To a Homeless Person Who Blames Capitalism

I cannot respond to this post (below) where it was posted since I would be instantly suspended. No one was suspended for agreeing with everything she says or who blames free market capitalism, Donald Trump or the Christian church (the usual suspects for the left). Sarah Beauchamp, the homeless author, is angry because she was made to move from private property to a government sponsored "campground". She is angry because the bureaucrats that run it aren't delivering all the services they were promised. She wonders where the 800K that was spent on this homeless resettlement project went. But does she blame anyone who was actually responsible for her predicament? Look, I'm not a mean person. I spent 4 decades working to help the homeless, disabled, seniors with disabilities, low-income families, abused women and children and the mentally ill. I have no 401K or retirement plan. They don't call them nonprofits for nothing.

I've even been homeless before. It was not fun. We weren't taking drugs. Circumstances not in my control left my wife and I out on the street. I scraped enough together to get into a cheap motel room with WiFi. I got busy online and earned enough freelancing to keep us in the hotel and scrape together food. My wife cleaned the room to a shine worthy of a surgical suite. We borrowed a little from family to help us get through and from an organization that owed me for a lot of free labor I did. We prayed a lot and God sent us landlords who were wonderful Christians who helped us get through months where we weren't able to pay the rent.

Once I retired and social security started up our situation stabilized and we caught up. We'd have recovered more quickly, but we elected a president who killed my business (and it wasn't Trump). We were recovering during 2017-2020, even during Covid, but in January 2021, the bottom fell out of my freelance and grant-writing market again. I work from home because both of us are pretty much disabled now. So the spiraling cost of living has added $400 a month to our expenses in the past two years. So it's a struggle. But socialism has done little to help us, that I can tell you.

To Sarah:

You know, you indite capitalism for the failures of the socialist style program that dragged you out of the woods into what sounds like a government gulag. I'm from Texas. Where I lived in East Texas we have some amazing homeless shelters. They come with warm food, safe indoor rooms, clothing programs and job placement services. The churches created a common social service setup to prevent people from shopping church to church preying on people's sympathies for money for drugs. There's a huge train yard there and we used to get a flood of hoboes and homeless off the Interstate. After we organized ourselves, set up food banks in dozens of churches, folks who wanted to stop being homeless were able to. Word quickly got around the homeless community that if you get off the train in Tyler, they'll make you work.  That cut the homeless population drastically. The corner panhandlers got to where no one would give them money. You'd see guys with a bag of cold uneaten McDonald's hamburgers which was a dead giveaway they weren't hungry like the sign said.

This homeless guy was taking in $200 an hour.

 

Your situation is exactly how socialism works. If there's no incentive to do better, you get bureaucrats who sit in the office and embezzle from the organization. A lot of homeless folks are angry at Christian churches, but the irony is, they can be the best route to recovery. Our churches in East Texas did so well with the church-based food bank program that the feds cut the Food Stamp Program by 800K. They tried to recuperate their funding by spending 150K, not on food but on a marketing program. The theme of the ad campaign was "Food Stamps is not part of welfare reform." When asked they said nothing would change with regard to the proctological application program people had to go through, they just wanted more applications. It turns out the homeless numbers their appropriation is based on is according to how many "applications" they get, not how many folks they give food stamps to. There's your government social programs. That famous one in five go to bed hungry statistic is based on how many applications they get. And if you make an extra hundred bucks to pay on your back rent, they pull your food stamps and make you reapply. And they count every time you reapply as another hungry person. Government programs play with the numbers like that.

Kiddo, if you're looking for government social programs to save you, you are going to be very disappointed. The purpose of federal social programs (Lyndon Johnson's Great Society) was primarily a tool to break down families of color and make them dependent and reliable Democrat voters. The big corporations the anti-capitalists hate pay billions to support Democrat candidates because they protect them from competition by small independent (dare I say "Mom and Pop" businesses.

You're mad at the wrong people; victimized by Marxist propaganda. Capitalism is the only system in history by which the poor have been able to rise in the world by working hard, providing quality goods and services through mutually beneficial fair trade with others of all class, race and culture groupings.

