Slavery Under Socialism

Socialists/communists have pulled down, and in the case of New York City’s government, are contemplating pulling down, the statues of such great historical figures as Washington, Jefferson, and Columbus, on the grounds that during their lifetimes these men owned one or more slaves. The outrageousness of this is all the greater when one realizes that socialism/communism is both a system of universal enslavement and leads to mass murder.

A socialist/communist state is a universal monopoly employer, the only employer in the economic system. As such, it can pay its workers as little as minimum subsistence, because they have nowhere else to go. Indeed, in today’s environment, it can pay them nothing at all, and let them starve to death. That’s one way to reduce a nation’s “carbon footprint.” Slavery under socialism/communism is far worse than the conditions that exist when the slaves are privately owned. As I wrote in my book Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics (p. 290 ): "There is a further consequence of forced labor under socialism that must be considered, namely, its potential for developing into mass murder. To understand how this can happen, we must contrast forced labor under socialism with forced labor under different conditions. "Slavery existed in ancient Greece and Rome and in the Southern United States before the Civil War, and was, of course, a moral abomination. Nevertheless, abominable as slavery was, there was an important factor in these cases which restrained the slave owners and the overseers in their treatment of the slaves. That was the fact that the slaves were private property. A private slave owner was restrained in his treatment of his slaves by his own material self-interest. If he injured or killed his slave, he destroyed his own property. Of course, out of ignorance or irrationality, this sometimes happened; but it was the exception rather than the rule. Private slave owners were motivated to treat their slaves with at least the same consideration they gave to their livestock, and to see to it that their overseers acted with the same consideration. "But under socialism, the slaves are 'public property'—the property of the state. Those who have charge of the slaves, therefore, have no personal economic interest in their lives or well-being. Since they are not owners of the slaves, they will not derive any personal material benefit if the slaves are alive to work in the future, nor suffer any personal material loss if the slaves are not alive to work in the future. In such conditions, slave labor results in mass murder. The officials in charge of the slaves are given orders to complete certain projects as of a certain time. Quite possibly, they are threatened with being reduced to the status of slaves themselves, if they fail. In these circumstances, the slaves are treated as valueless natural resources. Brutal punishments are inflicted on them for trifling reasons, and they are worked to the point of exhaustion and death. The slaves of socialism are slaves, but they are no one’s property and therefore no one’s loss. "In this way, slave labor under socialism results in mass murder. In just this way, tens of millions of people have been murdered. "Of course, the economics of slavery under socialism is not a sufficient explanation of mass murder. Those who participate in the system must be utterly depraved. But observe how socialism creates the conditions in which depravity flourishes—the conditions in which depravity can express itself, is freed of the restraints of better motives, and is positively nurtured and encouraged. For it is socialism that delivers men into slavery. It is socialism that removes the restraint of self-interest from those in charge of the use of any form of property. And it is socialism that creates an environment of hatred and sadism. In such conditions, the most depraved and vicious element of the population finds a place for its depravity and viciousness and steps forward to run the labor camps and the whole socialist society." Reisman on Amazon and YouTube: http://amazon.com/author/george-reisman… https://youtube.com/@georgereismancapitalism

Washington’s Birthday

 

Today, February 22, is Washington’s Birthday. For most of our history, it was celebrated as a national holiday and deserves to be again. Lincoln’s Birthday can be combined with that of Martin Luther King and celebrated as “Black Freedom Day.”

However great the merits of Martin Luther King may be, they do not outweigh those of the Father of Our Country, which is what Washington was. Yet this is what is implied by giving King a national holiday but not Washington.

The communists, socialists, and progressives who attack Washington for owning slaves have no solid ground on which to do so, for, unlike Washington, who sought the end of slavery and ultimately freed his slaves, they seek the reimposition of slavery—for everyone.

Socialism requires that everyone work for the government, for whatever pittance the government chooses to pay. This is slavery.

A Woke Solution for Americans Trapped in Afghanistan

Here's a woke solution for Americans trapped in Afghanistan: buy a painting by Hunter Biden. That, minus a substantial commission, would allow for a still significant payment to the Taliban, and thus free an American.

Matters could be speeded up if Joe, the rest of his family, and the members of his Cabinet could temporarily be made students of Hunter and thus learn to paint as well as he does. They, in turn, could have students of their own, which would increase paintings output by a further multiple.

Soon canvases would appear signed by such notables as “Student of Jen Psaki,” “Student of General Mark Milley.” In short order, sufficient funds might be raised to free all the Americans and all their Afghan allies as well.

Of course, such an arrangement would bear no resemblance to the United States of old, when Pres. Jefferson refused to pay tribute to the Barbary Pirates and, instead, defeated them in war.

But Jefferson has been discredited, because he owned slaves, the intellectual foundations of which institution he totally destroyed in The Declaration of Independence.

