distributed according to necessity, not talent, then you’re going to get an inefficient labor force. An example of this is that I don’t have a green thumb. Almost every plant I’ve tried growing from seed has died somehow. If you put me on a farm in a communist system, I’m not good at growing things so I’m not going to be able to produce much. Farmers who are more talented at growing will be doing more than those who aren’t and are maybe better at something like engineering, wasting potential and making the economy inefficient. It’s better for an economic system to allow people to choose what they want to do by their abilities than by necessity because it will get more done. The capitalist system allows for this; the communist system does not.

Then there’s the fact that the unintended consequence of communism is that it does create two classes: the working man and the government, who actively oppresses the working man out of necessity to keep them loyal and to keep them working. Going back to the North Korea example, the government oppresses its people through starvation and propaganda. They do not care how many people must die as long as those in the government get to survive. The communist cannot completely abolish the classes because if they did, there would complete anarchy, which means it can never reach its goal of ushering in a Marxist utopia.

Until next time,

M.J.