Parents of college-age children are finally
catching on to the cultural Marxist PC scam. Cries of “insensitivity”
every time a conservative or libertarian speaker appears anywhere near a
college campus; “safe rooms” equipped with play dough, soft music, and videos
of frolicking puppies; the endless accusations of “racist/sexist/homophobe”
aimed at all non-leftists on campus; and widely-publicized episodes of vulgar,
ignorant, x-rated, “students” screaming their heads off at conservative campus
speakers have exposed the real purpose of political correctness:
censorship of any and all non-Marxist ideas. It’s not about fighting racism,
sexism, etc.; it’s about censoring the ideas of freedom.
Today’s college students have been –and are
being – trained to be intolerant, totalitarian-minded, communist thugs.
All for a mere 50 grand a year at even mediocre institutions of “higher
education.”
This all began after the worldwide collapse
of socialism in the late 1980s. Socialists never give up on their dream of
ordering their fellow human beings around, plundering them with taxes, and
enriching themselves in the process. Very few of the twentieth-century
socialist ideologues ever admitted that they were disastrously wrong, or
apologized for providing aid and comfort to the likes of Stalin, Mao, and
Castro. Instead, they and their intellectual descendants have worked
tirelessly to invent a virtual socialist reality – at least in the minds
of America’s youth – while censoring all dissenting opinions. Socialism’s
dirty secrets must never be revealed to America’s youth, lest they revolt
against the giant lying machine known as “higher education.” (There are a
few exceptions, of course, but most of academe is now dominated by the
totalitarian, cultural Marxist Left).
What are socialism’s dirty secrets that
must be kept from America’s youth? Let’s examine a few of them:
- Socialism has always and
everywhere been an economic disaster, and every honest scholar knows this.
After seventy years of socialism, the Soviet economy was barely 5% of the
U.S. economy, despite the false assertions of pro-socialist economists
like Paul Samuelson, who wrote in the 1988 edition of his famous textbook
that the Soviet economy would exceed the U.S. economy by the year 2000.
- You cannot fix socialism with
smarter government planners or plans. Socialism cannot work because the
rational economic calculation is impossible without private property,
free-market prices, the profit-and-loss market feedback mechanism, and
economic freedom in general.
- The ostensible goal of socialism –
egalitarianism – is at war with human nature because all human beings are
unique in thousands of different ways. The only kind of “equality” that
socialism has ever created is equality of misery and poverty.
- Socialism generates far more
societal inequality than economic freedom does. In all socialist societies
the politically-connected elite live lives of luxury while nearly everyone
else is equally impoverished. In democratic socialist Venezuela
today the economy has been ruined by socialism while the daughter of the
late Hugo Chavez, the father of Venezuelan socialism, is reportedly worth
$4.5 billion.
- The worst kind of people – the
most immoral, corrupt, cynical, uncaring, and brutal – rise to the top
under socialism because socialism is all about forcing people to abandon
their own plans for their own lives and complying with mandatory
government plans instead. It is no accident, in other words, that
socialism is associated with such violent thugs as Stalin, Hitler,
Mussolini, and Mao.
- Fascism was just another variety of socialism. The word “Nazi” was an acronym for national socialism. The German socialists distinguished themselves from the Russian socialists by calling their variety of socialism “national” as opposed to “international.”
- It is a myth that Scandinavian
socialism has been successful. Swedish capitalism was extremely
successful in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The
Swedes began living off of the fruits of capitalist prosperity by adopting
a version of democratic socialism in the 1950s. As a result, there
was not a single net new job created there from 1955 to 1995.
- Nineteenth-century socialism was
“government ownership of the means of production,” but it now includes the
welfare state progressive income taxation and the strangulation of capitalism
with regulation and taxation. The welfare state has destroyed the work
ethic of millions; destroyed millions of families; caused a 400% increase
in out-of-wedlock births in America since 1960; and transformed millions
into lifelong beggars and wards of the state.
- Government-run healthcare systems
– medical care socialism – is like all other government enterprises in
that it operates with all the efficiency of the Post Office or Department
of Motor Vehicles and all the compassion of the IRS. Anything as important
as medical care should never be put in the hands of politicians and
bureaucrats.
- The worse pollution problems on
the planet for the past century or more have been in the socialist
countries, as documented by books with titles like Ecocide in the USSR.
After the collapse of socialism the world learned that, in addition to
being economic basket cases, socialist countries were also ecological
cesspools.
These are but a few of the well-documented
truths about socialism that are rarely, if ever, mentioned on college
campuses. They are among the main reasons why the cultural Marxists have
erected so many instruments of ironclad censorship on college campuses.
They are why institutions like the Mises Institute – and all the scholars
associated with it — are so reviled by them, for they provide their students –
and anyone else – with a source of alternative economic education, an education
based on sound economics and based in reality. Mises wrote in Human Action of how the socialists of his
day were at war with economics, for economic common sense threatened their
totalitarian plans. Today’s socialists hope to never even have to respond
to sound economic arguments and facts at all by simply censoring them out of
existence.
Thomas J. DiLorenzo [send him mail] is professor of economics at
Loyola University Maryland and the author of The Real Lincoln; How Capitalism Saved America; Lincoln Unmasked; Hamilton’s Curse; Organized Crime: The Unvarnished Truth About Government;
and most recently, The Problem With Socialism.
