The Case Against Socialism

by Rand Paul

  Indeed, once you have a centralized government in control of your health care, your child care, your college education, and your employment, you are on the slippery road to the regulation of cultural and scientific work, including what can be published, studied, or researched. After all, if you want the government to pay for it, they control it. In the complete socialist state, Ebeling writes, “Man’s mind and material well-being would be enslaved to the control and caprice of the central planners of the socialist state.”2

  Socialism also crushes the spirit of work and entrepreneurship. As Ebeling puts it, socialism weakens “the close connection between work and reward that necessarily exists under a system of private property. What incentive does a man have to clear the field, plant the seed, and tend the ground until harvest time if he knows or fears that the product to which he devotes his mental and physical labor may be stolen from him at any time?”3

  Today’s socialists argue: “No, that is not what we want at all. We want more ‘freedom’ for the individual. Those who lack wealth under capitalism are enslaved by the rich!” And what of the argument that socialist rulers would be guided by their own self-interest, just as capitalists are, but with the brute force of government at their disposal? Doesn’t the government, even now, exert control by withholding or granting funds to individuals and groups who are ever more dependent on them? As the saying goes, “The government big enough to give you everything you want is a government strong enough to take away everything that you have.”

  Socialists have argued since the time of Plato that political evolution will bring about philosopher-kings who are disinterested in their own material gain. Lenin predicted that class struggle would lead to a “New Soviet Man” guided by altruism and the common good. Instead, history has given us Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, and innumerable other socialist elites who began by pursuing the ideology of equality but ultimately and perhaps inevitably succumbed to a tyrannous accumulation of power—all while preaching egalitarianism, redistribution of wealth, and an age of enlightened “new men” full of hope, change, and altruism. Before anyone signs up with any of today’s young socialists, it’s worth learning the dark origin and decline of Mao’s attempt to create a workers’ paradise.4

  Mao admitted that the socialism he strove for would, at least at first, require war. Mao is famous for saying that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” To get that power, Mao decided to weaponize the divide between the rural peasants and the urban capitalist class. Mao saw a path to victory by mobilizing the rural peasants. While Mao believed the Chinese People’s Revolution would lead to its own unique socialism, he also saw the Chinese revolution in the context of a worldwide class struggle as Marx had described. Mao, like Marx, believed in the Hegelian notion of the inevitability of socialism. Workers are naturally pitted against owners who, according to Marx, steal “value” from the labor of the workers, which leads to class warfare and ultimately to a synthesis where a workers’ paradise comes into being.5

  Mao, like Marx before him, believed that socialism was a Darwinian destiny. Mao wrote: “Socialism, in the ideological struggle, now enjoys all the conditions to triumph as the fittest.”6

  Interestingly, intervention by European powers played a role in Mao’s rise. At the end of World War I, the Treaty of Versailles ceded the Shandong region of China to Japan. This region had been controlled by Germany until her defeat. The socialist movement was able to incorporate Chinese nationalism and pride into its message, setting the stage for the people’s revolution of Mao.7

  Likewise, the chaos of World War II and the unifying opposition to Japanese rule allowed the communists to combine socialism with nationalism to grow its forces. In the ensuing civil war with Chiang Kai-shek, like so many revolutions before and since, the communists “fought against” the injustices and lack of freedom under the rule of Chiang’s Kuomintang. But when the communists came to power they, in turn, became the despots they had once despised.

  The People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949. Factories were nationalized; land was expropriated and divided up among the peasants. Taking everyone’s land, as you can imagine, is difficult to do overnight. To stamp out resistance, Mao targeted the bourgeoisie, seeking “to destroy the property-owning class by killing at least one landlord in every village via public execution.”8

  Over an eight-year period, the land was confiscated and the farmers forced to work in gradually larger and larger “cooperatives.” These agricultural cooperatives ranged from 100 to 300 families.

  The economy was planned from the top down, and the communist government attempted to micromanage several hundred million people.

  By 1953, Mao determined that the post–civil war economy and collectivization had progressed enough that he could emulate the Soviets by launching a five-year plan for the Chinese economy. Like Soviet five-year plans, Mao claimed his agrarian socialism was working, but the facts argued otherwise. Nicholas Kristof writes, “China’s per-capita income was actually lower, adjusted for inflation, in the 1950s than it had been at the end of the Song Dynasty in the 1270s.” The government conclusion was that the five-year plan from 1953 to 1958 had succeeded, but the truth was the opposite.9

  In 1958, an optimistic Mao launched “the Great Leap Forward.” Collectivization of the farms was completed, and private farming was banned. The goal was to quickly transition Communist China from agrarian socialism to a modern, albeit socialized, industrial nation.

  The result was disastrous almost beyond human comprehension. Instead of a Great Leap Forward, what ensued was perhaps the worst man-made famine of all time.

  The famine was no accident. When ownership is collectivized, the incentive to work harder, to be more productive evaporates. When the government purchases nearly a third of the crop at prices controlled by the government and regulates the prices of the remaining two-thirds, shortages inevitably occur. Over time the government began to buy more and more of the harvest. The central planners “calculated” a great harvest and so increased export of grain and dictated that land be converted from grain to cash crops. The farmer co-ops were merged into giant people’s communes.

