The Naked Socialist

by Paul B Skousen

  Right #2—Choice.

  By definition, an independent entity has free will—he or she is capable of making choices.18 Choosing wisely or foolishly is a measure of a person’s level of experience and ability to judge. There are always consequences for choices, and avoiding negative consequences is everyone’s constant challenge. Incentives play an important role in making choices, and the responsibility attached to this right is to never make choices that violate the same moral rights of others.

  Under socialism, all choices are controlled so that they will benefit the rulers and keep the people’s will checked and under control.

  Right #3—Property.

  Property is the defining attribute of existence. A person’s body is his or her first piece of wholly owned and controlled property. A person must work to support his existence, and that labor produces private property. Deny people their property, and you deny them their lives.19

  Without property, there can be no freedom. Private property is how individuals express their choices.20 People who are denied their property are called slaves—or ghosts.

  Socialists believe property is the root of all human problems. They deny people the freedom to own property, and claim it for themselves, to distribute according to their wise and wonderful plan of equality and fairness.

  Right #4—Association.

  Freedom of association means that people may join together with others who share common interests to promote, defend, study, and express those interests without interference from the state or anyone else. The Founders believed this freedom was the strongest prevention of centralized power.21

  Socialists won’t allow unauthorized meetings because discontent and rebellion can grow and overthrow the rulers. Groups must be tightly watched and controlled in a socialist society.

  Right #5—Equality.

  All humans are endowed with the same set of entitlements or rights.22 These are natural rights common to all and may not be arbitrarily violated except in consequence of criminal activity.

  Equal rights must not be confused with equal opportunity, equal outcome, or equal things. Opportunities are not equal for everyone, and the outcome or fruits of labor are never guaranteed.

  The socialists promise equal things for all, but this is impossible in every way, although it sounds alluring and many fall for it.

  Right #6. Defense.

  The right of self-defense is the unalienable right to defend your own life and property, or that of other people.

  This includes the right to use deadly force, to use legal procedures such as a law suit, to express an opinion in a public forum, to use legal representation in the presence of a judge and jury, to use a gun or other weapon, or to use a militia or military power.23

  Socialism must deny the right of defense because it allows a person to act in opposition to the rulers, to insist on private choice to protect his or her rights defensively, to raise a rebellion against a dictator—or, to question the declarations of the rulers and to disobey their unlawful writs and rules. Socialist strive to remove all means of self-defense from the people as a means to stay in control.

  Right #7—Compassion.

  Compassion is the cornerstone of human action. It separates humans from animals. It encourages cooperation and prosperity. Compassion serves to correct flaws in society and allow for progress in spite of human frailties and failings. Compassion is the gentle equalizer of human imperfections.24

  Socialism destroys compassion by forcing people to pay welfare by taking more taxes, and people naturally avoid taxes at all costs. This is not compassion. People forced to pay for welfare eventually turn their backs on those in need, thinking that some agency or shelter will “handle it.” Forced compassion is slavery. It dulls people’s sense of caring for others. Without compassion people become as animals, willingly sacrificing the lives of others just to get ahead.

  Right #8—FAILURE.

  Real freedom means the freedom to fail. Failure is life’s greatest teacher—it exposes weaknesses for repair. Failure is unforgiving. It exacts a price that can be costly. Sometimes, a person pays with his life to learn that some things are dangerous, risky, or foolish.

  Failure is a necessary part of innovation and creation. It teaches people tenacity and perseverance. It encourages invention and cooperation, patience and understanding. It can be discouraging, painful, frustrating, and costly—but it teaches, and therefore, advances society. It is an unalienable right to fall flat on our faces.25

  Socialism seeks to eliminate failure by building safety nets at every level of society. It answers the call of pain and misery with massive tax-funded supports. These government-supplied safety nets always thwart the natural consequences of life. Nothing is permanently advanced by this—a class of dependency is created, and no economy in the world can sustain entitlements for very many decades before running out of money, creativity, and bailouts.

  “The Individual Has Reigned Long Enough”

  Protected individual rights prevent the rulers from abusing the ruled. For centuries the socialists have been calling for abolishing protected individual rights, calling them outmoded, ineffective, selfish, greedy, rudely self-centered, and harmful to everybody else. Such name calling is the socialists’ attempt to remove the last and strongest obstacle standing in their way of total control.

  G. Brock Chisholm (1896-1971): “To achieve world government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men their individualism, loyalty to family traditions, national patriotism and religious dogmas...”26

  Karl Marx (1818-1883): “The human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.”27

  Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979): Marcuse said that Freud’s most important contribution to understanding humans was to undermine “one of the strongest ideological fortifications of modern culture—namely, the notion of the autonomous individual.”28

  Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980): “I believe that the thinking of the group is where the truth is. ... I always considered group thinking to be better than thinking alone. ...I don’t believe a separate individual to be capable of doing anything.”29

  Louis Baudin (1887-1964), writing about the Inca, “Life itself was torn out of that geometrical and sad empire, where everything occurred with the inevitability of fatum. ... The Indian lost his personality.”30 (fatum—fate, destiny, doom, lot, etc.)

