Thursday 1 May 2003

Pic of the day: May 1. What a beautiful day to be marred by the blight of socialist celebrations, which tellingly often take the form of protests and demands. Needless to say, I stayed well away.

Socialism

Next week when my archives have moved to their new site, you should be able to get an in-depth understanding of my thoughts about May 1 and socialism as a whole. But to put it bluntly, I believe socialism recruits its support mostly from those who don't understand how society works. OK, very few really understand, but I mean those who don't even remotely begin to understand how it works.

It is natural for students to be socialists. They are utterly inexperienced – as a matter of fact, most of them probably think "experience" is an euphemism for sexual intercourse – and have very foggy notions about money, where it comes from, where it goes, and why it is so important to the parent generation. They also tend to think that the rich should share with the poor, since they are poor. Finally, years of high school have taught them to run with the crowd. They are ideal socialists.

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Youth fades, but stupidity is forever. A more lasting power base for socialism used to be the "working classes", people who either were too dimwitted to read and write, or just did not consider it manly enough, and who consequently had to resort to hard manual labor for low wages. (In really old days, there wasn't a decade of free education for everyone either. I don't think there are many alive now from that time, though, not in English-speaking countries at least.)

In light of the higher intelligence and better (or at least more) education in our time, it is rather disconcerting to see opinion polls in Norway indicate a socialist majority. Admittedly this majority includes the social-democratic Labor Party, which is socialist mainly in opposition. In government it tends toward the center. Still, it is worse than the current coalition of Christian Democrats, Conservatives and a sprinkle of Liberals.

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What is socialism? Socialism is the belief that society's money is best spent by people who have not earned it and suffer no hardship if they misuse it. Socialism is the conviction that bureaucrats know better than those whose livelihood depend on their own decisions. So it can be expected to be popular among the less intelligent, who are generally convinced that they could do anything better than anyone else, from solving international conflicts to scoring goals at the football stadium, if only they were allowed to try.

(I certainly have my opinions too ... but I don't presume to rule over when people should be allowed to shop or how they should plan for their future pensions, if any.)

There is an underlying theory for socialism, called Marxism, but it is rather obscure and philosophical. In fact, it could be argued that Marxism is simply a derivative of Hegelian dialectics. Hegel laid the groundwork, Marx drew the conclusions, and Lenin put them to work. Much like they say about Darwin, Nietzsche and Hitler. But philosophy is one thing, practice is another. (Look at how the Christian nations practice the tenet of turning the other cheek, for instance.) In practice, socialism is about playing Santa Claus with other people's money. And to think that a good thing, you must either be very broke, rather dim or have a quite peripheral relationship to money.