Shakedown Socialism

by Oleg Atbashian

  How worthy and moral can an ideal be that punishes achievement and criminalizes human nature?

  Proponents of economic equality are either willfully blind, or are themselves sociopathic megalomaniacs, trying to create a restrictive system in which they envision themselves to be part of the powerful ruling elite. Both are willing to go to extremes in order to achieve their goal. As they spin their tale of an immi-nent paradise, they never say what it will cost us to get there - and, frankly, they don't give a damn. Individual human sacrifice is never an obstacle for collectivists; their glorious end justifies any unsightly means.

  It is up to us then to examine just what exactly we will have to give up for the promise of economic equality - something that has been proven to not exist.

  At first we will have to accept restrictions on certain consumer choices and products in exchange for letting the government take care of our personal well-being. Then come restrictions on speech and activities: a price for maintaining the national well-being. Eventually all dissent is suppressed and criminalized, as the media falls under the government control, young people are indoctrinated in the "new ways," businesses pay enormous taxes, more and more families descend into misery and live off government subsidies, the economy crumbles, and shortages create long lines at the supermarket.

  The leaders shift the blame to "enemies of the people," saying that this country would have been a dreamland if it weren't for a few greedy reactionaries. With no one left to object, desperate citizens succumb to the hatred and accept the idea that eliminating the few is a fair price to pay for improving the lives of the many. Then they accept the idea that eliminating an entire class of people is a small price to pay. But despite all the bloodletting, the promised collectivist paradise never arrives and the misery only increases. By now the demoralized, destitute masses are fully separated from the ruling elites by an impenetrable wall of privilege.

  The ultimate price - the relentless sacrifice of millions of people: their work, careers, ambitions, property, and lives - has been paid to reach an unattainable economic mirage, a phantom concocted in the feverish minds of a few maniacs obsessed with class envy.

  In contrast, the price of living in a free and prosperous capitalist society is merely to accept economic inequality as a natural extension of human nature.

  Without doubt, it's a small price to pay for remaining a free, productive, and normal people who live in harmony with human values.

  A False Image of Capitalism Doesn't Survive the Test of Time

  Note how archaic and foolhardy these notions appear today in free-market economies, where common workers have access to more and better goods and services than those at the top of the pyramid at the time.

  The depicted rigid social structure and lack of upward mobility belong, not to capitalism, but rather to an aristocratic feudal society. This "progressive" drawing may have been an ambitious attempt to condemn capitalism in 1911 when it was created, but after a century of real capitalist progress it looks more as a mislabeled snapshot of a bygone era.

  More precisely, the drawing reflects a time in European history when the elements of capitalism were gradually penetrating the old feudal system and transforming it from within. Today it's the socialist elements that are penetrating and transforming the capitalist system, bringing back the same pyramid they purportedly want to destroy.

  But can such a pyramid exist today? Yes it can! With minor adjustments it is a fair representation of life in the socialist "people's republics" of Cuba, North Korea, and all those nations that rejected capitalism as an economic model.

  It surely reminds me of the Soviet system with the majority of the people at the bottom, the feasting apparatchiks above them, followed by the KGB, the Party propagandists, and the Party and state elites at the top, with the pinnacle made of collected works by Marx and Lenin.

  I hope you enjoyed this book. It was written in response to a great number of emails sent to me by readers after Pajamas Media published my earlier essay about the similarities between Obama's and Stalin's methods of pitting unions against businesses. I thought it would be fitting to include that essay in an appendix, along with some other bonus material.

  - Oleg Atbashian

  APPENDIX

  Obama the Pitchfork Operator: Remake of the Soviet Classic

  While some of today's comparisons between Obama and communist dictators may go over the top, the general direction of such thinking is not without merit: they share a utopian goal of forced equality. It's logical then to expect that their methods may also converge at some point. To wit, recent actions from Obama reminded me of a ploy Stalin used on Western entrepreneurs, which in itself is an illustrative morality play contrasting the differences between socialism and capitalism.

  "My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks," Barack Obama told the CEOs of the world's most powerful financial institutions on March 27, when they cited competition for talent in an international market as justification for paying higher salaries to their employees.

  Arrayed around a long mahogany table in the White House state dining room, the bankers struggled to make themselves clear to the president, but he wasn't in a mood to hear them out. He interrupted them by saying, "Be careful how you make those statements, gentlemen. The public isn't buying that."

  To get the full flavor of the president's implication we must remember that in Obama's code language, the word "pitchforks" means "a vigorous campaign of threats and intimidation perpetrated by Obama-sponsored ACORN and union activists in conjunction with theatrical outrage from government officials, amplified by the complicit media, and coordinated from one political center, which has now moved to the White House."

  Accordingly, the words "public" and "the people" denote "an appearance of broad popular movement created by a small but highly organized band of professional pitchfork operators (ACORN) who rely on the government funding and the media's eagerness to present their deliberately planned actions and pre-fabricated messages as heartfelt and spontaneous."