  Dom Deschamps (1716-1774) envisioned how his perfect world with “identical morals would make, so to say, one man of all men and one woman of all women. I mean by this that ultimately they would resemble each other more than animals of the same species.”31 He further proposed banishing “all terms presently used to express our good and bad qualities, even all terms unnecessarily distinguishing us from other things.”32

  Lester F. Ward (1841-1913). In 1893, Ward called for a revolution against the individual. “The individual has reigned long enough. The day has come for society to take its affairs into its own hands and shape its own destinies. The individual has acted as best he could. He has acted in the only way he could. With a consciousness, will, and intellect of his own he could do nothing else than pursue his natural ends. ... Society should learn its great lesson from him, should follow the path he has so clearly laid out that leads to success.”33By eliminating the individual, a new society is created, a society of the anonymous human being. An important tool for destroying individual rights and promoting “group-think” is to deploy the clever abuse of one of mankind’s most basic generators of conflict: Envy.

  * * *

  17 4th Amendment, “...secure in their persons...”; Declaration of Independence, “...all Men are created equal ... unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness...”; see Virginia Declaration of Rights, June 12, 1776.

 
18 Declaration of Independence, “...certain unalienable rights ... the Pursuit of Happiness ...”

  19 4th Amendment, “...secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects ...”; 5th Amendment, “...without due process ... without just compensation.” 14th Amendment, “...nor shall any State deprive ... property ... nor deny ... equal protection of the laws.”

  20 Some scholars postulate that Thomas Jefferson adopted a phrase from the Virginia Constitution (1776) that read “acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety” and condensed it to “the pursuit of happiness.”

  21 1st Amendment, “...peaceably to assemble...”; 14th Amendment, no abridging of privileges.

  22 Declaration of Independence, “...all men are created equal ...”; 14th Amendment, equal protection of the laws; Alex. Hamilton, inequality will exist under liberty, Papers of, 4:218.

  23 1st Amendment, right to petition government; 2nd Amendment, right to bear arms; 5th Amendment, rights in court; 6th Amendment, right to counsel; 7th Amendment, trial by jury.

  24 Godly acts of service are often encouraged by religion, protected in the 1st Amendment.

  25 To succeed or to fail is the natural outcome of the Declarations’s “pursuit of happiness.”

  26 Attributed to G. Brock Chisholm, co-founder of the World Federation of Mental Health.

  27 Karl Marx, The German Theology, International Publishers, 1970, p. 121

  28 Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization. A philosophical Inquiry into Freud, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., England, 1956, p. 57.

  29 Jean-Paul Sartre, The Right to Rebel, Ph. Gavi, Satre, P. Victor, Paris, 1974, pp. 170-171.

  30 Louis Baudin, Daily Life of the Incas, Paris, 2003, pp. 135-136.

  31 Dom Deschamps, La Verite ou le Veritable Systeme, Moscow, 1973, p. 176.

  32 Ibid., p. 503.

  33 Lester F. Ward, “Sociocracy,” American Thought: Civil War to World War I, pp. 113-114.

  Chapter 5: Force and Envy

  Force is the lazy’s man’s shortcut, envy is his rationale.

  Socialism is a blatant contradiction. It sets out to accuse the world of inequality, injustice, and lack of freedom. Yet history shows, once socialism is put in place, it imposes a far greater inequality, injustice, and lack of freedom than that which existed before—all in the name of fairness.

  To achieve fairness, socialists must crush the human attributes that create inequality. One way they achieve this is by appealing to the most base and common human weaknesses of envy and force—an appeal to the primitive state that smothers the highest ideals, the most sophisticated and multifaceted human qualities of choice, compassion, and innovation. The philosopher John Locke said these positive qualities that envy sets out to destroy are actually a reflection of the very attributes of God.34

  Sticks and Stones Will Break My Bones ...

  Calling on envy to justify force is an easy sell for most people. Envy appeals to the brutish attributes of the “natural man.” Stirring up feelings of greed, envy, jealousy, and arrogance is the socialist’s main tool for proselytizing.

