What Would A Socialist America Look Like? — Part 2

Oprah Winfrey is the only self-made black billionairess in America. She may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but Oprah should be given credit for her achievements. She is said to have homes in California (a 42 acre estate),  Chicago, Florida (another estate), Hawaii, New Jersey, Washington State, and the island of Antigua.

How many of those homes would she be able to keep in the United Soviet States of America? Here is what might happen if Ocasio-Cortez and her friends from Black Lives Matter get their way. While everyone has heard of Karl Marx, few people have heard of Béla Kun. Unlike Marx, who never held political office, Kun actually ran Hungary for a short time, when he nationalised practically everything including landed property, all businesses employing more than twenty people and all private property above a minimum. He also made all bathrooms public on Saturday nights.

Even if Oprah were able to keep one or two of her properties, can you imagine her being forced to share her bathroom with the great unwashed? And there would be plenty of those, because one of the very first things the new socialist government would do would be to open America’s borders, providing free accommodation, free healthcare, free everything for anyone and everyone who entered the country by the millions. None of these people would be checked for contraband, for drugs, for vaccinations against exotic diseases, for terrorist connections…And if you object to any of this you can only be racist, right?

So how does America or any country provide everything for everyone free? You already know the answer to that “…who does not obey shall not eat.”

So how do you force everyone to obey, to provide all this free stuff, everyone from farmers to manufacturers to medical professionals? You know the answer to that too: at the point of a gun. The big problem here is that the peasants will stand for only so much of this insanity, and will resist or even rise up against you. Unless they are disarmed. So the second amendment must go, and the first amendment to ensure there is no talk of counter-revolution.

That means all these media giants that have been censoring and shadow banning conservatives will have to be taken over by the state, right? Private corporations of that size cannot be permitted to exist, nor can any company or any individual be permitted to spout anti-state propaganda.

But don’t these progressives want to defund the police? Heck, did you really believe that? That applies only to your police, not to their police, whatever they call them. As things stand, when the police overstep the mark they can be held to account. This is difficult, but at times police officers are sacked or even prosecuted, and citizens are compensated for wrongful arrest or worse. What do you think will happen when all lawyers are employed only by the state? No justice, no compensation. Indeed, with the #MeToo Movement and cancel culture, people are already having their livelihoods destroyed without the slightest pretext of due process. Under socialism, no one should expect any kind of justice from the courts.

How would goods and services be allotted? Currently we use something called prices. In a free or relatively free market, prices transmit information. If consumers demand more of a product, its price will rise. If they keep demanding more, more, more, the price may eventually fall because more manufacturers and suppliers will enter the market increasing competition. With new technologies, the fall in prices can be dramatic. Here is a quite stunning example. In February 1927, a famous half hour telephone call was made between the music publisher Lawrence Wright in New York and the bandleader Jack Hylton in Wright’s London office. The cost of that call was £150, over £9,000 in today’s money.

How would telephone and later computer technologies have developed in the absence of a price mechanism? The answer is not very well, if at all. Again, how would goods and services be allotted? Karl Marx had a simple answer for this: from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. And people’s needs will be decided by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or perhaps Bernie Sanders, the socialist who “needs” three homes?

If this nightmare scenario sounds too extreme to entertain, take a look at what has been happening in Minneapolis, Portland (Oregon), and Seattle recently.

A socialist America would be far, far worse than any other country because America is and always has been the prize. Furthermore, socialism can be sustained only by massive injections of capital from outside. This is what happened when Stalin and company seized power in Russia. Antony Sutton documented this irrefutably, but he has been written out of history. If the United States should fall to socialism, there would be nowhere left. Americans need to take a stand in November so Trump and his team can finish draining the Swamp.

Back to Part 1.