Capitalism is not the problem. It is the Capitalist system which has provided every material thing that we today take for granted. It is the Capitalist system that has lifted Human Beings from a subsistence existence scratching a living from the land, to a standard of living hitherto only dreamed of.
Socialism is the problem, Socialism masquerading as Capitalism.
The text below is taken from Ayn Rand's "The Virtue of Selfishness". It explains clearly how Socialism is responsible for economic and social problems we face today.
What had once been an alleged ideal is now a ragged skeleton rattling like a
scarecrow in the wind over the whole world, but men lack the courage to
glance up and to discover the grinning skull under the bloody rags. That
skeleton is socialism.
Fifty years ago, there might have been some excuse (though not
justification) for the widespread belief that socialism is a political theory
motivated by benevolence and aimed at the achievement of men’s wellbeing.
Today, that belief can no longer be regarded as an innocent error. Socialism
has been tried on every continent of the globe. In the light of its
results, it is time to question the motives of socialism’s advocates.
The essential characteristic of socialism is the denial of individual
property rights; under socialism, the right to property (which is the right of
use and disposal) is vested in “society as a whole,” i.e., in the collective,
with production and distribution controlled by the state, i.e., by the
government.
Socialism may be established by force, as in the Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics—or by vote, as in Nazi (National Socialist) Germany. The degree
of socialization may be total, as in Russia—or partial, as in England.Theoretically, the differences are superficial; practically, they are only a matter of time. The basic principle, in all cases, is the same.
The alleged goals of socialism were: the abolition of poverty, the
achievement of general prosperity, progress, peace and human brotherhood.
The results have been a terrifying failure—terrifying, that is, if one’s motive
is men’s welfare.
Instead of prosperity, socialism has brought economic paralysis and/or
collapse to every country that tried it. The degree of socialization has been
the degree of disaster. The consequences have varied accordingly.
England, once the freest and proudest nation of Europe, has been reduced
to the status of a second-rate power and is perishing slowly from hemophilia,
losing the best of her economic blood: the middle class and the professions.
The able, competent, productive, independent men are leaving by the
thousands, migrating to Canada or the United States, in search of freedom.
They are escaping from the reign of mediocrity, from the mawkish
poorhouse where, having sold their rights in exchange for free dentures, the
inmates are now whining that they’d rather be Red than dead.
In more fully socialized countries, famine was the start, the insignia
announcing socialist rule—as in Soviet Russia, as in Red China, as in Cuba.
In those countries, socialism reduced the people to the unspeakable poverty
of the pre-industrial ages, to literal starvation, and has kept them on a
stagnant level of misery.
No, it is not “just temporary,” as socialism’s apologists have been
saying—for half a century. After forty-five years of government planning,
Russia is still unable to solve the problem of feeding her population.
As far as superior productivity and speed of economic progress are
concerned, the question of any comparisons between capitalism and
socialism has been answered once and for all—for any honest person—by
the present difference between West and East Berlin.
Instead of peace, socialism has introduced a new kind of gruesome lunacy
into international relations—the “cold war,” which is a state of chronic war
with undeclared periods of peace between wantonly sudden invasions—with
Russia seizing one-third of the globe, with socialist tribes and nations at one
another’s throats, with socialist India invading Goa, and communist China
invading socialist India.
An eloquent sign of the moral corruption of our age is the callous
complacency with which most of the socialists and their sympathizers, the
“liberals,” regard the atrocities perpetrated in socialistic countries and accept
rule by terror as a way of life—while posturing as advocates of “human
brotherhood.” In the 1930’s, they did protest against the atrocities of Nazi
Germany. But, apparently, it was not an issue of principle, but only the
protest of a rival gang fighting for the same territory—because we do not
hear their voices any longer.
In the name of “humanity,” they condone and accept the following: the
abolition of all freedom and all rights, the expropriation of all property,
executions without trial, torture chambers, slave-labor camps, the mass
slaughter of countless millions in Soviet Russia—and the bloody horror of
East Berlin, including the bullet-riddled bodies of fleeing children.
When one observes the nightmare of the desperate efforts made by
hundreds of thousands of people struggling to escape from the socialized
countries of Europe, to escape over barbed-wire fences, under machine-gun
fire—one can no longer believe that socialism, in any of its forms, is motivated
by benevolence and by the desire to achieve men’s welfare.