  Stirring up Envy—Hillary Clinton: “The rich are not paying their fair share in any issue.”35

  Stirring up Envy—Barack Obama: “I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”36

  Stirring up Envy—Barack Obama: “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that, somebody else made that happen.”37

  Stirring up Envy—Barack Obama: “It’s not that I want to punish your success, I just want to make sure that everybody who is behind you, that they’ve got a chance at success too.”38

  Stirring up Envy—Hillary Clinton: “Too many people have made too much money off of eliminating opportunities for caring for people instead of expanding those.”39

  Stirring up Envy—Franklin D. Roosevelt: “Not only our future economic soundness but the very soundness of our democratic institutions depends on the determination of our government to give employment to idle men.”40

  Stirring up Envy—Howard Dean: “We know that no one person can succeed unless everybody else succeeds.”41

  Stirring up Envy—Michelle Obama: “The truth is, in order to get things like universal health care and a revamped education system, then someone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie so that someone else can have more.”42

  Forgotten and Left Out

  These statements appeal to the envious side of the “have-nots.” It tells the “have-nots” that their place in life is not their fault, not their doing, and not their responsibility. To fix it, to make things fair, to satiate the demands of envy, the socialists use government force. Only government force lets them control society so they can take from the real producers, the “haves,” and give unearned riches and benefits to the “have-nots.” It’s all about government force.

  Threatening Force—Maxine Waters: “And guess what this liberal will be all about? This liberal will be all about socializing—uh, uh-um—will be about ... basically ... taking over and the government, running all of your companies.”43

  Threatening Force—Joe Biden: “You know we’re going to control the insurance companies.”44

  Threatening Force—Jim Moran: “Because we have been guided by a Republican administration who believes in the simplistic notion that people who have wealth are entitled to keep it and they have an antipathy to our means of redistributing wealth.”45

  Threatening Force—Bill Clinton: [Speaking about crime-ridden slum areas] “A lot of people say there’s too much personal freedom. When personal freedom’s being abused, you have to move to limit it.”46

  Threatening Force—Bill Clinton: “If the personal freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution inhibit the government’s ability to govern the people, we should look to limit those guarantees.”47

  Threatening Force—Hillary Clinton: “We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.”48

  Threatening Force—John Dingell: “The harsh fact of the matter is when you’re passing legislation [national health care] that will cover 300 million American people in different ways, it takes a long time to do the necessary administrative steps that have to be taken to put the legislation together to control the people.”49

  Threatening Force—Barack Obama: “I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money.”50

  Threatening Force—Jan Schakowsky: “You don’t deserve to keep all of it [private money] and it’s not a question of deserving because what government is, is those things that we decide to do together.”51

  Threatening Force—Steven Chu, U.S. Secretary of Energy, on banning incandescent light bulbs: “We are taking away a choice that continues to let people waste their own money.”52

  Threatening Force—Steven Chu on forcing Americans to buy fuel efficient cars and move closer to work: “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”53

  Threatening Force—Cass Sunstein, Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, on forcing a ban on eating meat: “Somewhat more broadly, I will suggest that animals should be permitted to bring suit, with human beings as their representatives, to prevent violations of current law.”54

  Socialism is Force

  According to the socialists, force is a necessary evil for the simple reason that people are more interested in their own pursuits than the needs of the whole. Therefore, people must be forced to care for the whole, they must be forced into socialism. Consider a few of the instances where the freedom to choose has been replaced by government force disguised as legitimate uses of the legislative process—

  Forcing people to give to the poor (taxes).

  Forcing people to save fo
r retirement (social security).

  Forcing people to hire incompetent employees (EEO rules).

  Forcing people to stop smoking (taxes and regulations).

  Forcing people to be compassionate (taxes).

  Forcing people to use one kind of light bulb (regulations).

  Forcing the rich to pay more taxes; force the poor to pay none (graduated income taxes).

  Forcing people to pay for unrelated projects a thousand miles from home (redistribution of the wealth).

  Forcing children to attend school, or certain schools (forced busing and government mandates).

  Forcing people to bail out bad businesses (TARP and so-called stimulus bailouts).

  Forcing people to solve other nation’s problems (taxes, wars, and foreign aid).

  Forcing people to produce a particular type of car (EPA and OSHA regulations).

  Forcing people to cater to coercive monopolies (post office, utilities, railroads, cable television, water, etc.).

  Forcing people to support media control and regulation, and publicly supported outlets—and the list goes on and on.What’s Wrong With That?

  In the opinion of many millions, the above list makes good sense. Why not use government resources for these purposes? It’s worked so far, hasn’t it?

  The Founders understood that granting government the power to meddle in private life, to the extent listed above, is a two-edged sword. Government is a fearful master, George Washington warned, and when given too much power, it will turn quickly on its own supporters and force on them somebody’s idea of “good” whether the population approves of it or not. The Founders wanted the decisions about “good” left to the states, where the people could exert tighter control on the use of force, and adjust the laws according to their individual needs and populations.