“Under capitalism,” cynical Muscovites used to quip, “man oppresses man. Under socialism it’s the other way around.”
There’s only one area in which socialism is demonstrably more successful than capitalism: mendacious propaganda.
In that sense, propaganda is like advertising: repeated often enough and long enough, it housetrains the populace to accept slogans as reality.
Socialists have known this from the time they first entered history, stage left. Thus French revolutionaries came up with liberté, egalité, fraternité, the slogan that still adorns every public building in France.
For a while they managed to convince the world that martial law was liberty, a cull of the upper classes (and anyone else the revolutionaries disliked) was equality, and dressing most of the eligible population in uniforms of the same design was brotherhood. But this didn’t last.
The appeal of the revolution has worn off, even in France, but the propaganda is still working overtime. Throughout the world, and certainly in Britain, people swallow socialist lies whole, without bothering to chew on them first.
Hence they accept statements like the one in today’s Times, describing our medical care as “virtually free”. Having lived in the USA, with medical care supposedly taken over by greedy medics, I can compare the two systems and conclude that ‘virtually free’ can be dear at the price.
My medical costs in America, and I was hardly the paragon of health, never approached the 12 per cent of my income, which is the National Insurance tax paying for ‘free’ medicine in Britain – and that’s not even counting the cost of additional private insurance, which is mandatory for anyone desiring proper treatment and able to pay for it.
Yet because the NHS is a socialist enterprise it’s held to be off limits for any substantive criticism. One is allowed to lament a few mechanical glitches and too much bureaucracy, but not to make the obvious point that the problem with the NHS is that it’s founded on an inherently corrupt socialist idea.
Some politicians know this, but they also know that even hinting at this fundamental flaw of the NHS would spell an instant end to their careers. People need to have faith in something and, since God is no longer an option, they have to worship the NHS.
Moving on from the specific to the general, the belief nurtured by socialist propaganda is that, though socialism may not make us all richer, it will make us all equal – or at least more equal than we can aspire to be under blood-sucking capitalism, where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
“Workers of the world, unite!” screamed Marx and Engels when the Industrial Revolution was gathering pace, “you have nothing to lose but your chains!” And the amazing thing is that even many self-described conservatives accept that capitalism, unlike socialism, fosters inequality.
Alas, like many other good stories this one is contradicted by facts, not that firmly entrenched beliefs are ever vulnerable to such trivia.
Thus in the second half of the nineteenth century, when Marx’s dreaded capitalism was at its peak and American robber barons were at their most oppressive, the average ratio of income earned by US corporate directors and their employees was 28:1.
These days, when egalitarianism proudly reigns supreme and much of socialist dogma goes uncontested, this ratio stands at 158:1.
Hence we shouldn’t be surprised that the data published today show that directors of FTSE companies earn 120 times more than their average employees. The survey doesn’t even mention the gap between the bosses and their lowest-paid workers, which is twice as wide.
One has to conclude that socialism and equality exist in an inverse proportion, which shouldn’t surprise anyone who has bothered to study socialism seriously.
Now that supposedly private firms are run the same way as publicly funded, which is to say socialist, enterprises, they conform to the same principles.
The most important of these is that socialist systems are operated mostly for the benefit of the operators. As a result, the operators, be it directors of multinational ‘capitalist’ concerns or managers of multicultural socialist Leviathans, seek to distance themselves from those who do the actual work.
In an age of stock market flotation and public ownership, today’s ‘capitalists’ typically don’t own the capital they control. This absolves them of the same responsibility for their employees that owners of the past felt as a matter of course.
As in any socialist enterprise, the rank-and-file are seen as material, not an aim in themselves. An average worker is reduced to the level of a cog – just as the average voter is merely a cipher in today’s fundamentally socialist ‘democracies’.
This shouldn’t be construed as the idealisation of dog-eat-dog capitalism. That too had its flaws and excesses: no system can be so perfect as to absolve people of the need to be good, as T.S. Eliot pointed out.
Since all people are fallible and some downright wicked, perfection is unattainable in this world. But there is a big difference between a basically sound system that’s at times corrupted by unsound individuals and a system corrupt in principle.
The gap in earnings that’s exciting everyone’s imagination at the moment isn’t significant in itself. Overemphasising it only serves to foster envy, a rather unenviable emotion.
The purpose of an economy is to promote not equality but prosperity, and the two are at odds. But today’s average employee living in a small suburban semi or a smaller urban flat has been sufficiently poisoned by socialist venom to resent his employer living in a mansion.
Being a religion of envy, socialism has an inherent interest in bolstering this vice, and the more socialist a country the more envious will its population be.
Yet the income gap isn’t without significance: it’s a teaching aid for those who still haven’t learned the truth about socialism.
The main truth is that, since socialism is based on a lie, everything emanating from it is a lie too. Looking beyond the lies, we can see that, rather than achieving its proudly proclaimed goals, socialism invariably achieves their exact opposite.
Thus, upon closer examination, its liberty begins to look more like tyranny, its brotherhood turns out to be envy reigning supreme, and its equality naturally develops into a glaring inequality.
Yet those who are ignorant of socialism but pray at its altar nonetheless won’t be swayed by facts. They are proud of their ignorance.
My forthcoming book Democracy as a Neocon Trick can be pre-ordered, at what the publisher promises to be a spectacular discount, from http://www.roperpenberthy.co.uk/index.php/browse-books/political/democracy-as-a-neocon-trick.html or, in the USA, http://www.newwinebookshop.com/Books/0002752