Brad Warbiany the Unrepentant Individual…who’s really the world’s second youngest curmudgeon no matter what he says, pointed the way to a great find.

Catallarchy, a community blog I’ve never heard of before, does a yearly retrospective on May Day covering the many victims of Communism…100 million killed thus far.

It’s a favorite saying of idiots and overinsulated/underexperienced people that socialism/communism is a good idea in theory. They forget the most important part of judging theories; that they have to explain and correspond to what’s seen in the real world.

Communism and Socialism are based on a number of assumptions which violate the most basic rules of behavior:
1. That people will actually work according to their ability regardless of compensation, a falsehood that both evolutionary biology and economics predict would not be the case.
2. That the all-powerful state will remain a tool of the people, despite the fact that its pervasiveness makes it a ripe target for exploitation by the selfish and the power hungry.
3. That the state, without competition or any other force, will be the most efficient arbiters of all matters economic. This again violates behavioral and economic theory and observation, that efficiency only increases under competition

Socialism in all its forms thus fails to bring itself in line with the most basic tenets of animal behavior. It assumes that ‘the worker’ will not be motivated by selfish goals. It assumes that government officials will be purely altruistic in doing what’s best for ‘the people’. And it assumes that an organization in a stagnant environment will remain dynamic and efficient.

These wrong-headed assumptions may explain the reason jackboots and thuggery have so often been necessary in the maintenance of the socialist state.

To quote Brad:

When you argue with those who think socialism is the true ideal form of government, if only humans could make it work, remember the lengths to which they went to make it work.

On to Catallarchy…

Professor RJ Rummel points out that the oft-quoted sum of 20,000,000 killed under Stalin’s reign is really a lowball estimate. In fact, the total number of Russians and foreigners killed during the Soviet Empire’s existence was 62,000,000; 43,000,000 under Stalin alone.

But he illustrates it even more graphically:

Another way of looking at this is that the annual risk of a person under Soviet control being murdered by the regime was 1 out of 222. But, compare – the annual risk of anyone in the world dying from war was 1 out of 5,556, from smoking a pack of cigarettes a day was 1 out of 278, from any cancer was 1 out of 357, or for an American to die in an auto accident was 1 out of 4,167.1

Now, I must ask, with perhaps an unconscious touch of outrage in my voice, why is this death by Marxism, so incredible and significant in its magnitude, unknown or unappreciated compared to the importance given slavery, cancer deaths, auto accident deaths, and so on. Especially, especially I must add again, when unlike cancer, auto accidents, and smoking, those deaths under Marxism in the Soviet Union were intentionally caused? They were murdered.

*appplause*

Next, Dr. Bryan Caplan discusses the double standard in comparing the atrocities of Nazis and Communists. Another subject which, although it pains me, I understand the reasons for completely. People want to believe that communism works, because they’d rather delude themselves about our true natures and the importance of individualism than admit that the world isn’t a perfect place and there ain’t much we can do about it:

Like the Nazis, the Communists murdered tens of millions. But even today, few people hold both movements in equal contempt. Citizens of the West remain largely ignorant of the crimes of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao. But even those who know what happened shy away from the thesis that the two movements were morally equivalent. Why is this?

But while the argument from good intentions is probably the main reason why people think that Communism was better than Nazism, the argument is at best half-baked.

In short, both ideologies began with the creepy demand that human beings stop being the diverse, self-interested animals that we are, and eagerly jumped to the conclusion that a bloodbath was in order. How could their intentions be any more comparable - or any worse?

It’s that last segment that really hits home. No matter which kind of Statist position one holds, the end goal is the same; changing what it means to be human.

In the Proletariat’s Paradise is a poignant memoir of a USSR survivor. There were a few pithy quotes in there, like:

In Soviet Russia, although they claimed that land belongs to people, it was not so. The land belonged to the government. Not only the land, but people as well. One does not exist as an individual. The Revolution in 1917 abolished the class system based on hereditary aristocracy. But it introduced another aristocracy that was based on allegiance to the Party. Privileges were allocated according to the position and hierarchy occupied in the Party.

Socialism is nothing but a children’s fairy tale. ‘The noble worker’ might as well be the merrily singing 7 dwarfs. ‘The People’s Party’ could very well be that wise and just king that you saw in Disney’s Prince and the Pauper but never were able to find in a history book.

People are selfish. People will seek power, privilege and wealth. Working to provide them an all-powerful tool to oppress you with is the height of stupidity; building your own cage one wall at a time. Funnily enough, our founding fathers recognized this and established the most just government in the history of mankind. And as tendrils of socialist philosophy have insinuated their way into out lives and our minds, we risk going down that road to serfdom. Learn the lessons of the Soviets, of China. Let those 100,000,000 dead not be in vain. To accept any degree of socialism is to eventually accept the death of the individual.