One of the things we’ve
noticed about people who call themselves capitalists or socialists is that far
too often those who advocate or defend a system seem to have trouble defining
it consistently, and sometimes at all.
It calls to mind what Alexis de Tocqueville said about socialism during
the 1848 Revolution in France:
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| Alexis de Tocqueville |
From the 25th of
February onwards, a thousand strange systems came issuing pell-mell from the
minds of innovators, and spread among the troubled minds of the crowd. . . .
These theories were of very varied natures, often opposed and sometimes hostile
to one another; but all of them, aiming lower than the government and striving
to reach society itself, on which government rests, adopted the common name of
Socialism.
Socialism will always remain the
essential characteristic and the most redoubtable remembrance of the Revolution
of February. The Republic will only
appear to the on-looker to have come upon the scene as a means not as an end. (Alexis
de Tocqueville, The Recollections of
Alexis de Tocqueville. Cleveland,
Ohio: The World Publishing Company, 1959, 78-79.)
As a result, many people
today may not know what socialism is, but they know they want it. Of course, many people today also want
capitalism, although they don’t know what capitalism is, either. At the same time, the number of Millennials who
often have no real expectation of becoming capitalists are tending to
socialism. We found dozens (okay,
thousands) of articles about how Millennials have given up on capitalism and
are turning to socialism. Not surprisingly for those aware of the link between socialism and esotericism and modernism, a
lot of them are also turning to astrology and the Occult, often with little to
no understanding of what they’ve gotten themselves into.
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| Founding of the Bank of England |
This is actually nothing new. It results from a combination of economic and
social insecurity accompanied by a decay of traditional institutions, a process
that in its present phase has been going on for two-hundred years or so. It was triggered by three revolutions: 1) the
Financial Revolution, epitomized by the establishment of the Bank of England in
1694, 2) the Political Revolution, seen in the polar opposites (in terms of the
meaning of “liberal democracy” each embodied) of the American and French
Revolutions, and 3) the Industrial Revolution.
These were not isolated revolutions.
The Financial Revolution made the Industrial Revolution possible, but —
in a very real sense — made the Political Revolution necessary.
This is because the
concentration of economic power made possible by the productiveness of
machinery compared to human labor meant that the political power of the
ordinary person was eroded in direct proportion to the decline in the economic
power of human labor. In 1776 Adam Smith
could theorize in The Wealth of Nations that, regardless of the degree
of capital ownership of the wealthy (“capital” including land and technology),
the goods of the Earth would always be equitably divided because even the
richest and most selfish individual could not satisfy even the most rapacious
and greedy desires without employing the poor.
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| Adam Smith |
Smith, of course, simply didn’t
reckon on just how much more productive capital is than labor, so that the rich
who owned capital were able to satisfy outrageous desires by employing fewer
and fewer people, and finally — as computers and robots became reality —
without any people at all. As a result,
the more that could be produced by technology, the less ordinary people could
produce and obtain “their share.” The
rich got richer, and the poor became destitute.
Clearly something new was
needed, and a number of thinkers thought they had the answer. Since the old institutions had failed, it was
time to abolish organized religion, traditional political forms, and even
marriage and family. This required that
fundamental concepts of society that had been accepted for thousands of years —
generally known as the natural law — had to go.
In their place was whatever scheme someone thought would work better
than what had been worked out for thousands of years.
With very few exceptions, the
first socialists laid out programs that differed only in details, regardless
how viciously some of them might attack the others as prophets of false
religions . . . did we mention that socialism was first proposed as a
replacement not of capitalism (that actually came a little later), but of
Christianity, especially that of the Catholic Church? In addition, they also called for the
abolition of private property, and often of marriage and family.
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| Robert Owen |
Robert Owen, the noted
capitalist-socialist, for example, outraged Americans when on July 4, 1826, the
fiftieth anniversary of American independence, he gave a speech in New Harmony,
Indiana (where he had established his utopian community) calling for the
abolition of private property, organized religion, and marriage and
family. Owen called it his “Declaration
of Mental Independence,” undermining everything in the original Declaration of
Independence. Ironically, both John
Adams and Thomas Jefferson died the very day Owen gave his speech, within a few
hours of one another.
Where before the general code
of human behavior had been determined by what human reason and experience told people
what was good, the new principle was that the end — whatever it is — justifies
the means. It therefore becomes
completely understandable that so many people today turn to socialism so
readily. They feel powerless and need to
feel in control of their lives again, and they do that in the time-honored
fashion of attaching yourself to the most powerful individual or group around,
in this instance, the State that will take care of everything . . . until it
can’t.
Of course, a much better solution
would be to return power to people, but that can only be done by making it
possible for ordinary people who have no power to have the property that will
vest them with power. To do this, we
propose a “Capital
Homestead Act” that will make it possible for everyone to become a capital
owner and to have power over their own lives once again.
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