_Brandon Bartlett is a freshman political science major at MU. He is an opinions columnist who writes about politics for The Maneater._
I recently attended an event hosted by MU Socialists called “Socialism: Reform or Revolution?” Anytime I plan on going to an event that I know I will disagree with, I always accept the possibility that there may be a fact I have not heard of and maybe they will change my mind or give me something I at least have to consider, and this event was no different. However, my mind remains unchanged to the fact that the ideology of socialism is extremely harmful to the entirety of society.
This is not to say that everyone who believes in socialism is evil, and I actually think most socialists have good intentions of making the world a more equal place. However, there is nothing just or good about forcibly taking money from someone who has earned it and giving it to someone who has not, no matter how much they need the money.
There were two parts to the event. The first was a speech about the history of socialism and how it could possibly be implemented in the U.S., and the second was a Q-and-A. The main points given on how to implement socialism in the U.S. during the speech were as follows: We need a socialist majority in our government and the U.S. population in general, we need to abolish private property and we need global socialism. This was a part of the event that I actually enjoyed because any rational person can understand this will not happen until hell freezes over.
Most of those main points make some sense as to why they would be necessary to implement socialism in America, but why do we need global socialism? The socialists’ response was that if only one country does it, then all of the businesses will just move to other countries. It might seem like a basic response, but this is an absolutely radical statement. This is an ideology that wishes to drain business owners of their livelihood and force them to deal with regulations that will strip them of everything they have worked so hard to build all in the name of fairness and equality. After the conclusion of the speech, we began the Q-and-A, and things were equally as interesting, as the conversation basically revolved around three questions.
The first of these questions was brought up by an older gentleman, who asked why anyone would even want socialism over capitalism. He said he had been around long enough to remember hearing of people risking their lives to leave their socialist countries to make it to America, where they could prosper and make lives for themselves. To this, they gave the generic response that every socialist gives, which is that those countries weren’t really socialist but they were socialist in the sense that they were state socialist. They even went as far as to say that we have never ever had a country that was really socialist. First off, let me just suggest that if an idea has been around for this long and it has been implemented wrong every single time it is attempted, it might be the idea that is the problem. Secondly, it has actually been implemented several times. Whether it was Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany or modern-day Venezuela, just to name a few. They have all miserably failed, and with a rather large death toll.
According to historyofrussia.org, most historians seem to agree on a total of about 20 million people dying in Soviet Russia. People are starving in Venezuela. And Nazi Germany was responsible for the death of around 19 million people. Many socialists would argue that Nazi Germany was not a socialist country, and I will admit that they have a point because the Nazi Party Platform from 1932 stated that it wanted to “eliminate the marxist threat,” but it also said, “The state ensures that every citizen live decently and earn his livelihood” and guaranteed jobs and benefits for all workers. According to The Independent, Hitler even said “the whole of national socialism” was based on Marx. It seems like it would be fairly obvious that the Nazi party was socialist seeing as the name of the party in German, Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, translates to National Socialist German Workers’ Party.
The second question was “What is the difference between socialism and communism?” The response given by MU Socialists was that in socialism the people own the means of production and in communism the state owns the means of production. However, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, socialism and communism have a few different definitions, but the No. 1 definition for socialism is “any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods” and the No. 1 definition for communism is “a system in which goods are owned in common and are available to all as needed and a theory advocating elimination of private property.” That sounds similar to me. People use the words fairly interchangeably and the miniscule differences between the two don’t matter in the end because socialism always turns into communism.
In reality, people in a capitalistic society will not easily be persuaded to giving up all their private property rights, so socialism is a sort of in-between step to more easily transform a capitalistic society into a communist one. The main difference is that people still own some private property in socialism, and everything is communally owned in communism. Socialists and communists know they cannot take away property rights in one fell swoop, so they instead turn it into a battle of inches in which people slowly lose the rights to all private property.
The third question, which was highly debated, was one I posed, and it is my biggest problem with the entire idea of socialism. The question is: How is it moral to forcibly take something that someone earned and give it to someone else who has not earned it? I understand that there might be someone who could use one of Bernie Sanders’ three houses more than he can, but that doesn’t mean any of us has the right to vote on whether the government should go and take them from him or not. I was quickly given a reply and, of course, it didn’t actually answer the question because there is no legitimate answer to it. Instead, I was told the people who are rich didn’t really earn the money and that they only have it because the people who work for them made them the money. This is correct in one way but wrong in every other.
Obviously most, if not all, rich business owners are rich because other people work for their very large companies and produce products for consumers to buy. This is how capitalism works. Someone with an idea starts a business and takes all the risk of that business failing and losing all of their money. If they have a good idea, the business grows so it is successful enough that they need more help to keep up with the demand. They hire people who voluntarily agree to work for them and pay them an agreed-upon amount as compensation for their time and labor. This is called capitalism, and it is perhaps the greatest economic system known to man. I explained this to MU Socialists but fear it fell on deaf ears as I was once again met with the generic response of, “they didn’t really have a choice to take the job because they needed the money,” to which I say their employer is doing them a favor if they really needed the money.
The major difference between socialism/communism and capitalism is that in socialism you either hand over your personal property and go along with the fairness agenda, where no one is actually successful, or you get thrown in jail or executed. In capitalism, you can be successful and make millions of dollars a year, but only if you make something that is good enough for other people to voluntarily hand you their hard-earned money. Capitalism is also good for poor people because it allows them to have some of the same things that rich people do. In the past, only rich people had cars, air conditioning, cell phones and computers, but now, virtually everyone has those things. Also, poor people in the U.S. are among the richest poor people in the entire world. Capitalism has made the U.S. the most successful and free country in the history of the world, and socialism seeks to destroy it so that everyone can have a participation trophy.
