Iranians: Yearning to breathe free!

In Auckland yesterday we woke to news that Iran's theocratic rulers were dead and dying. 

Within hours, Iranians in Auckland had gathered to celebrate. (Yes, those are Israeli and US flags being waved below, and pictures of a dead Ayatollah being celebrated). 

This was in complete contrast to the hand wringing going on in the homes of (to pick just two people) Helen Clark and Antōnio Guterres, who were quick to bemoan attacks on the regime that had slaughtered at least 35, 000 Iranian innocents -- which they'd ignored.

So too had Iranians in many other parts of the world. Not least in Iran. (Click through for posts and videos.)

It seems the only place these murdering bastards are mourned are in the homes and offices of people with Pro-Palestinian t-shirts in the cupboard and keffiyeh on their hat rack. These people "have no shame," observes Brendan O'Neill. "They said nothing when thousands of Iranians were slaughtered by the theocratic regime. Yet now they’re crying because some regime goons were killed in airstrikes. These people are just apologists for tyranny."

Given the Iranian regime's role in supporting world terrorism, Islamofascism and in trying to destroy western life (in every way possible) -- on raining death and destruction on the world for 47 years -- then if regime change is successful in Iran -- if! -- then it would be the single most momentous geopolitical change for the better since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

But as with Bush II's Iraq War, the question to come is: do they know what the hell they're going to do next. With this administration, that's unlikely (it hasn't even bothered to seek Congressional approval, which is constitutionally required). So it will need every circumstance to go the way of those Iranians celebrating above people. As Eliot Cohen says,  "Something of an exercise in ambivalence here. I would like to see the Iranian regime go down hard -- and am not confident Trump knows what he is doing."

Let's hope with crossed fingers for a lion of freedom to arise from the attacks.

Berlin Wall: Weasel Vs Hawk

Was it some kind of "collective will" that caused the Berlin Wall to fall, or some kind of individual agency that pushed it over? Our guest poster Andrew Bates characterises the makers of these two arguments as Weasels and Hawks respectively.

London’s normally excellent paper City AM also publishes a fellow called Dr John C Hulsman, described as “a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations,” and a political consultant “explaining American politics and policy to the wider world, while also assessing the broad contours of the new multi-polar era we find ourselves in.” In other words, a long-time member of the Weasel vanguard.

For the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, City AM have published Hulsman’s take on ‘Fall of the Berlin Wall’: “The weary West,” he says, “has forgotten how it won the Cold War.”

Mark Steyn has also written an essay to commemorate the occasion, ‘The Will to Fell.’ Steyn could fairly be called a Hawk.

The Economics Behind the Fall of the Berlin Wall

Much of the media discussion around the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s fall focusses on American military politics and the politicians of the time. But to truly understand why the Soviet system in Eastern Europe collapsed, says Ryan McMaken in this guest post, we must look to Mises’s pioneering work on economic planning.

Today marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Like most historical events that are commemorated as if they took place on a single day, the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, was just one of many interrelated events that led to the end of the system of Soviet client states in Eastern Europe, and to the end of the Soviet Union itself, in December of 1991.

With the fall of the wall, East Germans, who had lived under severe restrictions on travel and emigration, were able to freely travel to West Berlin, which continued a chain of events already begun earlier that year in which many anti-Soviet dissidents throughout Eastern Europe became emboldened and met with unprecedented success. Meanwhile, East Germans flooded into neighbouring countries by the thousands, seeking refuge from Soviet-sponsored oppression in Austria and West Germany.

Why It Was Different in 1989

Throughout the mid-twentieth century, Eastern Europe was home to numerous anti-Soviet revolts and acts of civil disobedience. In Hungary in 1956, Prague in 1968, and especially in Poland throughout the 1970s and 1980s, resistance flared up, but was reliably crushed with Soviet-sponsored martial law and outright military intervention.

But in the summer of 1989, the Poles held an election that essentially overthrew the Soviet-approved regime in Poland. This, time, however, instead of sending tanks to crush the Polish agitators, the USSR did nothing.

By November of that year, dissidents had noticed a trend of Soviet inaction. Hungary and Czechoslovakia haphazardly opened their borders, allowing East Germans to stream into Austria and on to West Germany. East Berliners began to demand free passage to the West. The opening of the wall soon followed.

Americans today, and especially American conservatives, like to claim that the end of the Soviet bloc and the Soviet Union was America’s doing; that the Soviet oligarchs feared American military might, and simply decided to give up and vote themselves out of existence, as they did two years later. This tale makes for nice domestic propaganda in America, but the fact that regimes virtually never just “give up” without firing a shot when faced with a threatening foreign power makes it rather unlikely.