  In compliance with Orwellian logic, Obama's "Newspeak" not only redefines existing meanings, it also abolishes ranges of "Oldspeak" meanings such as property, markets, competition, capitalism, political opposition, and the rule of law. The latter is perhaps the most important ingredient missing in his new "pitchfork" formula, signaling that law is now being replaced with mob rule.

  In a balanced society, an angry mob is never a part of the equation. But if the goal is to throw a capitalist society off balance in order to change it, an angry mob is the ticket. Anger is known to be the easiest and the most effective tool of crowd manipulation. Angry mobs cancel out the rule of law. Infusing anger into a community and turning it into an angry mob, canceling out the rule of law, and changing the balance in a society - this is what community organizers do for a living.

  It was often pointed out during the election that Obama lacked management experience. While having a president with no experience is bad, it's not nearly as bad as having a president with experience as a community organizer.

  Community organizers were instrumental in forcing banks to give subprime loans to unqualified minority borrowers by using the "pitchforks" tactics - protesting in front of the banks, camping on the lawns of the bankers' family houses, intimidating families, and suing in courts. After the bankers were sufficiently roughed up, a community organizer would show up at their office to "negotiate" the bank's surrender in the form of bad loans and money for community organizations that pay community organizers for their "services."

  Squeezed between the "pitchforks" and the government (see Community Reinvestment Act), the banks survived by releasing the accumulated toxic assets to the rest of the financial system, which over the years poisoned the entire world economy. Now that the crisis has propelled a former "pitchfork operator" into power, it shouldn't surprise anyone that the new organizer in chief would try to "heal" the economy how he knows best: by continuing to squeeze businesses between
the "pitchforks" and the government - a tactic that had caused the disease in the first place. Only now he is doing it on a global scale.

  Once a community organizer gains control of the media and the government, the next logical step is to turn the entire nation into a mob and set them against businesses, while offering the latter government "protection." The subsequent takeover of the economy leaves the future society reduced to the two basic elements: an authoritarian government and a compliant mob. This may be an ideal arrangement for a community organizer, but it's a direct opposite of what the Founding Fathers had intended.

  Most Americans will probably associate this trend with the protection racket that was rampant in Chicago in the 1930s. It follows the same pattern: the mob, in conjunction with the unions, would organize strikes and protests, do physical damage, and intimidate business owners. Then a mob representative would meet with the owner and offer "protection" by saying "I'm the only thing between you and the pitchforks."

  Curiously enough, at about the same time, a similar drama was unfolding halfway across the world in the Eastern Siberia - only this time the role of the mob was played by a government that claimed to act in the interests of the workers. And while the mobsters were motivated by greed and used the workers simply to milk the capitalists, a workers' government, motivated by the common good morality, used the workers for something much more sinister and immoral.

  After the Communists nationalized Siberian gold mines, the government's incompetence and lack of incentives sent gold production into a decline. Many of the managers and engineers had fled abroad; the foreign-made mining equipment lay in ruins. But the country badly needed gold to finance industrialization and prepare for war with Western capitalism.

  The popular sentiment, whipped up by the party-controlled media, was that "heads must roll." Failing to deliver the required quotas, the remaining managers and engineers were declared enemies of the people and either executed or sent to hard labor camps. That didn't help; the production continued to drop.

  That's when Nikolai Bukharin, a former community organizer in charge of industrial development, came up with an idea to infuse some capitalism and lease Siberian mines to British mining companies. The plan was approved by Stalin.

  The lease terms were extremely favorable; before long British capitalist exploiters arrived at a few Siberian locations. They brought new equipment, trained the local workers, and quickly revived the industry. But as soon as things began to run smoothly, local unions organized strikes at all British-run mines, protesting exploitation and demanding a significant pay raise.

  The strike sounded absurd as the miners' wages and living conditions by then were among the best in the country. The foreign management didn't realize, of course, that the strike had been secretly ordered by the party's central committee as part of Bukharin's clever scheme. The unions wouldn't dare defy the party. The workers simply did what they had been ordered to do.

  The British gave in and raised the wages. But a few weeks later another strike broke out, with more picketing and demonstrations, as the unions demanded another significant raise and improvement of living conditions. The British gave in again. After yet another strike the Siberian miners already had a higher living standard than any of their Western counterparts, while the mining operation was becoming barely profitable. When the next anti-exploitation strike broke out, the capitalists cried to the Soviet government for help.

  Bukharin, on behalf of the party and the government, answered that he had no power over the unions. This was not a capitalist country where governments oppressed their workers. This was a workers' state, ruled by the workers who were getting angry at capitalist exploitation, and the government had to obey their will. Long story short, and not necessarily in these words, the gist of the message was that the Brits only had Stalin's mercy standing between them and the pitchforks, and they better not push it.

