Socialism’s Inequalities
In full-blooded socialist systems, access to government power is the paramount avenue to success.
Angelo Codevilla
- February 29th, 2020
Few statements are more revealing of ignorance than the standard conservative indictment of socialism for “equally spreading poverty.†According to this critique, poverty happens when socialism’s insistence on equality of conditions deprives people of the incentive to work. Such statements so offend reality as to lead one to ask whether those who make them have ever opened their eyes in a socialist country.
No. Socialism makes for the most radical of inequalities among human beings, and enforces them through the state’s absolute power.
Note: Places like Denmark and Sweden, and even Germany, France, Italy, or Argentina, though their governments spend about half the national income, or more, are not socialist. Instead, they have a greater or lesser degree of corporate capitalism, a system first introduced by Benito Mussolini in Italy in the 1920s, in the United States in the 1930s, and that thereafter was copied throughout much of the world.
Under this system, as government power mixes with, counterbalances, and often overrides private enterprise, people often find government favor to be an adjunct to success—or even the main avenue to it. Everywhere in the modern world, having the government on your side makes up for much lack of talent, enterprise, decency, etc. But you can still do all right on your own, so long as you don’t get the corporate state down on you.
But in full-blooded socialist systems—the Soviet Union was prototypical—like Cuba, China, and Venezuela access to government power is the paramount avenue to success. So much so, that all assets pale in importance by comparison.
Talent and enterprise seldom hurt. But if you see someone prosper, you can be sure that he is well connected with the powers that be. Under real socialism, prosperity and power are two sides of the same coin. Always. Invariably.
Food is the most fundamental feature of prosperity or lack thereof.
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