There's a Great Lie being perpetrated, but it's not the one about Russian collusion. Here's Sarah's manifesto is appended below; written apparently with the help of her boyfriend who's spelling and grammar I've corrected.

© 2012 by Tom King

My name is Sarah Beauchamp and I'm one of many homeless people who's home has been destroyed and forced to relocate to the encampment ran by the Tacoma rescue mission. My friends and neighbors have been forcefully relocated and promised safe housing, bathrooms, hand wash stations, laundry facilities, hygiene services, community tent, community food tent with access to food, microwaves, kitchens to cook, case managers to help with more permanent housing, job searching, and social worker services. There is supposed to be a donation center where the residents can go to claim dry clean clothing, blankets and other materials, but what we got was unlivable, dangerous, wet, cold stinking tents with no waterproof floors where the rain just pours into the living area ruining everything in it's path. The tents were made for snow.... Not rain, and made for ice fishing, not living in. Square footage allocated to each person is such that it barely allows for someone to lay down... on the cold wet floor. No bedding is provided or bed roll of any kind. I was given a power strip with 2 outlets and a USB port and the last heater they had in supply. Many more people came after me and still have no heat. Everyone's personal belongings are getting ruined by the rain.

The staff from valeo don't know what there doing and are usually sleeping or hiding in their office which is filled with donations of food but not given to the people who need it most. My friend who is a war veteran for our country who lives onsite has diabetes and in desperate need of fluids and sugar he ventures to the office and asks staff for a Gatorade or something to halt his plummeting blood sugar and was met with nothing but refusals from staff. They said "no you can't have any of this food in here it's for staff only." The Tacoma rescue mission is so keen on saving face and not admitting that they have fallen so short of the mark they promised that they are turning away donation's of food, clean dry blankets, tarps and ties and canopies to keep people dry. Why? They don't want witnesses to the deplorable inhuman conditions they are forcing these people to endure with no alternative as camping is now basically illegal in Tacoma. 

We were better off in our tents because at least we were warm and dry and could feed ourselves. With rules like no cooking in your tent how are people supposed to feed themselves and with all the promises made dozens of people are suffering waiting for someone to advocate for them. 

Well here I am! I was lucky enough to get housing but I have been waiting 8 years I lived at the camp and know everyone there. There is no Tacoma rescue mission staff on duty there only heartless, uncaring security staff. There's no laundry facilities or kitchen or food or donation closet there's no kitchen tent or case managers trying to help us better our situation. The tents are still leaking the conditions are getting worse the trash is overflowing and people are starting to get sick. This is a text I got from a good friend living there: "Okay, so we're all still getting wet all they did was throw tarps over the tents some people don't have heaters and the people who do have heaters some of them broke. There's food and drinks in the office I'm pretty sure they were donated for us but Earl went up there and asked for a Gatorade because he has diabetes and he needed some fluids and they told him no it was for the staff only which I was appalled by that. 

All my new blankets rug was ruined from the water which is still getting in but we're trying to keep it out by stapling the bottoms of our tent to the wood the pallets we have like three or four tarps over our tents it's not under control yet not even close to being under control we can't cook in our tents but we don't have no kitchen no microwave . The garbage is out of control it's overflowing. We don't have no kitchen no laundry anything no place to heat up food the over here by our 10th where your tent was in my tent and Angie's tent is flooding no donations coming in no blankets we're out of tarps and blankets. How are we supposed to wash laundry we're going to have to convert back to hustling so we can get money to go do laundry and get food and such security is sleep most the time say night. The staff really comes out of their office" 

The whistle needs blowing and these people need help before something terrible happens that can't be undone. Please help me help them and let's get the real news out there not some stuffy press release filled with lies to cover up what should be considered criminal actions by taking our homes away and putting us in a literal concentration camp reminiscent of the Holocaust. Being homeless shouldn't be a crime. That's against everything America stands for. Our founding fathers carved their homes out of the wilderness CAMPING UNTIL THEY FINALLY SETTLED AND WERE ABLE TO BUILD A LIFE FOR THEMSELVES AND THEIR FAMILIES. Everyone deserves a fighting chance to not just survive but thrive in this harsh world where the system made to save us actually harms us worse in the end. 