  Finally the Brits fathomed the depth of the hole they'd dug themselves into. There was nothing else they could do except run away from the threat of the pitchforks as fast as they could. Shipping back the equipment would only increase their losses, so they left the machinery behind.

  As a result, the Soviet government got new working equipment, trained workers, and well-organized production - all free of charge. None of the captains of socialist industry lost any sleep; it was done for the common good of the workers, and so the end justified the means. According to a witness account, members of the party's central committee, including Stalin, laughed hysterically every time Bukharin retold the story of how the workers' state fooled Western capitalism.

  But the joke really was on the workers. As soon as the British left, the mines were taken over by the state, the wages dropped to the national average, and the usual misery ensued. The unions had done their job; there were no more strikes. Who would dare protest the party that acted in the interests of the workers? No one was foolish enough to stick his head into that noose and be declared enemy of the people. And since everyone acted smart and in the interests of the common good, the industry quickly declined to the pre-capitalist level.

  In 1937, Bukharin himself was declared an enemy of the people and, after a show trial, executed on unrelated charges. The allegations against him were as bogus and far-fetched as the very system he had helped to create - and of which he later became a victim. The gold-mining episode was perhaps one of the most innocent schemes he conjured in the interests of the common good.

  "We asked for freedom of the press, thought, and civil liberties in the past because we were in the opposition and needed these liberties to conquer. Now that we have conquered, there is no longer any need for such civil liberties."

  - Bukharin, 1917

  In the absence of economic incentives, the stagnant and unproductive industries could only be run by threats and intimidation. Those who think that the Soviet system was an aberration of socialism, consider that it had been consistent with the principles of equality and the common good. Stalin's reign of terror was merely an inevitable end result of a collectivist utopian theory that contradicted human nature, vilifying people for "greed" and "selfishness," which were mere manifestations of their individuality, and punishing the desire to be free from state-run slavery.

  It appears that the ultimate manifestation of the "common good" principle is an absolute power of the state. Stalinists associated the idea of "socialism with a human face" with moral confusion and ideological corruption. At least the henchmen were consistent in their beliefs.

  As post-Stalin liberal reforms softened the totalitarian system, they also made it more dysfunctional. With the fear of repressions withering away, the economy slowed down to a halt. And just as the last remaining fear was gone in the years of Perestroika, the country fell apart.

  This was a logical conclusion of an attempt to build a "workers' paradise" based on "progressive" collectivist morality, which turned workers into slaves and corrupted the society to such an extent that it required a partial return of totalitarian rule by Putin in order to rein in organized crime.

  But American "progressives" seem to be unable to learn from other people's mistakes, even if the former KGB officer Vladimir Putin himself is asking Obama to take a lesson from the pages of Russian history and not exercise "excessive intervention in economic activity and blind faith in the state's omnipotence."

  I don't often agree with Putin, but when he's right, he's right. "In the 20th century, the Soviet Union made the state's role absolute," he said at the World Economic Forum in Davos. "In the long run, this made the Soviet economy totally uncompetitive. This lesson cost us dearly. I am sure nobody wants to see it repeated."

  Can Socialist Monopoly compete with Capitalist Monopoly?

  We all know how the game of Capitalist Monopoly works: one player wins and the rest lose, at least until the next round. But what if you are a permanent loser? That is unfair. The most obvious solution to this crisis is to remake the rules in your favor.

  Brilliant
minds among the loser community have made repeated attempts to make new rules that would allow them to become winners. They mostly ended up with appointing one of the players to be a dictator (usually themselves), who promises to redistribute everything on the board equally so that everyone wins. The dictator appoints assistants and together they become the government. For this plan to work, the government must forcibly take over all the property on the game board. Thus the government becomes a monopolist and the sole big winner. All the others become perpetual lesser winners: equal among themselves, but not equal to the government and its officials. Let's broadly describe it as Socialist Monopoly.

  But not all the state-run rental properties on the board are equal, so the game goes on. Now the selection of winners becomes wholly dependent on a player's personal relationship with the government. Those who are not the relatives or good friends with the govern-ment, become losers. The latter can still stay in the game by participating in an intricate system of bribes, kickbacks, and exchange of favors. Those unwilling to play by these rules become the ultimate losers and are despised by everybody. Usually they are the people who would previously win in Capitalist Monopoly.

  When all the redistribution has been completed, Socialist Monopoly becomes a really boring and tedious game. The government deflects the growing dissatisfac-tion by adding a new rule: all players must blame the former winners of Capitalist Monopoly for sabotage and obstructionism. After all the said former winners quit and leave the table, the interest in the game is sustained with the help of cheap vodka, which also helps to suppress mutual resentment and hatred. The game ends when all players, including the government, lose all motivation to go on, or fall under the table into a puddle of their own vomit, whichever comes first.