The Left’s inherent challenge is justifying their claim to what
others own. This challenge arises from the contradiction between
the Left’s motivating ideology and the failure of its economic
application. Understanding this inevitable contradiction and the
necessity it creates enables us to understand everything else the
Left think, say, and do.
Nowhere is the hypocrisy of accusing others of one’s own
greatest fault clearer than with the Left. The accusation in
question is materialism — the charge with which they seek to
indict capitalism. Yet, it is the Left themselves who are utterly
captivated and defined by material production.
If there is a political embodiment of the ethos of greed, it is
not capitalism, but socialism, where everything is reduced to no
more than a means to that society’s self-professed end: material
production. While Marx explicitly made this the basis of everything
— not only in socialist and communist societies, but all human
history — it is no less the implicit motivator of the rest of the
Left.
However it is perhaps history’s greatest irony that the Left
consciously choose to eschew capitalism — history’s most efficient
means of producing the material resources they require. The Left
deny the equity of any distribution of resources that they do not
control. Capitalism is therefore the most egregious violation of
their sense of fairness, because it is premised on a lack of
control — i.e., a free market.
As a result all Leftist systems are rooted in a profound and
insoluble contradiction: an ideology of producing a materially
superior society that is doomed in practice to be a materially
inferior one.
In order to compensate for their innate material deficiency, all
Leftist systems must have two things: access to others’ resources
and a means of enforcing others to participate in a suboptimal
economic system. As history has repeatedly shown, people will not
acquiesce to either willingly for long.
The necessity to enforce participation requires a strong state.
Again, in contradiction to Marx’s assertion that under communism
society would be classless and the need for a state to enforce
class rule would disappear, just the opposite occurs. The Leftist
system can only exist be force.
Because the disparity between its economic system’s failure and
capitalism’s success grows, the Leftist state must expropriate at
increasing rates.
Others’ greater resources are also an implicit condemnation of
the Leftist system — a living refutation of its fallacies. Even if
redistribution were not part of the Left’s ideology, it would have
to be part of its practical application.
The growing gap between the Left’s failure and capitalism’s
success — and its citizens’ desire to gain access to the latter —
requires ever greater levels of state interference in the lives of
its citizens.
To obtain access to the resources it needs from its citizens,
the Leftist state must justify a greater claim to them. For this
reason, traditional property rights can not and do not exist in
socialist states. Nor can a socialist state be founded on negative
rights — as was the United States by our Constitution — by which
a citizen is assured protection from state encroachment.
State encroachment is elemental to the Left’s state model.
Accordingly, their model is founded on positive rights — the
citizen being given “rights” to things, which the socialist society
is then justified to obtain for the citizen from others. In the
Left’s model, society’s rights thereby supersede the citizen’s and
the state maintains an eminent domain over them.
There is a reason why no truly socialist state — or even an
attempt a truly Leftist system within in a capitalist nation — has
survived for very long, and none without oppression. The state must
compensate for what its economic system cannot provide. It can only
do this by expropriating its citizens — of their property and even
their labor.
While the economic necessity of this is relatively easy to see,
the citizen’s subservient relationship to the Leftist state does
not stop at economics. Because the state must have access to its
citizens’ resources, its entire foundation rests on its citizens’
inferior position to it. The citizen serves the Left’s state — the
very reverse of the relationship that our founders envisioned for
America.
Thus everything the Left thinks, says, and does must ultimately
return to its self-inflicted economic necessity and its endemic
need to create an ideology and mechanism of expropriation to
address that necessity.
What starts as a denial of an individual’s property rights,
comes to extend far more broadly — to a denial of an individual’s
property of rights at all.