And make no mistake, capitalism is the real enemy here. these people aren't unwilling to work, to find a better way to live. sure there's a bad element in every walk of life, every circle. Shouldn't we try to help those that are willing to help themselves? Struggling under the weight of oppression and greed's mighty heel? not everyone has all opportunity and the winning hand dealt to them. Some of us begin life with nothing and no one to show the way. If those of us with all the wealth and power could experience what these people are going through i guarantee this whole situation wouldn't even exist in the first place. What i want to know is how did this camp full of ice fishing tents cost some $800,000 for the city of Tacoma to construct as they claim? Where did that money really go and whose pulling the strings behind the scene getting rich on other peoples suffering? Solid American Peoples suffering in your neighborhood. And do you rest easy knowing that these same wealthy manipulators are running that corrupt system dictating the "laws" and "regulations" supposedly keeping you safe? Its time to wake up. Its time for a change. 

We cant sit idly by and do nothing while our fellow Americans freeze to death or starve. Right down the street from where you live! Are we now advocating for the new holocaust? Are we accepting this yoke of tyranny and greed as the mantle of truth? I tell you right now i do not. I will not sit idle as my friends and neighbors suffer. I mean to see that change. Today. Right now. Something must be done.

Sarah Beauchamp (2012)

 

Why I Dislike the Word "Compliant"

A word that pops up disturbingly often in education, social service and health care paperwork is "compliant". It seems everyone who has anything to do with helping people seems hell-bent to make sure their charges are "compliant".  Even my doctor monitors "compliance" with his orders. Cooperating with my doctor is, of course a good thing, but I prefer "cooperation" to "compliance". I think "compliance" is a dangerous goal for any society. Americans are not a compliant people, thank God. My progressive friends seem to think more compliance would be good. The idea is that the government would make laws and then everyone would comply with them and then utopia would be achieved. The government could redistribute wealth and suddenly everyone would be "equal".  

The trouble is that "sameness" is not necessarily "equality". And redistributing wealth only redistributes wealth. It does not redistribute character or talent. There's nothing wrong with redistributing wealth. In fact there is no way to avoid doing that. Capitalism does that by its nature. Socialism does that by force. The question is can we intentionally spread wealth around in a way that is mutually beneficial to all. Must wealth be spread so that it is the same to all no matter how hard they work or what risks they take. Surely, there must be a way to gather enough wealth to allow (the few) enough rewards for risk-taking to create new economic activity. There also must be enough wealth spread around for (the many) people to be able to afford to buy new products or services. Turns out there is. It's called free-market capitalism.

Henry Ford contradicted conventional capitalistic wisdom (and angered fellow capitalists) by more than doubling the wages of his factory workers. Instead of going broke, Ford thrived because that act essentially created a new middle class who, for the first time, could afford to buy cars. Sadly, Ford mistook wise business policy for equally sound political policy and supported Hitler and Mussolini's ideas of socialism. World War II was an eye-opener for Mr. Ford. Mr. Ford got too big for his britches in thinking he could apply what he did voluntarily, but do so by force through government authority. He was desperately wrong.

If we think the economic pie is finitely small, we can't do things like Ford did. Even Ford seems to have missed that. Giving your workers more money in a zero-sum game would mean the business owner makes less. Progressive idealists love the idea of picking wealthy pockets, the politics of envy being essential if you're planning to use the proletariat's greed to foment a revolution. My point is this.

Time and again members of the progressive left keep hitting me with this argument in favor of me coming over to the progressive side: 

• "I don't understand why you would support a policy that is against your own interests."

So, supporting political policy simply because it would increase my welfare check would be in my own interests in the short term? Well, maybe, but such a policy might not be good for everyone in the long run. That very appeal to narrow self-interest reveals the piratical nature of the strategy behind the progressive agenda. In a moment of rare clarity, one leftist wag reminded me that if I were to vote for progressives, then they would take money from people I envy and give it to me.

They did a lot of that in Detroit and for a while the people of Detroit enjoyed the vast influx of public largesse from the federal government.  Detroit was to be the showcase of liberal planning and a demonstration of the benefits to be gained from big government spending, central planning and wealth distributions. The People's Republic of Detroit, however, proved to be an unsustainable house of cards and it crumbled to ruin, leaving behind a wasteland, where once stood the most vibrant industrial city in America once stood - at least before Progressives tried to fix it..

