COUNTRY: Canada (34 million people)
BELOW POVERTY LINE: 3.2 million (9.4 percent )
WELFARE COSTS: 17.8 percent of GDP (#24 in world)
NATIONAL DEBT: $1.2 trillion
STORY: An interesting decline in Ontario’s welfare recipients took place in 1995 when welfare payments were reduced by 22 percent. In eight months about 80,000 welfare recipients fell off the rolls, saving the province $499 million a year.698 Critics argued that the 80,000 were forced to take jobs that were not appealing. Well, wasn’t employment the point, to return able-bodied workers to the workforce? It appears that at least some complaining Canadians love socialism.
COUNTRY: China (1.3 billion people)
BELOW POVERTY LINE 36 million (at least)
WELFARE COSTS: Not available
NATIONAL DEBT: $635.5 billion
STORY: It is difficult to measure the demeanor of 1.3 billion people fully dominated by the totalitarian state of China. Statistics are always skewed by the prosperity of Hong Kong, the most vibrant part of China’s overall economy. Excluding that oasis of capitalism, the rest of the country suffers under the sluggish regimentation of communist rule.
But in January 2012, the little fishing village of Wukan, only 12,000 strong, held free elections to replace the dictatorship of crooked communists and police. What ended up being a recall election was ignited when local Communist Party members seized the villagers’ farmland, sold it for enormous profits, and invited into their quiet piece of the world all the trappings of China’s growing wealth—luxury homes, shopping centers, golf courses, and more. When an earlier protest was lodged against these confiscations, the protester’s leader, Xue Jinbo, was arrested and died while in police custody. In a fit of rage, the villagers attacked the police and drove them out and wouldn’t let them return.
For the people in Wukan, withdrawing from the abuses of socialism and communism was worth risking the wrath of the central Communist Party. It remains to be seen how far this rebellion will spread before the ruling powers crack down.699
Historical Perspective: In 1994, R.J. Rummel estimated the body count from socialism’s tyranny in China to be 72,260,000, probably a low-ball figure, tallied from 1949-1980. Chairman Mao Tse-Tung’s “Great Leap Forward” to make China a military superpower in just five years, cost at least 27,000,000 deaths from famine and another 5,680,000 deaths by execution.700 Mao’s massive push created a tremendous strain, diversion of resources, and severe conditions of living and overworking. Giant communes for grain production were organized, with tens of thousands of families grouped at the farmlands, with all things communal.701
COUNTRY: Cuba (11 million people)
BELOW POVERTY LINE: not available
WELFARE COSTS: not available
NATIONAL DEBT: $21 billion (77th in world)
STORY: The Communist state of Cuba was dependent on the Soviet bloc for decades. When the Soviet Union fell, Cuba was left hanging without the financial support to keep its socialist economy running. Despite the U.S. blockade, sprinklings of help arrived such as oil from Venezuela.
Having all things in common means rationed food. Today, the basics such as milk, bread, rice, eggs, and beans can be bought if there are any in the stores—otherwise, it’s a long wait in line to get small portions. Families are allotted 1 liter of milk per child per day. These scarcities drive a large black market for the basics.
Teachers suffer on a salary of $15 a month and cannot obtain pencils, paper, crayons, or books, not to mention computers.
Medical supplies are scarce, and modern medical technology such as MRI and CAT scanning equipment are almost unheard of. The water is turned off from midnight to 6 a.m. to save on energy, chemicals, and the machinery to pump it.
Technology helps increase freedom. For example, while impoverished Haiti had cell phones (40.03 percent) and Internet access (10-11 percent), Castro’s utopia had only 8.9 percent with a cell phone and 1.7 percent on the Internet.702 The people of Haiti enjoy much more freedom than Cubans.
Crime is rampant—corruption, prostitution, drugs, white collar crime. Tourists are often victims of robberies or pickpockets.
The Castro regime used torture, arbitrary imprisonment, false trials, and executions to keep the population under control. Civil activists protesting the communist leadership are routinely arrested and imprisoned. Next to China, Cuba has the second highest number of journalists in prison.703
In 2010, The Raul Castro government announced that Cubans could build their own houses. The following year, Cuba announced it was thinking about free enterprise—the legalizing of buying and selling property—as a way to restart the economy. What a novel idea.
Cuba’s enslaved and threatened population has little option but to support socialism. To do otherwise means prison—or death.
Historical Perspective: In 1997, R.J. Rummel estimated the body count from socialism’s tyranny in Cuba over the years 1949-1987 to be about 70,000 dead.704
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688 Star Parker, Welfare Dependency Destroys Black Families, August 9, 2011, urbancure.org.
689 Ibid., Pictorial History of England.
690 For more information on the world-wide impact of socialization of nations as discussed in this section, see CIA World Factbook, 2012.
691 Alexei Barrionuevo, Kirchner Achieves an Easy Victory in Argentina Presidential Election, The New York Times, October 23. 2011.
