Tuesday 23 August 2005

Pic of the day: Just a friendly request. "Please don't dwell in delusions without bothering with the truth." Equally applicable to politicians and scary yaoi fangirls, although the latter are the target here in the anime Shuffle. Still, it is good advice for the general election too.

Socialism – evil or stupid?

The general election in Norway is drawing ever closer. (It is on September 12th, a day where I have another appointment. Not that I usually vote anyway. Parties are of the Devil. OK, or at least they don't represent me so well that I would ally with them except in emergencies.)

This election is remarkable in that it is the first after blogging became a force to consider. The traditional media have spun off small "blogs", but of course it is much the same opinion providers in a new and cuter format. The real blogs are out there, though, and they may be near the height of their career. Already there are signs that blogging is becoming so simple that the kooks, the weirdos and the just plain stupid are getting into it, and it will become a cacophony where you can spend your life digging the acre for the one pearl. Then again, the world was always like that, wasn't it?

Some of the blogs tend toward the extreme: The Muslims are coming to kill us all and take our land! No, the terrorists are operatives from the secret police, here to frighten the populace into obedience! America is the root of all evil! But traditional newspapers aren't exactly resting on their laurels either. A few days ago, there was a big headline: "SOCIALISM IS UN-CHRISTIAN!" No kidding, man. You just now realized?

Actually the statement was provoked by the Labor party in a neighboring province, which had tried to fish voters from the Christian Democrats by insisting that they (Labor) were the true proponents of neighborly love. There is something in that: Jesus told one would-be follower to sell everything and give it to the poor, and he generally advised against riches in this world. His disciples continued this tradition and were pretty harsh against those who hoarded riches while others were freezing and starving. So if socialism really was about the rich giving to the poor, there would be a lot of common ground. Alas, socialism isn't about that at all. It is about the poor (or people acting on their behalf, usually) taking from the rich. That is entirely different. Did you ever hear Jesus preaching to the poor that they should force anything from the rich? I challenge you to read the New Testament from beginning to end, and you still won't find anything like that.

Of course, for the poor it generally plays a lesser role whether the rich decide to give them money or someone else wrests the money from the rich and spreads it around. (Although with socialism, there tends to be some waste somewhere between the rich and the poor... some silent disappearance of money.)

The real problem with socialism isn't that it is evil, but that it is stupid.

***

Do you really think people will work hard when they know you will come and take their money away anyway? Do you really think people will invest in a good education, spending years of their life and borrowing lots of money, when they can just drink beer in front of their TV and get money for nothing? There may be some such idealists – in fact, there are – but not nearly enough to feed the entire populace. For this reason, history shows us that socialism only works when you have sufficiently many guns pointing at the working people.

I repeat in other words: The main problem with socialism is that it doesn't work.

This time, however, it may work for a while. The small and peaceful nation of Norway has heaped up a lot of money over the last years. Lots and lots of money. So even if you run the country with the wrong policy for a while, there will still be enough money to keep people happy. Even if people work less, not to mention take less education (which will only show its effect years from now), things can still go on for a while. But for the sake of the future, socialism is a bad idea.

But that is not really my concern. We have a representative democracy there in Norway. This means that if we get a stupid government, it is because we are a stupid people. Who am I to argue with that? Stupidity is its own punishment. Democracy may not be the BEST government, but it is the most righteous. The people gets the government it deserves. A sad thing, but perhaps eventually someone can learn from it. It took Russia around 70 years before they gave up on communism, but they did get it eventually. I am pretty confident we can get by with less. Less socialism and fewer years of it. So I am not overly concerned.

Think of it as a learning experience for a new generation. They did not grow up with social democracy as I did. They did not live in a land with only one radio channel and only one TV channel, both of them owned by the government. They did not grow up in a place where you have to apply for a telephone some months in advance, because there was only one telecoms company, owned by the state of course. (Yes, that's the one currently known as Telenor, the one that is not able to fix my DSL line. I guess we all need a learning experience from time to time...)