I believe the short-sighted thinking of the progressive movement stems from an almost desperate need by the leaders of the movement (most of whom reject religion in general and Christianity in particular) to prove that man can create a heaven on Earth by writing laws. The folly of perfecting people by passing laws has been demonstrated already. In the early days of Israel, God showed the Israelites that even He could not create a perfect world by making laws - not in a world where humans have free will to obey or disobey those laws. Laws only reveal what is evil in man. Changing man's heart that he may obey those laws on his own steam must happen in the human heart, transformed by time spent in the presence of He who is love, joy, peace and harmony incarnate.

The Progressive movement falls into the trap very quickly of deciding that if writing the law doesn't work, then what's needed is strict enforcement. Then, a perusal of history shows that the harder they try and enforce the law, the more rebellious people become. Under government coercion of its citizens, resistance to the law tends to increase until finally, the whole thing deteriorates. At last tyranny comes to open warfare with the people who must live under the laws. Such governments pass more and more laws thinking to make people more likely to obey. But hedging people about with an abundance of law is inevitably fatal. Too many laws and obedience becomes more and more onerous and the more it becomes evident that the laws are not working. Finally, the "dear leaders" find themselves strung up by their feet from a nearby telephone pole or cast into their own gulags.

It's why socialist nations eventually take up genocide as their national sport. They try to eliminate anyone who might not be compliant. It's why Hitler killed Jews and gypsies. It's why Stalin starved 1.8 million Ukrainian Kulaks, the best farmers in Russia. It's why the bishops of France drove out the Hugenots - Protestant shop-keepers who were the backbone of business in France. It's why Chairman Mao slaughtered Chinese teachers and intellectuals and landlords. A landlord to Mao was anyone who owned more than one ox. Pol Pot murdered 3 million professionals, intellectuals, Buddhist monks and ethnic minorities. The "reunited" Communist "People's Republic" of Vietnam murdered some 2 million South Vietnamese after the Democrat US Congress abandoned their agreement to support the South Vietnamese after the peace accords were signed. 

Those who will not obey must be eliminated. It's such an elegant solution. Kill anyone with any spunk and leave only the compliant behind. It's why the leaders of revolutions tend to kill off their own comrades once they've seized power. All threats to their power must be removed, leaving only "the compliant". Hitler turned on the Brownshirts - the citizen thugs that supported his rise to power. Can you say ANTIFA?. Stalin assassinated his fellow Communist, Leon Trotsky and anyone who was his friend.

The devil's first lie was an empty promise.  "Thou shalt not surely die." His second was that "You shall be like gods."  Then, every time we try to be like gods we somehow wind up enslaved and dead. It is the nature of lusting for power. The wages of sin," says the Apostle Paul, "is death." And when we dabble in it, the wages always get paid.


God on the other hand does not demand compliance. Obedience by our own free choice to obey laws we believe in, is not knuckling under to an oppressor. That's what non-Christians don't get about us. We obey because we agree with the law, not because we fear the consequences. Over the years some have created tools like hellfire and excommunication and guilt and the power of priests to forgive in the same way Karl Marx tried to use revolution and enforced collectivism.

.
© 2018 by Tom King

Retail Workers, Dishwashers and Ditch Diggers, Oh My!

I get stuff like this (right) all the time from, to borrow a phrase from Tom Paxton, the "smart alecs" out there who believe they are part of the hereditary ruling elite. As you know I blame Walt Disney for promoting the idea of hereditary nobility long after the idea wore out its usefulness. Too many impressionable kids grew up believing that they were, in fact, the long lost princess (even some of the boys). But really. That's a fairy tale (which also may further explain a few things).

Did you read what you just wrote people? You start out with the standard false assumption in order to make a point that has no real basis in logical thought. The false assumption - that retail workers, dishwashers, ditch diggers and laborers are pretty much too stupid to get training or, at least, shouldn't have to be bothered to make any effort to improve their job situation. They are saying that somehow, just because these jobs exist, we should subsidize them in order to insure they don't get all riotous and mess up the elistists' front lawns.

