To Be a Capitalist or To Be a Communist
By: David Deschesne
Editor/Publisher,
Fort Fairfield Journal
January 17, 2018
The Democrat party of today has adopted the political ideology of “steal from your neighbor to give to yourself” or a more sanitized, “from those who are able to those who are in need.” Either way you brand it, it’s Communism. Some would say Socialism, but Socialism is really just Communist-Lite.
This isn’t to say the Republican party is much better than the Democrats. In order to get elected to public office with a voting block consisting of large groups of people who expect the government to give them something for nothing, both political parties have had to promise to take from the producers (which are fewer in number) and give to the non-producers (which are now far greater in number).
While receiving such “benefits” may seem attractive at first, one must realize that those benefits are chains that bind and bars that imprison within a government-run slave grid designed to keep people down, discourage personal self-improvement, and guarantee a voting block that will continue to reelect those government thieves to office in perpetuity.
The mainstream television and newspaper media is unabashedly a capitalistic system centered around huge profits, but they have adopted and are espousing and reinforcing a socialist or communist system to the masses in order to keep them underfoot and more easily controlled. In this sense, belief systems become prisons for the mind and the mainstream news media its jail guards and wardens.
While the glories and wonders of communism and socialism are being promoted by these power-brokers today, the idea of capitalism is being downplayed and discouraged. Yes, there are instances of capitalism where huge amounts of wealth are amassed and used to persuade politicians. This has been dubbed “crony capitalism” but it should not be used as an excuse to abolish capitalism altogether. After all, capitalism is the only economic system that allows for personal freedom and self-improvement; communism—and its little brother, socialism—is purposefully designed to keep people down, stuck in place and unable to ever improve themselves.
Now, allow me to explain the two systems.
Capitalism
Let’s say you grow a garden with various crops such as beans, potatoes, corn and cucumbers. At harvest time you will collect your food and perhaps can some of it for the winter. If you’re a really good gardener and have a large garden, you might be able to grow enough of those crops to sustain yourself through the winter, spring and summer until the following Fall’s harvest.
Now a time comes when you have such a large garden plot and high yield that you have enough food to feed yourself and your family with food left over. That excess food is called, “Capital.”
Capital is really any natural resource that has had human labor impressed upon it to improve it or produce a finished product in a quantity greater than the original producer’s needs. Capital can come in virtually any form, from a finished wooden book case to a barrel of oil—basically any natural resource that has been improved by human labor. In the case of the garden, labor had to be expended to till the soil, plant the seeds, adjust fertilizer, make sure it’s watered, keep the weeds down and ultimately harvest the food. The basket of beans, bushel of corn or bag of potatoes contain the value of all the human labor used to get them to that point. You can either eat them, or if you have more than you can eat you can sell them, or trade them for something somebody else has produced an excess of, for what you are in need of. This is called, “Capitalism.”
Now, you’re a pretty good gardener and are becoming a pretty good capitalist, too. You expand your acreage and sell some of your crops for money so you can pay for a few people to help you with the gardening chores since the plot of land is getting to be larger than you can handle on your own. Under this capitalistic system, these people are called, “Employees.” The employee in this case must understand the reason for their being hired is to produce food for the owner of the garden plot and to ultimately make the owner a profit so he can afford to pay them, maintain the land, and show a return of profit for his efforts and investment. Ergo, the job exists in this case for the purpose of food production. Most employees today think employers are obligated to provide jobs out of thin air and when they show up to work they do not understand their job is to do the work the owner of the business doesn’t have the time to do him/herself. Businesses that provide jobs do so for the express purpose of making the owner a return on the investment of time and money. Businesses are not hobbies, they must make a profit to remain relevant. Whether you like it or not, at the end of the day, the job of the employee is to make the owner of the business money. Some of that money is shared with the employees. This is how capitalism works.
Communism
In the 1800’s a man named Karl Marx looked at capitalism as a means of “exploiting the masses.” He looked at the massive numbers of employees being paid very low wages while the owners of the businesses retained most of the profits for themselves. This scenario developed as more and more people entered the labor market and thus drove down the wages for all. In all economic systems, from baseball cards to gold bullion, the economic rule of “the more there is, the less it’s worth” holds true. Wages weren’t being kept down by the evil business owners who didn’t want to pay wages, the cost of wages was being bid down by an excess pool of employees, some of whom were willing to work for less just to have a job. This is primarily what drives down the wages—a kind of reverse bidding war between the employees in the labor pool. Just like when there are too many of one kind of baseball card on the market, its value becomes less and a person won’t pay a premium price for it because he can be sure to get that particular card anywhere he looks, anytime he wants. The same goes for beans, potatoes, corns, cars and laborers. The more there is, the less it’s worth.
Well, Mr. Marx thought that wasn’t fair and he believed the employer was the problem. He envisioned a system where ownership of property was abolished and those instruments of production—businesses and corporations—reverted to ownership by the employees themselves; administered of course, by a large authoritarian government bureaucracy. He also advocated for a heavy and progressive income tax which took more money from people who had more and less from poorer people. Sound familiar?