692 Economists Quake as Argentina Votes, Wall Street Journal, October 22, 2011.
693 Liliana Samuel, Argentina Seizes Gas Firm Owned by Repsol, AFT news, April 19, 2012.
694 Argentina’s president fires central bank chief over foreign reserves, Los Angeles Times, January 8, 2010
695 Argentina shuts down Internet service provided by the Clarin media group, MercoPress, August 20, 2010.
696 Wall Street Journal, Heritage Foundation Index of Economic Freedom, 2012.
697 The Sydney Morning Herald, PM’s Dodgy Maths on Welfare Dreams, March 23, 2011.
698 The Ottawa Times, December 1995, Welfare cuts force thousands back to work, reprinted by Freedom Party of Ontario, Freedom Flyer 29, March 1996.
699 Brian Spegele, Chinese Village Vote Tests Waters on Reform, WSJ, February 2, 2012.
700 Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story, Alfred A. Knoph, 2005, p. 438.
701 Rummel, R.J., Death By Government, New Brunswick, NJ, Transaction Publishers, 1994.
702 The World Bank, cited in Mike Gonzalez, Bringing the Light of Freedom to Cuba, March 21, 2012.
703 Committee to Protect Journalists, 2008 Prison Census: Online And In Jail, December 4, 2008.
704 R.J. Rummel, Statistics of Democide: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900.
Chapter 88: A Snapshot of World Socialism, continued
—France, Germany, Greece, Iran, Ireland, Italy—
In bad economic times, nothing is more easily rationalized than a welfare check from the government.
COUNTRY: France (65 million people)
BELOW POVERTY LINE: 5.3 million (8.2 percent)
WELFARE COSTS: 28.5 percent of GDP (#3 in world)
NATIONAL DEBT: $5.6 trillion
STORY: The second largest economy in Europe was stagnating by 2011, teetering on the brink of a major recession. In response, France turned to raising the retirement age from 60 to 62, eligibility for pensions from 65 to 67, raising corporate taxes, and raising taxes on consumable goods (except groceries). But welfare and pension expenses had already crushed the nation’s ability to prosper. French workers boasted that they spent more of their lives in retirement than did their counterparts in other countries. However, by 2011, those costly pension plans could no longer be sustained.
Rigid austerity plans were imposed on most EU nations looking for bailouts. Despite
the dire necessity, the public was outraged at the announced cutbacks. Trade unions reacted violently to protect their hard-won social rights. Strikes of 1 to 2 million people took place several times across the country that included school students, truck drivers, teachers, train drivers, postal workers, trash collectors, and more—all in response to the government’s attempt to cut back spending and borrowing and spending and borrowing and spending and ....
In the streets of Paris and elsewhere during 2011, protesting citizens made it abundantly clear: the French love socialism.705
COUNTRY: Germany (81 million)
BELOW POVERTY LINE: 12.6 million (15.5 percent)
WELFARE COSTS: 27.4 percent of GDP (#4 in world)
NATIONAL DEBT: $5.6 trillion
STORY: Before World War II, the Weimar government tried to control the growth of towns and cities all across Germany. They believed the city life was overcrowded, too disorderly, and sorely unchangeable. The better answer, they said, was to build smaller, more easily controlled and organized communities in fertile areas where both farm and factory could thrive.
Just before the war, the new National Socialist government took the country just the opposite direction. They wanted to create beautifully ordered cities with large, but controlled, populations.
The back-and-forth of these growth models so disrupted the people that they rejected central planning altogether. When Ludwig Erhard came to power right after the war, he was fully expected to install a highly regimented socialistic government to control Germ-any’s war-ravaged economy. Instead, with the stroke of a pen, he abolished socialism and installed instead a free market.
Today there remains great bitterness and resentment toward central planners who take away local decisions and desires. Although socialist parties occasionally rise to take power, the Germans jealously guard their freedoms, and have worked hard to prosper despite the impositions of government.
The Germans probably hate socialism, but they’ve embraced many of the same costly government security nets that are crushing other economies in Europe and around the world.
Historical Perspective: Before Germany’s liberation from one of the most murderous socialists in history, Adolf Hitler, his regime began a state-sponsored systematic killing of at least 3,200,000 Jews in concentration camps, and at least 2,800,000 more—men, women and children—were exterminated and cremated with the help of Nazi collaborators in other nations. The Hitler regime called it “the final solution to the Jewish question.” The war Hitler helped foment ultimately killed between 62-78 million, or 2.5 percent of the world’s population, the deadliest war ever.706
COUNTRY: Greece (10.8 million)
BELOW POVERTY LINE: 2.2 million (20 percent)
WELFARE COSTS: 24.3 percent of GDP (#10 in world)
NATIONAL DEBT: $583 billion
STORY: The ruinous outcome of over-promising a mountain of perks and pensions and national care took center stage in 2011-12. Faced with half-a-trillion dollar debt, the Greek parliament tried to cut back its expenses so the nation wouldn’t default on its loans and thereby cause a chain reaction of defaults throughout Europe (many were invested in Greece).
The outgoing socialist government of Papandreou failed on his promise to privatize many nationalized parts of the economy—a promise made to stimulate economic growth. The new government promised they would fix things. In return for more borrowed money to stay afloat, the government promised to cut public spending by $20 billion, and raise taxes by the same amount over a five-year period.