The assumption is that if you subsidize these positions at rates of pay considerably above what the market offers, that somehow everybody will be happy and peace and joy and choruses of Kumbayah will break out. This is based on Maslow's Heirarchy of Need and idea socialists have seized on to justify placing all governance in the hands of a few elite smart people. The theory goes that if you give people assurance of food, water, clothing, shelter, healthcare and some sort of busywork to do, they will spontaneously want to move up the heirarchy and want to be productive, creative and useful citizens to the collective that gives them the basics. The Russians discovered, for instance, that when you took the farms away from the farmers and paid them what farm hands get paid, they weren't interested in managing their farms and doing all the extra hard work that farm owners do. They wound up with everybody on the farm doing the minimum and everybody began to starve (except the farmers that were growing stuff for themselves off the books).

Unfortunately for Marxist theory, Maslow was wrong. People without adequate food, shelter, clothing and healthcare do self-actuated, highly productive and creative things all the time - whether because they just are that sort of people or because they are hoping for a reward or payoff as a result of what they are doing. The theory is balderdash. If you pay people a lot of money who have no skills, then they have no motivation to learn any new skills or even the bare bones requirements of their jobs. They just sit around drawing a paycheck and doing as little as possible.

I have been an employer. I took over one small company that was losing $5000 a quarter. The staff was demoralized. Nobody had had a raise in ages because there was no money to give them raises. I came in and worked for six weeks without pay, Found a grant to cover my paycheck and began overhauling the organization. Instead of raises being given by time served, I looked around, found a couple of people who werer still working hard and trying to do a good job and gave each a small raise (remember we were still losing money). I visited my people and asked for their input as to how we could improve things and make their lives easier on the job. I acted promptly to get them what I could and gave them timelines for when we would get the rest. I stayed there late at night painting and fixing things up working hours I was not paid for. I got us some nice carpet for the rooms they worked in. We organized their equipment and made it easier for them to get to without having to run begging to the bosses for what they needed. Even got them some equipment they needed. 

In the first quarter we broke even and had a 20% growth in customers. By the end of the year we had cleared $19,000 above operating expenses and had a cash reserve. I gave more raises and worker performance improved except in two or three cases where the employees continued to do the minimum possible and grumbled because they weren't getting raises. As they began to get the idea, they began to do extra and to put more energy into their work. As they did so, we made more money and I was able to give more raises.

Most employers do that kind of thing. If they don't, you shouldn't work for them. If people didn't tolerate bad employers, they would have to pay far more than the good employers for help. Then bad employees could take the jobs with the bad employers, make more money for putting up with lousy working conditions and everybody would be happy. Right?

No, of course, not. If people stopped working for a bad employer who didn't give them a fair wage, the employer would have to improve working conditions and give a fair wage in order to have an adequate number of employees to conduct business. Bad employees, no matter how well paid, drive away customers, so the owner, in order to make more profits would have to pay an increased market price in order to get good employees.

That's how free market capitalism works. Artificially bumping up wages of entry level workers does nothing to improve their working conditions, their performance on the job or the way they take care of a business's customers. Mostly it just gets minimum effort employees replaced by higher paid people who can do the slacker's job and their own or the operation gets roboticized.

Now stick out your tongue and say "nyuh-uh!" That always works. Maybe call me, what was it? Oh, yeah, "mean-spirited and ignorant." Well I turned a losing business into a profitable one with a healthy cash reserve, 30% customer increase, improved facilities, better program and better-paid employees in 9 months. And I raised my entire first year's salary from outside sources. Years later after we ended the project, I still have former employees on my Friends List on Facebook.

So tell me, what have you done, oh great expert on how business should run, that gives you expertise in this matter?

Sheesh!© 2015 by Tom King

Like We Need Another "Ist"....

The man who sits in the oval office is a progressivist, a socialist and a collectivist. He is a Marxist, an elitist and a unilateralist. The only ist he "istn't" is a free market capitalist. For the foundation principle behind the great wealth and security we enjoy today, he has mostly contempt. save for his profound appreciation for the fruits of that principle.  He looks upon the wealth of America with the same gleam in his eye that mythical dragons had for gold and treasure just waiting to be plundered.  He and his fellow dragons have set themselves the task of looting our children's future in order to change America into a pale shadow of a failed ideology that angry leftists cling to as a child clings to candy and sweets all the while rejecting the whole idea of learning to eat their vegetables. (And he throws like a girl).