This idea sold quite easily to the masses. Even though the average worker in a company didn’t have the knowledge base required to run the company, conduct business, do sales, product marketing or customer relations, he became owner overnight under a Communist model.
The former model of the gardener in the previous section on capitalism would look like this under communism:
The owner of the garden would lose ownership of his land and it would revert to a centralized governing authority who would be in charge of managing the land, scheduling the watering, fertilizing, planting, weeding and harvesting. The owner and all of his previous employees would all become employee-owners with the government functioning as the “boss.” The government would determine what gets planted, when it’s watered, how it’s harvested, when it goes to market and what the price will be. The employees, regardless of their education or skill-set would all receive the same pay no matter how little or how much they contributed to the production of those crops. Because of this feature of communism, there was no incentive to improve the product, or make the production more efficient, since the pay would be the same at the end of the day and only the government bureaucrats would be the ones to enjoy the extra profits. In this sense, communism stifles and discourages efficiency and progress.
Under the communist model, housing is provided to all employees but they don’t get to choose where they live. As with determining how much money they'll make, the governing authority also allocates housing based upon what it perceives the needs to be. Under the communism of the former Soviet Union, the average worker lived in a dumpy, run-down, government-managed apartment while the government bureaucrats and chieftains lived in palaces and resort homes that were confiscated from the wealthy who built those properties prior to the adoption of communism.
Health care in communist and socialist systems is also “free” but after waiting in log lines for care, you will find that the doctors aren’t that motivated to provide high quality service because their pay is also similarly limited.
The workers under communism are always sold on the idea that they will be part-owner and their life will improve. But, in reality all that really happens is the government bureaucrats become the owners and operate the instruments of production in a capitalistic way, for profit, while petering a pittance of the profits back down the line to the general laborers. The only thing that has changed under communism is who the owner of the instruments of production is—ownership went from private individuals with a vested interest in improving their property, business and production, to the government with its concretized and inefficient system of bureaucracy where the bureaucrat-managers in government offices, who know nothing about producing the product they have been placed in charge of, end up making all of the important businesses decisions relevant to that product’s production.
Everyone knows the most inefficient organization for production in the world is government. The only things governments excel at are killing people and collecting taxes. They really do nothing else as well.
The U.S. Today
What we have today in the U.S. is a hybridized form of Communism (government mandated wages/bureaucratic regulations/heavy and progressive income tax), Socialism (forcefully taking from those who have to give to those who don’t have) and Fascism (merger of government with business and corporation).
Under a capitalist model, a person is free to make as much profit as his intellect and labor is able to achieve. Since a person is literally limited by his ability to labor, capitalism will allow jobs to form naturally as that person’s abilities are able to grow the business. So long as government (or organized crime, which is a private form of government) leaves businesses alone and doesn’t try to tax them, force them to pay artificially high wages disproportionate to the available labor pool, or burden them with excessive regulations, businesses will grow, jobs will follow and everyone from business owner to employee will be free to do with the fruits of their labor (be it money or trade for other products and services) whatever they wish.
Over the past sixty years or so, however, the United States has been adopting the concepts enshrined in Communism. Ironically, while the House Committee for Un-American Activities sought to identify and imprison suspected communists throughout the 1950’s, the U.S. government had already adopted nearly all 10 planks of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto.
For those past sixty years, the U.S. government has been chiseling away at the capitalist system and the mainstream media-brainwashed populace of voters have been wholeheartedly voting for politicians to continue to do it.
Voters fail to understand that in order for the government to give out a free benefit—whether it’s health care, housing assistance, free public education or even a free cell phone—the money to fund that freebie must first be stolen from a producer. This is because the government produces nothing of any tangible value. The only thing the government produces is debt.
We are now a quasi Communist-Socialist-Fascist state where the government is acquiring control of businesses through excessive regulations, controlling the wages via minimum wage laws that create disproportionately high wages compared to the available labor pool, and confiscate wealth from the producers in order to give away free services to the majority of the voters who continue to be stuck where they are, receiving those freebies, unable to increase or improve themselves past the economic level they’re currently at.
At the end of the day, Capitalism creates a nation of free, individualistic self-starters who have the motivation and initiative to improve themselves, which ultimately improves society. Meanwhile, Communism/Socialism stifles personal and business development and wastefully siphons off profits from the producers to be frittered away by greedy government bureaucrats and chieftains whose only motivation is to take care of themselves and perpetuate their own mini fiefdoms.
Everywhere communism was tried, it failed shortly after its adoption. The only reason some countries, like China, North Korea and (while it lasted) the former Soviet Union were able to make communism last was they had to employ a massive and brutal authoritarian, militarized and heavily armed police state to enforce compliance at the barrel of a gun.
Freedom and personal betterment can never develop at the business end of the barrel of a gun. A gun, in government hands, with the unwitting support of a citizenry expecting the government to give them something for nothing, can only result in total and permanent slavery of the masses.
