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Getting Socialism Straight
When did humans start acting like humans? Margaret Mead says it started when humans started fixing broken bones. Says she on X:
A broken thighbone that has healed is evidence that someone has taken time to stay with the one who fell, has bound up the wound, has carried the person to safety and has tended the person through recovery.
I think that is what a neighbor was communicating with her “Reject Fascism” sign that adds “Care for Each Other.”
Is that socialism? I think that is what our liberal friends understand when they think “socialism.”
Only thing is that I think it only applies for face-to-face caring with the people living under the same roof.
When self-described “socialists” began describing socialism in the early 19th century, they meant, according to Grok,
social reorganization based on cooperation rather than pure individualism or laissez-faire.
Notice that they think that individualism and laissez-faire isn’t really cooperation.
But when we get to Henri Saint-Simon,
He favored centralized planning to anticipate needs and direct resources, with the goal of improving the condition of the poorest and most numerous class.
But the problem with “centralized planning” is that it means that the planners get to enforce their plans on the community. When the planners enforce their centralized plan they are no longer talking about cooperation. We are talking about subjection.
And that centralized planning didn’t work well for the Pilgrims arriving in Massachusetts in the early 1600s. Here’s how the rules were set out, initially.
There was no such thing as private property; all property and all business activities belonged to the collective with none of it belonging to individuals or individual families.
But Governor William Bradford said that it didn’t work:
“...[C]ommunity of property was found to breed much confusion and discontent; and retard much employment which would have been to the general benefit...
“For the young men who were most able and fit for service objected to being forced to spend their time and strength in working for other men’s wives and children, without any recompense...
“The strong man or the resourceful man had no more share of food, clothes, etc., than the weak man who was not able to do a quarter the other could. This was thought injustice.
“The aged and graver men, who were ranked and equalized in labor, food, clothes, etc., with the humbler and younger ones, thought it some indignity and disrespect to them.
“As for men’s wives who were obliged to do service for other men, such as cooking, washing their clothes, etc., they considered it a kind of slavery, and many husbands would not brook it...”
In other words, humans have all kinds of ideas about what constitutes fairness and justice. But socialism requires force. Not just the enforcement of contracts but forcing people to do work for other people because the rulers say so.
A lot of people, I think, believe that cooperation is the natural instinct of humans, and then scale up that belief from the family to the village to the clan to the nation. But, I think, as soon as you scale up from the family you require force to make people do their share. That’s no longer cooperation, but subjection.
But still: a lot of people believe that the market and its prices is artificial and oppressive. And they have a point. There is no argument with the market price.
Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, didn’t agree.
“the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another is common to all men, and to be found in no other race of animals.”
Or let us say that the way that humans cooperate and work together is through the organic web of exchange and prices and buying and selling. It’s in the jeans, but it wasn’t obvious until recently. And the remarkable thing about exchange and prices is that it scales up from individual exchanges between individuals to mega exchanges between corporate persons and businesses. Who knew?
Naturally, what people hate about prices and markets is when it all breaks down for them in a crisis, whether financial or weather or war-related. The market has failed!
The instinct in such cases is for the men to go out as a war party and steal it. This is the accepted practice, according to Wilfred Thesiger in Arabian Sands where everyone herds sheep in a land that only gets precipitation every two years or so. As I wrote ten years ago:
But suppose you are just unlucky and your sheep all die of hunger. What then? Well, southern Arabia has a culture of raiding. So your last resort is to raid your luckier neighbor and take off with some of his animals. But the rules say that you don’t touch the women and children.
Very civilized. It’s in the jeans.
If prices and exchange are in the jeans, and also raiding and looting in an emergency, whatabout the evident yearning for socialism and caring for each other? Is it in the jeans too?
I think so. For women it’s “care for each other;” it’s in the jeans. So why not scale it up from the family to the state? How hard can it be?
For men, it’s “fight for each other.” If people won’t cooperate then we will force them to cooperate. Because it’s the right thing to do.
Both of these instincts are all very well at the family or village level. But at the state level?
To me, the thing that is remarkable even magical, is that the “the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another” scales up from person to person all the way up to the largest organizations on Earth. Who knew?
I wonder whether the market and its prices scales up to interplanetary? Elon! What do you think?
| Fri, 31 Jul 2026 23:58:26 GMT |
The Necessity of the Big Lie
We conspiracy theorists are all naturally outraged at the conspiratorial refusal of COVID Savior Dr. Fauci to testify to Congress. How Dare He!
But when I asked Google Search about Big Lies, it first mentioned Iraq Weapons of Mass Destruction, Watergate Coverup and Nazi “Peace in our Time.”
Grok first mentions Hitler’s statement “that the masses more readily believe a colossal lie than a small one.” Then it lists the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Donation of Constantine, Piltdown Man.
My three Big Lies are:
Climate Change
COVID
Red Scare Pushback.
Notice that the Google Big Lies are all Liberal Narrative related. Here the Bushies, the Nixons and the fascists are the problem. Grok’s list is not really related to today’s politics.
My list says that liberals are the problem. Climate Change is about liberals wanting to put the world on a war footing against fossil fuels; COVID seems to have been liberals wanting to put the world on a war footing to cover up “gain-of-function” research in the administrative government. The Red Scare seems to have been about liberals trying to cover up the fact that there were Commies in the State Department.
But Literally Hitler seems to have been the guy with at least half a brain. Let’s repeat, from Grok, Our Adolf’s idea:
Adolf Hitler described in Mein Kampf the idea that the masses more readily believe a colossal lie than a small one if it is repeated enough.
Ain’t that the truth. Fortunately, US leaders only repeat the truth.
I think that we have to understand that the basic — and only — function of government is to mobilize the people against the enemy. But there’s a problem. If you are a leader with strategic vision, you will be seeing the threat way before ordinary politicians and journalists and opinion makers — or the man on the street. So, if you are going to mobilize your people in time, you may have to add a bit of lipstick to the pig. Just a little.
Here in the US we had an anti-war movement in the runup to World War I. It was the left, from socialists to pacificists to feminists. But President Wilson got us in anyway, using the issues of German unrestricted submarine warfare and the Zimmerman telegram.
We also had an anti-war movement before World War II. It included the left during the Nazi-Soviet Pact, starting in 1939. And the right-wing America First Committee starring Charles Lindbergh. It all dissolved when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.
Then, in the runup to the Cold War we had the left pushing back against President Truman’s Red Scare campaign that was eventually all about Sen. McCarthy (R-WI) because reasons and “have you at last no sense of decency.”
You can see that lots of ordinary people don’t want to go to war. So any ruling class that needs to go to war has its work cut out for it. Fortunately, the US has noble, worthy leaders, while our enemies are led by liars and cheats. Still, it takes a great leader to persuade the American people to go to war, and he has to use all the arts of persuasion to save the world from Kaisers, Nazis, and Commies.
And now fossil fuels, COVID, and bigots making life difficult for transgenders.
| Fri, 31 Jul 2026 00:13:55 GMT |
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Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
Government is an armed minority, occupying territory, and taxing the inhabitants thereof to reward its supporters.
Women expect to be protected; Men know they are expendable.
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
And the trouble with politics is that it reduces human society to a war against the enemy, as determined by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
Today’s topic: A Critique of Critical Theory