 Tom King  (c) 2013

Karl Marx Was a Goblin....

Frederic Bastiat called socialism "legalized plunder".  My friend Sophia, apparently an admirer of Karl Marx, disagrees.  She says this: 

• Capital already exists and is already owned. Where did it come from?  It came from labour. All capital is the product of labour, therefore labour has a claim on all capital. It is not abstract means of production that the workers should control but the means which already exist.

The idea that all capital comes from labor seems to swim against the direction that money actually flows.  Capital (or profit) as far as I can see originates when consumers pay for goods and services.  The company uses that income to pay workers.  So if anything, capital comes from consumers and is passed to labor by capitalists.  The fact that labor is also a consumer doesn't change that. AND Management (those greedy old capitalists) are also consumers.

It's like the water cycle. Water evaporates all over the place, collects in clouds which rain on the land watering the fields.  The excess runs off into streams and from there to rivers and on to the ocean where it evaporates again and makes clouds. Money works like that.

Sophia and Karl would have you believe that the economy (the financial water cycle if you will) actually runs  counter to its natural direction. Capital is, they say, stolen from the workers to enrich the wealthy capitalists. Odd that they conveniently leave out consumers in this model, inserting them later when they want to look like populists. Classless society advocates would have you believe we can create a society where consumers deposit money directly into the pockets of labor.  Of course, the pockets of labor are on the other side of the same pair of pants.  When you need some consumer cash again, the worker must transfer money over to their consumer pockets, from whence they transfer the cash back to their labor pockets and so on, ad infinitum.  Of course, this all happens AFTER they've cut out the evil capitalists and eliminated them as large scale consumers and reduced them to pocket-swapping labor and monumentally screws up the economy.

Which confuses me, because they also believe there is an elite group of smart people who by virtue or their great brains, their pure hearts and their unbounded courage can centrally plan all our lives for us and create a utopian society where everybody is the same, no rich, no poor, no war, no religion.  The whole thing is either a John Lennon song or a Wizard of Oz sequel they're going for, I'm not sure which.
The Marxian model seems a classic double bind where two opposing beliefs exist in one man's head and it locks him up so he cannot move forward.  It could explain why liberals seem to be crazy. 

I had the same problem with the goblins of J.K. Rowlings Harry Potter books. The goblins, if you remember, are the bankers of the wizarding world.  They run Gringott's, the wizard's bank. The problem with the goblins is this. They make their living by taking gold from humans and making things for the humans.  They, however, believe that anything they make should revert to the ownership of goblins once the person who holds the object dies.  This makes perfect sense to them.  They made it, so it's theirs.

So what do they do for a living?  The goblins run wizard banks where the wealth and precious objects, many of goblin make, of generations of wizards are stored in highly secure vaults. These vaults, by the goblins own policy, are held to be inviolate, no matter that they believe that much of the treasure that they are protecting is of goblin make and therefore actually belongs to them.  It is a point of pride (and good business policy) that nothing is ever stolen from a Gringott's vault.

They may believe that everything they make still belongs to them in theory, but in practice they know that if they actually took back the things they believed were theirs, their banking and jewelry/weapon-making businesses would shut down. Customers would not keep their things where goblins would take them back so the bank would close. Customers would not order goblin-made items because paying for something wildly expensive that you could not even pass on to your heirs would not make sense to anyone but goblins.  Therefore goblin business rumbles along with a set of beliefs that contradict what they have to do in actual practice in order to keep making a profit off the wizarding world.

It's little wonder that the goblins of Harry Potter are devious, irritable little creatures. There is a conflict between belief and practice within the whole goblin economy that plants the seeds of insanity.  Goblins believe that wealth comes from goblins while in actual practice, goblin wealth, as they well know, comes from gold paid them for goods and services by wizard customers. If humans believed as goblins did, then, since the money collected by goblins, actually comes from humans, humans ought to have a perfect right to take back any money they have paid a goblin for a service or product from them when the goblin dies, since the gold originally came from humans. Goblins would have a real problem with this were wizards to actually try to put such an idea into practice.