The resulting burden placed on society was grating. Property taxes had to go up, consumption taxes at restaurants and bars rose from 13 percent to 23 percent, new taxes on luxury items were imposed, some tax exemptions were eliminated, taxes on fuel, cigarettes, and alcohol went up more than 30 percent, public wages were cut by 20 percent, about 30,000 public workers were to get only 60 percent of pay, all temporary public-sector workers were to be laid off, health-care spending and Social Security were all reduced, pensions were to be cut by 20 percent, the retirement age was raised to 65, and the government planned to sell off nationally-owned utilities to private investors.
The reaction of the people? With unemployment over 18 percent, there were bloody riots and protests that lasted for weeks. The Greeks made it clear they love socialism.
COUNTRY: Iran (78 million people)
BELOW POVERTY LINE: 14.6 million (18.7 percent)
WELFARE COSTS: not available
NATIONAL DEBT: $18 billion
STORY: Iran’s ruling Islamic regime has been forcing its people to obey religious tenets since the 1979 revolution. In the name of religious purity, the strait and rigid rules of oppression have crushed political dissidents, journalists, students, bloggers, advocates for women’s rights and human rights, and people of minority faiths. Those speaking out against the regime are followed and harassed, arrested and imprisoned, and sometimes stoned or hanged.
Ever since Ahmadinejad became president in 2005 and his questionable reelection in 2009, his regime has worried more about the indirect “soft war” that threatens to change the culture than any outside military attack. While imposing its purified Islam on the populous, it must crush all attempts to inject change. Silencing so many voices is a burdensome chore.
The rulers dictate everything—what people may wear, the books they may read, what television and movies they may watch, how they groom themselves, cut their hair, the food they eat, the company they keep. Journalists are jailed, movie makers are jailed, university instructors are jailed, anyone caught defaming the Supreme Leader or the declared tenets of Islam are jailed—or worse.
With nuclear weapons on the horizon, Iran became the new strategic threat to Israel and other western allies in the region.
Every pillar of socialism is present in Iran. The people are abused to such an extent that another revolution will be hard for the government to prevent unless they loosen the hard-line rules of complete obedience to the regime.
Historical Perspective: In 1988, Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa that led to the killing of 30,000 in Iran during a two-month purge. Some were children as young as 13, hanged from cranes, six at a time. It is unknown how many more have died for the purification of the culture. Socialism in religion is alive and lethal in Iran.707
COUNTRY: Ireland (4.7 million)
BELOW POVERTY LINE: 260,000 (5.5 percent)
WELFARE COSTS: 13.8 percent of GDP (#27 in world)
NATIONAL DEBT: $2.4 trillion
STORY: Like most of Europe in 2011, Ireland was buried under state welfare that supported the third highest EU unemployment rate of 14.6 percent—or 440,000. Half of those were long-term jobless who received benefits of £188 ($297) a week.
Cuts to wages for low-paid workers and restricting overtime pay on Sundays was floated as a solution, much to a cacophony of complaints. Working on Sunday always earned more per hour than weekdays, so all over Europe, people loved that extra opportunity to line the wallet. In Ireland, that Sunday pay was one of the very highest, a full 34 percent more than in England.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) chided the country for not reducing benefits as a means to encourage the job hunt. Said Education Minister Ruairi Quinn, “It doesn’t make sense for people to be better off by not working than by working.”708 The Irish love socialism.
COUNTRY: Italy (61 million)
BELOW POVERTY LINE: Not available
WELFARE COSTS: 24.4 percent of GDP (#9 in world)
NATIONAL DEBT: $2.7 trillion
STORY: Similar to Greece, the financial crisis that hit Italy extracted enormous costs and forced a turnover in the government. The two-decade reign of Berlusconi came to an end when he couldn’t salvage the country with cuts and increased taxes. The public debt at Berlusconi’s departure was almost $2.4 trillion, or 120 pe
rcent of GDP. Cuts across the board, plus increased taxes and shrinking the government, was their latest plan. And what did the Italians think of their bloated government’s efforts to rein in the extravagances? Riots and protests in the streets—a demonstration that Italians love socialism.
Historical Perspective: Benito Mussolini, Italian leader and founder of fascist socialism who carried Italy into World War II, helped Hitler exterminate Jews and worked to kill political prisoners both before and during WWII. At least 225,000 deaths are attributed to his dictatorship, deaths of Italians and people in Ethiopia, Libya, Yugoslavia, and Greece, among others.709
* * *
705 BBC, French Strikes Over Pension Reform, November 10, 2010.
706 Donald L. Niewyk, The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust, Columbia University, 2000.
707 Grand Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri, The Memoirs of Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, published privately, 2001.
708 Thomas Molloy, The Independent, May 26, 2011.
709 Rummel, R.J., Death by Government—Genocide and Mass Murder, 1994; also Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (1998).
Chapter 89: A Snapshot of World Socialism, continued
—North Korea, Peru, Portugal, Russia, Spain—
The Naked Socialist Page 54