  Mao did not anticipate the result. Once private property was abolished, so too was the ability to have rental income, to sell land for profit, or to use the land as collateral to borrow money. Peasants were reassigned from farm work to industrial iron and steel work and sent to the cities.

  Like all attempts at government-enforced equality, the need for the truncheon arose.

  In China, sticks served the purpose of truncheons. Professor Frank Dikötter describes beatings that were meted out by roving bands of communist enforcers. As the Great Leap Forward became the great leap backward, starvation and desperation required more brutality to keep people in line. Victims were buried alive, forced to labor in the subzero cold, with government thugs chopping off ears and noses of any who resisted.10

  Dikötter describes the descent into darkness:

  On the other hand, the farmers who were herded into giant people’s communes had very few incentives to work. The land belonged to the state. The grain they produced was procured at a price that was often below the cost of production. Their livestock, tools, and utensils were no longer theirs. Often even their homes were confiscated. But the local cadres faced ever-greater pressure to fulfill and over-fulfill the plan, having to drive the workforce in one merciless campaign after another. In some places both villagers and cadres became so brutalized that the scope and degree of coercion had to be constantly expanded, resulting in an orgy of violence. People were tied up, beaten, stripped, drowned in ponds, covered in excrement, branded with sizzling tools, mutilated, and buried alive. The most common tool in this arsenal of horror was food, which was used as a weapon: entire groups of people considered to be too old, too weak, or too sick to work were deliberately banned from the canteen and starved to death.11

  Dikötter traveled to China and examined the local documents concern
ing the Great Famine. Dikötter’s best estimate is that at least 45 million people died throughout China.

  Dikötter maintains that “[b]etween 2 and 3 million of these victims were tortured to death or summarily executed, often for the slightest infraction. People accused of not working hard enough were hung and beaten; sometimes they were bound and thrown into ponds. Punishments for even the smallest violations included mutilation and forcing people to eat excrement.”12

  Dikötter found a government report that describes how “a man named Wang Ziyou had one of his ears chopped off, his legs tied up with iron wire and a 10-kilogram stone dropped on his back before he was branded with a sizzling tool. His crime: digging up a potato.” He describes another horror story where a father was forced to bury his son alive for the crime of stealing a handful of rice. The famine was so terrible that the government eventually resorted to simply withholding food as punishment.

  It’s always hard to imagine people resorting to cannibalism, but Dikötter found police records of fifty such cases in one village. One report read, according to Dikötter, “culprit: Yang Zhongsheng. Name of victim: Yang Ecshun. Relationship with culprit: younger brother. Manner of crime: killed and eaten. Reason: livelihood issues.”

  The Chinese still see this famine as largely the result of natural causes, though even the official party line now acknowledges some “planning” mistakes. Millions died at the hands of government equality enforcers.

  Mao, never that sentimental, continued to confiscate ever-larger portions of the grain. Dikötter describes it:

  At a secret meeting in Shanghai on March 25, 1959, he ordered the party to procure up to one-third of all the available grain—much more than ever before. The minutes of the meeting reveal a chairman insensitive to human loss: “When there is not enough to eat people starve to death. It is better to let half of the people die so that the other half can eat their fill.”13

  The starvation and death became so widespread it was impossible to deny. Yu Dehong, a communist functionary in Xinyang during the Great Leap Forward, stated:

  [F]ive kilometers from my home, there were dead bodies everywhere, at least 100 corpses lying out in the open with no one burying them. Among the reed ponds along the river embankments I saw another 100 or so corpses. Outside it was said that dogs had eaten so many corpses that their eyes glowed with bloodlust. But this was inconsistent with the facts: people had already eaten all the dogs, so where would there be dogs to eat the corpses?14

  The Chinese journalist Yang Jisheng describes how China attempted to modernize and follow the Soviet Union’s attempt at rapid industrialization, but rather, the Great Leap Forward “brought inconceivable misery, bearing witness to what Friedrich Hayek wrote in The Road to Serfdom: ‘Is there a greater tragedy imaginable than that, in our endeavor consciously to shape our future in accordance with high ideals, we should in fact unwittingly produce the very opposite of what we have been striving for?’”15

  Certainly, famine was an unintended consequence, but it was not as if the socialists had not been warned. Hayek had written that any “Great Utopia” that required central planning according to a government blueprint would fail, that any “Great Utopia” that prevented the interaction of free individuals in a free marketplace was doomed to fail.