He’s been discredited by Marxists/Socialists/Communists, whose entire philosophy and program rest on slavery, which they plan to impose now, today, in the present-day world, as soon as they take power.

Such people have virtually no standing to discredit anyone. They themselves are at the bottom of the rungs of hell.

Most people do not know this, because they are largely uneducated. They have no knowledge of history, or very much knowledge of anything else. Thus, they cannot see what has happened to our country.

Washington's Birthday

Today is the birthday of George Washington, the Father of Our Country. In his time, the ownership of slaves was a widespread practice, and he owned some. But his principles and those of the country he founded guaranteed the end of slavery.

They did so by positing for the first time in human history the existence of individual rights to which laws and governments were to be subordinate

Far-leftists have no right to condemn Washington for owning slaves, for they advocate the fresh imposition of slavery, universal slavery, in the form of socialism. Under socialism, everyone is compelled by force to work for the government. Socialism is forced labor camps—Gulag.

Such camps are what those who tear down  the statues of Washington want to construct.

Washington and Jefferson, Slavery and Marxism

Do not believe the claim made by the media morons that statues of Washington and Jefferson have been toppled because these Presidents owned slaves. Their statues have been toppled because they advocated freedom and created a country based on freedom.

In contrast, the Marxists/Socialists engaged in this desecration are advocates of slavery, out to create a totalitarian dictatorship. At the same time, as part of the same phenomenon, they claim that slavery exists all around us, in the very nature of capitalism.

They claim that the employees of capitalists are slaves: “wage slaves,” they call them. They do this on the basis of their lunatic belief that capitalists gain from the employment of wage earners in the same way that a slave owner gains from the ownership of a slave.

Namely, from the fact that a slave or wage earner is able to produce in a day more than is required to keep him alive and able to work the next day. The existence of this excess or “surplus,” they believe is the explanation of profit.

Thus, capitalists allegedly exploit wage earners in exactly the same way that slave owners exploit slaves.

This may no doubt come as a shock to many multi-millionaires and billionaires busy contributing to Marxist/Socialist terrorist organizations in the belief that doing so buys them protection. There is no protection except to expose these vermin.

And one simple and effective way to do that is to read and publicize this book, which is available in both Kindle and paperback versions at https://amzn.to/2N44uTu.

Among other major subjects, it explains the productive role of businessmen and capitalists and the actual foundations of profit.

Socialism Is Slavery and Worse

Socialism is government ownership of the means of production. Since all work requires the use of means of production, under socialism the government is a universal monopoly employer. Everyone is forced to work for the government. Everyone is the government’s slave.

Lacking the competition of employers for labor, the natural level of wages under socialism is minimum subsistence. Even if it had the means, a socialist state always has something more important to attend to than the standard of living of its citizens.

The moral ideal of socialism is “from each according to his ability to each according to his need.” Since ability is limited while need is unlimited, socialism proclaims its ideal world as one of limitless shortages, in which who gets what is determined by arbitrary, brute force.

This includes the determination of who works at what, where, and to what extent. Under socialism, everyone is a passive tool of the government, waiting to be told what to do, how to do it, and where to do it.

The nature of socialism is revealed in its adherence to the proposition that the individual is the means to the ends of society.

Since “society” has no real existence apart from the individuals who comprise it, what this means is that the individual is the means to the ends of society AS DIVINED BY THE RULERS OF SOCIETY.

And what this means is that the individual is the means to the ends of the rulers.

Slavery under socialism is the worst form of slavery. A slave is the property of the state, not of any private individual, who would experience the slave’s injury or death as his loss. Under socialism, the slave’s life and well-being are valueless. So, millions are slaughtered.

Thus, socialism goes from enslavement to mass murder.
When you hear a socialist or talk to a socialist, know that you are dealing with someone seeking to enslave you and who is an accomplice to potential mass murder.

To learn more, read my Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics available at amzn.to/2PM19ut.

What the Protests Are Protesting

The “protests” are not against the death of George Floyd. His connection is no greater than the length of the fuse needed to set off a vast accumulation of explosive hatred for the United States, the capitalist economic system, and rationality itself.

If the protests were about Mr. Floyd, they would have stopped with the filing of murder charges against the officer directly responsible for his death, and with the filing of charges against the three other officers present.

Despite the filing of charges, the protests went on, virtually without skipping a beat. Perhaps if the officers had been dragged from custody and been hung or beaten to death, the protests might have stopped, simply out of shock at what had been done. But not necessarily.

The protests have the flavor of a pogrom incited by a single incident and taken as symbolic of something vastly larger. They have the same character as the vast destruction of Jewish businesses in Germany in Nov. 1938, in response to the killing of a German diplomat by a Jew.

Generations of miseducation, akin more to a process of protracted lobotomization than to education, especially in the so-called social sciences and the humanities, has produced millions of graduates who are profoundly ignorant and barely capable of thinking.