No man of authentic benevolence could evade or ignore so great a horror
on so vast a scale.
Socialism is not a movement of the people. It is a movement of the
intellectuals, originated, led and controlled by the intellectuals, carried by them out of their stuffy ivory towers into those bloody fields of practice
where they unite with their allies and executors: the thugs.
What, then, is the motive of such intellectuals? Power-lust. Power-lust—
as a manifestation of helplessness, of self-loathing and of the desire for the
unearned.
The desire for the unearned has two aspects: the unearned in matter and
the unearned in spirit. (By “spirit” I mean: man’s consciousness.) These two
aspects are necessarily inter-related, but a man’s desire may be focused predominantly
on one or the other. The desire for the unearned in spirit is the
more destructive of the two and the more corrupt. It is a desire for unearned
greatness; it is expressed (but not defined) by the foggy murk of the term
“prestige.”
The seekers of unearned material benefits are merely financial parasites,
moochers, looters or criminals, who are too limited in number and in mind to
be a threat to civilization, until and unless they are released and legalized by
the seekers of unearned greatness.
Unearned greatness is so unreal, so neurotic a concept that the wretch who
seeks it cannot identify it even to himself: to identify it, is to make it
impossible. He needs the irrational, undefinable slogans of altruism and
collectivism to give a semiplausible form to his nameless urge and anchor it
to reality—to support his own self-deception more than to deceive his
victims. “The public,” “the public interest,” “service to the public” are the
means, the tools, the swinging pendulums of the power-luster’s selfhypnosis.
Since there is no such entity as “the public,” since the public is merely a
number of individuals, any claimed or implied conflict of “the public
interest” with private interests means that the interests of some men are to be
sacrificed to the interests and wishes of others. Since the concept is so
conveniently undefinable, its use rests only on any given gang’s ability to
proclaim that “The public, c’est moi”—and to maintain the claim at the point
of a gun.
No such claim has ever been or can ever be maintained without the help
of a gun—that is, without physical force. But, on the other hand, without that
claim, gunmen would remain where they belong: in the underworld, and
would not rise to the councils of state to rule the destinies of nations.
There are two ways of claiming that “The public, c’est moi”: one is
practiced by the crude material parasite who clamors for government
handouts in the name of a “public” need and pockets what he has not earned;
the other is practiced by his leader, the spiritual parasite, who derives his
illusion of “greatness”—like a fence receiving stolen goods—from the power to dispose of that which he has not earned and from the mystic view
of himself as the embodied voice of “the public.”
Of the two, the material parasite is psychologically healthier and closer to
reality: at least, he eats or wears his loot. But the only source of satisfaction
open to the spiritual parasite, his only means to gain “prestige” (apart from
giving orders and spreading terror), is the most wasteful, useless and
meaningless activity of all: the building of public monuments.
Greatness is achieved by the productive effort of a man’s mind in the
pursuit of clearly defined, rational goals. But a delusion of grandeur can be
served only by the switching, undefinable chimera of a public monument—
which is presented as a munificent gift to the victims whose forced labor or
extorted money had paid for it—which is dedicated to the service of all and
none, owned by all and none, gaped at by all and enjoyed by none.
This is the ruler’s only way to appease his obsession: “prestige.”
Prestige—in whose eyes? In anyone’s. In the eyes of his tortured victims, of
the beggars in the streets of his kingdom, of the bootlickers at his court, of
the foreign tribes and their rulers beyond the borders. It is to impress all
those eyes—the eyes of everyone and no one—that the blood of generations
of subjects has been spilled and spent.
One may see, in certain biblical movies, a graphic image of the meaning
of public monument building: the building of the pyramids. Hordes of
starved, ragged, emaciated men straining the last effort of their inadequate
muscles at the inhuman task of pulling the ropes that drag large chunks of
stone, straining like tortured beasts of burden under the whips of overseers,
collapsing on the job and dying in the desert sands—that a dead Pharaoh
might lie in an imposingly senseless structure and thus gain eternal
“prestige” in the eyes of the unborn of future generations.
Temples and palaces are the only monuments left of mankind’s early
civilizations. They were created by the same means and at the same price—a
price not justified by the fact that primitive peoples undoubtedly believed,
while dying of starvation and exhaustion, that the “prestige” of their tribe,
their rulers or their gods was of value to them somehow.
