Kiss the nice fist

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Whenever Socialism comes on stage, you get the Fist. It promises to bring you the Rose, but there’s no rose without a fist.

When voters in their naïveté casts their ballots for the Socialists (which they do over and over again, depressingly enough), the first thing that happens is that their taxes go up. It’s a systemic requirement — if a socialist government is to keep its promises to distribute wealth and benefits more equitably, it has to get the money from somewhere. Perhaps it should invade a neighboring country and loot it. Or maybe it can pronounce anathema against a despised subgroup (Jews, say, or kulaks) and expropriate all their assets. Or it can borrow from the banksters, which has lately been the preferred tactic of redistributionist regimes on both sides of the Atlantic.

But eventually it has to raise taxes. There’s no way around it.

The preferred method is the time-honored “Tax the rich!” imperative. However, even if it were tax every rich person (whatever level of “rich” seems fair to the lumpenproletariat) at 100%, that still wouldn’t provide enough money to redistribute to favored groups — whatever money is left over, that is, after all those newly-hired administrators have been paid. And the lower classes have almost nothing that can be extracted, so that leaves the middle classes — you and me — to foot the bill.

[Socialism with a gun] Most middle-class people, even those who vote for the Socialists, would not voluntarily surrender the portion of their wealth necessary to run a socialist system. That’s just too much money — they want to keep more of it. They have reactionary tendencies. They may even be class enemies. Counter-revolutionaries!

That’s where the fist comes in. Or the truncheon. Or the gun. The government is unable to extract the amount it needs without coercion. And the longer the system continues to function, the more coercion is needed. Higher taxes and government meddling inhibit productivity and discourage innovation, so the pool of taxable wealth shrinks. More money is needed! It’s a vicious circle.

So they crack down on any “illicit” economic activity. Monitor every aspect of citizens’ lives, so that whenever two nickels change hands, the state can grab one of them.

An increasing level of coercion is an inherent feature of the system. Without forcing you to give up more and more of your wealth, Socialism will fail.

So what would happen if Progressives were to stick to reasoned discussion and avoid the use of force to achieve their goals? What would happen if they listened to their conservative interlocutors, agreed to disagree, and then walked away from the conversation without doing anything else?

The whole system would fall, that’s what.

And that’s why it will never happen. It’s also why you run into so few Progressives who are willing to use reason to grapple with real issues of political economy. Deep down, subliminally or otherwise, they know that the system they advocate will eventually require the use of naked force.

For the last sixty or seventy years, the Democratic Socialists of the West — those represented in the Socialist International, that is — have relied on unobtrusive persuasion to achieve their ends. Thanks to the wealth of a previously capitalistic society, they have been able to borrow their way to socialist prosperity, and mostly eschew open coercion. They’ve been eating their seed corn.

All that is now eroding. We’re seeing the use naked force a lot more than we used to.

Welcome to the Socialist future — Kiss the nice fist!

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