To protect themselves from ever learning anything by listening to ideas that conflict with their dogmas, they shout down speakers. When the opportunity arises, they seek to get professors with alternative views fired, if they’ve managed to be employed in the first place.

The educational system’s graduates are so ignorant that despite the scores of millions of deaths it has caused, they do not know that socialism is a system of slavery, terror, and mass murder, and want to impose it on the United States.

At the same time, they regard the United States, the first country in the history of the world created on the principle that individuals possess unalienable rights that governments are instituted to protect, as though it were a tyranny ruled by evil “capitalists.”

They ignore the fact that to rid the country of slavery and make it true to its founding principle of individual rights, more than 300 thousand Union soldiers died in the Civil War, out of a population 20 million, which toll is comparable to almost 5 million today.

They are so pathetically ignorant that they do not even know what biologically distinguishes men and women and believe that by wishing, they can override these biological differences.

They do not know that freedom is the absence of the initiation of physical force, and that it is secured by the ability and willingness to counter the initiation of force with greater, defensive and retaliatory force, thereby creating personal safety.

They do not know that a police force and army are essentially the one proper function of government, and that in preventing, or, if necessary, overcoming the initiation of force, it secures the freedom of the individual and respect for his rights.

They do not know that the essential problem in securing individual rights and freedom is keeping the government in check. It must be prevented from itself initiating force, which it does any time it makes illegal something that is not the initiation of force.

In an upside down, inside out, total reversal of rationality, today’s protesters in seeking to achieve socialism seek the use of government force in every area of life. Their newly discovered exception is prevention of common crime. They want to abolish local police departments.

Perhaps there is a logic in all this. Namely, today’s looters and fire bombers might serve as “post-police,” enforcing endless regulations, working as spies, and guarding inmates in the socialist state’s concentration camps. There will certainly be no shortage of such monsters.  

There is practically no hope of any serious news analysis from today’s mainstream media. The New York Times, for example, has sunk to the level of urging people to eat insects (https://nyti.ms/2O0ivSS) and to avoid the use of toilet paper (https://nyti.ms/3aPuZs0). Loathsome.

Readers who want serious discussions of leading current issues can start by consulting my Amazon author’s page at https://amzn.to/2NLvVVZ. The works found there, especially my Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics, provide references to all the important relevant literature.

The “White Privilege” Scam

Over the course of American history, the individual rights of whites have been far better respected than the individual rights of blacks. Whites were never enslaved; they were never murdered by lynch mobs; they were never the victims of government-imposed racial discrimination/segregation in housing, schools, restaurants, stores, railways, buses, movie theaters, and elsewhere.

Now the obvious, blazingly clear solution for the lack of respect historically shown for the individual rights of blacks, is to put an end to that disrespect, and henceforth to show the same respect for the individual rights of blacks as is shown for the individual rights of whites. The guiding principle is very simple: In each and every individual case, the rights of the individual, black or white, must be respected.

Indeed, to a large extent, this has already happened. Black slavery was ended in the Confederate States by Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and then, in 1865, by the 13th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, in whatever states in the Union that still allowed it. The last reported lynching in the United States occurred in 1981. Racial segregation and discrimination have also greatly diminished as the laws that imposed them were repealed or struck down by judicial decision.

The obvious path that needs to be followed in order to complete the job is to extend to blacks recognition and respect for the same individual rights held by them that have been far more often recognized and respected in whites than in them. Nevertheless, a widespread movement has developed that holds that a very different solution is required. This alleged solution is the elimination of respect for the rights of whites insofar as it exceeds respect for the rights of blacks. The greater respect shown for the rights of whites is transformed from a matter of respect for individual rights into an alleged matter of group “privilege,” in this case “white privilege.” Thus whites allegedly enjoyed a privilege in not being enslaved. They allegedly enjoyed a privilege in not being murdered by lynch mobs. They were allegedly privileged in not being victims of government imposed racial discrimination/segregation.

The concept of white privilege is a giant scam. Like any other scam it leads people to give up something that is valuable, such as their life’s savings, in exchange for something that is valueless. In this case, they are bamboozled out of paying attention to and valuing the concept of individual rights and are left instead with the utterly nebulous and highly destructive concept of white privilege.

The very concept of privilege implies injustice and calls for the abolition of whatever privileges are in question. But since white privilege is used as a different name for what in fact is respect for the individual rights possessed by whites that have not been properly respected in blacks, the actual effect would be the loss of respect for those individual rights of whites. By the logic of the situation, whites could be enslaved, lynched, and otherwise wrongly treated all in the belief that it was merely a matter of stripping away white privilege. The concept of white privilege is an invitation to the violation of the rights of whites to the same extent that the rights of blacks have been violated.

The concept of white privilege is a formula for massive injustice. It obliterates the concept of individual rights and thus destroys the possibility of respect for anyone’s rights, white or black. It aims at a society in which everyone is a slave—not to a plantation owner perhaps, but to the state.