  Dikötter comes to a similar conclusion: “Is there a more devastating example of a utopian plan gone horribly wrong than the Great Leap Forward in 1958? Here was a vision of communist paradise that paved the way to the systematic stripping of every freedom—the freedom of trade, of movement, of association, of speech, of religion—and ultimately the mass killing of tens of millions of ordinary people.”16

  As Yang Jisheng puts it: “In order to bring about this Great Utopia, China’s leaders constructed an all-encompassing and omnipotent state, eliminating private ownership, the market and competition. The state controlled the vast majority of social resources and monopolized production and distribution, making every individual completely dependent on it. The government decided the type and density of crops planted in each location, and yields were taken and distributed by the state. The result was massive food shortages, as the state’s inability to ration food successfully doomed tens of millions of rural Chinese to a lingering death.”17

  There is no kinder, gentler version of state ownership of the land. Jisheng channels Hayek when he describes China’s socialism: “An economy with ‘everything being directed from a single center’ requires totalitarianism as its political system. And since absolute power corrupts absolutely, the result was not the egalitarianism anticipated by the designers of this system, but an officialdom that oppressed the Chinese people.”18

  Chapter 26

  All Aspects of Culture Eventually Become Targets for the Planners

  The dangers of socialism don’t end with ruining the economy. When the economy fails, it must be blamed on malefactors besides the socialist leaders. Usually the blame falls on dissidents, capitalists, insufficiently productive workers, and foreigners. The economy is sick because the culture is diseased, and the disease must be eradicated. Not every socialist purge turns out as badly as China’s, but it’s worth exploring how and why China ended up the way it did.

  No sooner had the nation begun to recover from the famine of the Great Leap Forward than Mao decided to distract the masses with a new program. The Cultural Revolution was launched in 1966. The Cultural Revolution purged the remaining capitalist and traditional elements from Chinese society and put Maoism at the center of the Party.

  Mao, like socialists before and since, maintained that the failure of the Great Leap Forward and the famine was due to outsiders, lingering capitalists, and impure party members. The Cultural Revolution was to make socialism purer by purging opponents. The Red Guard was formed to enforce the purge.

  After the bungled Great Leap Forward, Mao’s leadership position in the Chinese Communist Party was threatened. The Cultural Revolution was a way to solidify his position by eliminating his rivals and purifying Chinese socialism. Like Stalin, Mao sought to develop a cult of personality around himself.

  A book of Mao’s quotations, The Little Red Book, was published and distributed far and wide to spread hero worship of Mao. This pocket-sized volume was printed by the hundreds of millions (some say billions). The Red Guard presided over public readings of Mao’s wisdom. One such exhortation read: “Be resolute, fear no sacrifice, and surmount every difficulty to win victory!” Flight attendants on Chinese airlines even intoned Mao’s words overhead to the passengers. Chinese citizens were expected to have a copy with them at all times.

  As part of the Cultural Revolution Mao closed down all the schools, libraries, shrines, and anything else perceived to be traditional. Houses were pillaged, and religious icons and books piled in the streets and burned.

  Mao exhorted China’s youth to purge the country of any who were sympathetic to capitalism or the “old” ways, to destroy the “four olds”—old ideas, old customs, old habits, and old culture.

  The Red Guard would attack people simply for wearing “bourgeois” clothes rather than the gray unisex communist pajamas, which represented complete equality. Mao encouraged the Red Guard to take matters into their own hands. The violence spread unchecked until 1968, when Mao finally intervened. While much of the violence was committed by the paramilitary Red Guard, the government had its hands in the conflict as well. Estimates are that the government killed upwards of 500,000. Military rule was instituted. The violence touched even leading figures in the party. Deng Xiaoping, who would become the most powerful man in China in the 1980s, was purged in 1967. China’s current president Xi Jinping’s father was beaten and sent into exile. Xi, himself, was a thirteen-year-old boy at the time.1

  Orders came down from Beijing for all Chinese families to send one child to reeducation camps in the countryside.

  Dr. Ming Wang, a friend of mine and a fellow ophthalmologist, was one of those children.

  He was born in Communist Ch
ina in 1960 amid Mao’s Great Leap Forward. Ming’s family were present to see farmers forced off their farms and into the cities. They experienced the famine firsthand.

  Ming was entering high school when the news came that he would not be able to continue his education. According to Dr. Wang’s book, From Darkness to Sight: “The first aim [of the Cultural Revolution] . . . was to eliminate higher education. Universities across China were shut down. Anyone with knowledge and education was labeled the ‘stinking ninth class,’ the absolute bottom of the social ranking, beneath even criminals, prostitutes and beggars.”

  Ming came from a family of doctors. All nine members of his grandfather’s family were physicians. Both of his parents were doctors. During the Cultural Revolution, the Red Guard marched on the medical university with clubs to destroy the classrooms and laboratories. Ming’s mother heard they were coming and bravely tried to protect her lab. She was beaten so badly that she was not able to rise from bed for one year and lived in pain for the rest of her life. When she finally could walk again, she was exiled to a work camp for two years. Ming was eleven years old at the time.

  In 1974, word came that each Chinese family could keep only one child. Other children would be deported to labor camps. Ming’s family chose him, hoping the policy would change before his younger brother reached the age of deportation. Choosing Ming meant he would not be deported—but only if he quit school. So, at the end of junior high, Ming was forced to quit school.

  Ming secretly attended the medical university with his father but ultimately was discovered and forbidden from attending lectures.

  Ming’s story is so moving and extreme that he could be a character in a dystopian novel. In fact, the grotesque concept of preventing the intellectually capable from pursuing higher education and assigning them to menial labor is not that different from the plight of the narrator of Ayn Rand’s Anthem.2