Karl Marx had the same problem as the goblins. His philosophy hinges on the belief capital comes from the labor of the working class. At the same time it is obvious that unless the consumer buys those goods and services, labor would receive no capital for its labors.  The accumulation of capital in the hands of a few is supposedly evil.  So how does Marx propose we solve that problem?  By taking all that capital from the hands of those "few" capitalists who accumulated it and giving it to the government "few" to redistribute to labor.  So instead of rich people having control over all the capital, we give it all to bureaucrats.

Goblins if you will.

I could also point to Douglass Adams' Vogons to illustrate the hazards of handing power and money to bureaucrats, but I think the point is made.

Karl Marx is a goblin.  Perhaps that's why he looks devious and cranky in all of his pictures.

Just one man's opinion,

Tom King

Karl Marx Meant Well......

He just didn't know his human race very well.

(c) 2012 by Tom King

Got into a debate with an economist the other day over Marxism vs. Communism. He took a swipe at Ronald Reagan for not understanding that Marxism and Communism are two different things (according to economists). No matter that Marx wrote the Communist Manifest (and yes, Engels helped, but he gave all the credit for the ideas to Marx).  Apparently the pure Marxist ideology is that the ideal worker's paradise should be a virtually leaderless society where the collective makes all the decisions and no strong leader exists.  That is actually an idea a died-in-the-wool capitalist could get behind actually. 

Karl Marx's great difficulty was that he looked to create a heaven on Earth. It was an admirable dream, but it does not work here on this planet. Marx's utopia requires a couple of things that Marx never accepted as necessary.  Marx later got involved with communism because he hoped to work out his worker's paradise in the real world and had, I believed, figured out that some system of authority was essential to make it work, whether he wanted to admit it or not.

The truth is, the ideals behind collectivism only work if all the people in the collective are good and altruistic people. There is no such group of people. The progressive movement still believes there is despite abundant evidence to the contrary. 

I'm pro capitalist because it seems the most effective way to create a healthy economy in a world where  the baseline is greed and self-interest.  We live in a sinful world, let's face it. With capitalism, if you over-extend and get piggish, you fail unless some government decides you're too big to fail and protects your depredations upon the system by bailing you out with tax dollars.

Our problem here is that we are trying to blend two system - one that believes that, if you meet a baseline of needs, people will be basically good and another that believes people are basically bad.  As a Christian, for instance, I believe the latter. I also believe that our experiences here and with the help of God, a goodly number of us will one day achieve that altruistic goodness that Marx mistakenly thought he could bring out in people by sharing the wealth around.

What Marx did not understand was that  free will is a wonderful, but double-edged sword. The communists hoped to somehow control free will and negate its effects. At first they tried through providing everybody's baseline needs as equitably as possible.  When that didn't work, they created the KGB and attempted to create altruism through fear and the gulags - Communisms own brand of hell.

It is tempting to intellectuals to believe that smart leaders can somehow create a centrally planned society where everyone is content if not truly happy.  Even Einstein, as smart as he was, wondered why we couldn't manage it.

The problem is in man's nature.  He does have free will (despite BF Skinner's assurances to the contrary).  He is born with two contrary natures.  The new born child knows how to love without reservation - he loves himself.  Sadly, many children never get far beyond that. It is the work of a lifetime to become a selfless person - the kind of people you absolutely must have in order to maintain Marx's leaderless collective. 

To base a political and economic system on the hope that  somehow you can somehow create rules or provide sufficient bread and circuses to cause people to spontaneously become self-less is an exercise in wishful thinking.

Marx had an admirable goal. It's just not achievable without two things.

1. People who want to be good above all things.
2. An all-knowing, all-caring leader to manage the details.

#1 is, I think, what will occur at the  Second Coming.
#2 I believe, requires the existence of God.

If neither of those elements are in place; if God does not exist, if people people who want to be good are not separated from those who choose to be bad, then we're well and truly hopeless because we're trying to make up flocks of sheep that include hungry wolves as members. Inevitably, this takes a terrible toll on the poor sheep as last century's experiment in Marxist sheep herding clearly demonstrates.

Just one man's opinion,

Tom King