Rome fell, bankrupted by statist controls and taxation, while its emperors
were building coliseums. Louis XIV of France taxed his people into a state
of indigence, while he built the palace of Versailles, for his contemporary
monarchs to envy and for modern tourists to visit. The marble-lined Moscow
subway, built by the unpaid “volunteer” labor of Russian workers, including
women, is a public monument, and so is the Czarist-like luxury of the
champagne-and-caviar receptions at the Soviet embassies, which is needed—while the people stand in line for inadequate food rations—to
“maintain the prestige of the Soviet Union.”
The great distinction of the United States of America, up to the last few
decades, was the modesty of its public monuments. Such monuments as did
exist were genuine: they were not erected for “prestige,” but were functional
structures that had housed events of great historical importance. If you have
seen the austere simplicity of Independence Hall, you have seen the
difference between authentic grandeur and the pyramids of “public-spirited”
prestige-seekers.
In America, human effort and material resources were not expropriated
for public monuments and public projects, but were spent on the progress of
the private, personal, individual well-being of individual citizens. America’s
greatness lies in the fact that her actual monuments are not public.
The skyline of New York is a monument of a splendor that no pyramids
or palaces will ever equal or approach. But America’s skyscrapers were not
built by public funds nor for a public purpose: they were built by the energy,
initiative and wealth of private individuals for personal profit. And, instead
of impoverishing the people, these skyscrapers, as they rose higher and
higher, kept raising the people’s standard of living—including the
inhabitants of the slums, who lead a life of luxury compared to the life of an
ancient Egyptian slave or of a modern Soviet Socialist worker.
Such is the difference—both in theory and practice—between capitalism
and socialism.
It is impossible to compute the human suffering, degradation, deprivation
and horror that went to pay for a single, much-touted skyscraper of Moscow,
or for the Soviet factories or mines or dams, or for any part of their loot-andblood-
supported “industrialization.” What we do know, however, is that
forty-five years is a long time: it is the span of two generations; we do know
that, in the name of a promised abundance, two generations of human beings
have lived and died in subhuman poverty; and we do know that today’s
advocates of socialism are not deterred by a fact of this kind.
Whatever motive they might assert, benevolence is one they have long
since lost the right to claim.
The ideology of socialization (in a neo-fascist form) is now floating, by
default, through the vacuum of our intellectual and cultural atmosphere.
Observe how often we are asked for undefined “sacrifices” to unspecified
purposes. Observe how often the present administration is invoking “the
public interest.” Observe what prominence the issue of international prestige
has suddenly acquired and what grotesquely suicidal policies are justified by
references to matters of “prestige.” Observe that during the recent Cuban crisis—when the factual issue concerned nuclear missiles and nuclear war—
our diplomats and commentators found it proper seriously to weigh such
things as the “prestige,” the personal feelings and the “face-saving” of the
sundry socialist rulers involved.
There is no difference between the principles, policies and practical
results of socialism—and those of any historical or prehistorical tyranny.
Socialism is merely democratic absolute monarchy—that is, a system of
absolutism without a fixed head, open to seizure of power by all comers, by
any ruthless climber, opportunist, adventurer, demagogue or thug.
When you consider socialism, do not fool yourself about its nature.
Remember that there is no such dichotomy as “human rights” versus
“property rights.” No human rights can exist without property rights. Since
material goods are produced by the mind and effort of individual men, and
are needed to sustain their lives, if the producer does not own the result of
his effort, he does not own his life. To deny property rights means to turn
men into property owned by the state. Whoever claims the “right” to
“redistribute” the wealth produced by others is claiming the “right” to treat
human beings as chattel.
When you consider the global devastation perpetrated by socialism, the
sea of blood and the millions of victims, remember that they were sacrificed,
not for “the good of mankind” nor for any “noble ideal,” but for the festering
vanity of some scared brute or some pretentious mediocrity who craved a
mantle of unearned “greatness”—and that the monument to socialism is a
pyramid of public factories, public theaters and public parks, erected on a
foundation of human corpses, with the figure of the ruler posturing on top,
beating his chest and screaming his plea for “prestige” to the starless void.
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