We are far more likely to find an answer if we ask ourselves not why the American state was so strong in the 1980s, but why the Soviet state was so weak. If the Soviets were more than capable of maintaining “order” in Eastern Europe during the 50s, 60s, and 70s, why was it unable or unwilling to do the same in the 1980s?

“Tear down this Wall!” [updated]

Sitting on my shelf at home is a small piece of concrete covered on one side in paint. I got it in Berlin in 1990. It's a piece of the Wall: the symbol for decades of the regime it protected, that finally fell 25 years ago today.

Nothing more defined the nature of the regime than the prison wall it was; nothing was more historically significant in the last half-century than its fall.

Behind the Iron Curtain for which the wall was the symbol –”a symbol of the tyranny of the totalitarian state under which the individual was viewed as the property of the state” – “a breathtaking moral obscenity, a manifestation in concrete of the philosophy on which it was built” -- over a hundred million people were enslaved, and hundreds of millions more were threatened by the regime’s bellicosity.

Few opportunities exist in the social sciences to observe what was virtually a controlled experiment on contrasting ideologies.  It was individualism versus collectivism, both starting out of the ruins of postwar Germany. On one side of the Wall, the shining socialist state of East Berlin, run “scientifically” by planners with guns; on the other the freedom and individual rights of the capitalist West.

If it had been a properly controlled experiment, it would have been stopped early for being too cruel.

One telling fact tells the whole story: Nobody was ever shot trying to escape into the literal prison camp of East Berlin.

The socialists of all parties had argued that whatever short-term misery might be “necessary” to effect the transformation of Eastern Europe, that scientific socialist planning would soon “bury" the West. Walking along Berlin streets just a year after the fall, you could see that the only thing the socialist east was ever able to produce well. Lined up in car parks along the Unter Den Linden in 1990 were the automotive fruits of the 45-year experiment was misery. BMWs, Audis, Porsches, Mercedes – shining, expertly engineered, and affordable -- and Trabants, which smelled of nothing so much as poverty.

It never changed or improved. It didn’t need to. Like all socialist production, it enjoyed -- quite literally -- a captive market. And it was awful.

The collapse of socialist Eastern Europe – and with it what should have been the utter collapse of the hypothesis that socialism could produce anything other than human misery – came as an utter shock for most learned types in the west.  As late as 1989, the author of the best-selling economics textbook by Paul Samuelson, the one still fondly remembered by Prime Minister John Key, declared magisterially that “the Soviet economy is proof that, contrary to what many sceptics had earlier believed, a socialist command economy can function and even thrive.”

It came as no surprise to followers of Ludwig Von Mises, who had explained way back in 1920 that socialism would eat itself and the people whom it enslaved – that it couldn’t plan, it couldn’t produce, that it couldn’t calculate -- that it was and always would be both morally depraved and economically unsustainable. Seven decades later, after all the Eastern Bloc capital had been consumed, he was proved emphatically correct.

(Yet Samuelson’s textbook in revised editions is still both a best-seller and a prescribed texts at many universities. Von Mises by contrast is still largely unknown by today’s intellectuals, and his books are untaught at nearly every major university. Go figure.)

The Eastern Bloc “superpower” was always full of bluster. What was revealed revealed when the Wall came down was that it wasn’t an economic power at all. It was a complete and utter basket case.

It was a basket case economically AND environmentally.

In Moscow, soon after the collapse, I saw old ladies outside Metro stations on the sidewalk selling used soap.  That was how bad things were economically.  In Magnitogorsk, the soviet engine of steel production, no-one could even see the black ooze that filled streets and rivers because of the smoke.  In Dzherzhinsk, the Soviet chemical capital, the toxic waste of dumped chemical weapons were all too visible.

This too was inevitable, and everywhere.

TODAY’S SOCIALISTS LIKE TO either forget or dismiss the results of the twentieth-century’s greatest and most disastrous political experiment, but in the collapse and in the reasons behind its inevitable collapse lie every lesson every student of socialism should have engraved on their soul. If they have one.

The simple lesson is this: "Man's mind is his basic tool of survival,” but “man's mind will not function at the point of a gun.”

Socialism [identified Ayn Rand] is the doctrine that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that his life and his work do not belong to him, but belong to society, that the only justification of his existence is his service to society, and that society may dispose of him in any way it pleases for the sake of whatever it deems to be its own tribal, collective good…
    The alleged goals of socialism were: the abolition of poverty, the achievement of general prosperity, progress, peace and human brotherhood. The results have been a terrifying failure—terrifying, that is, if one’s motive is men’s welfare.

Perhaps the single most astonishing result of the collapse is still the reaction of the intellectuals.  Anyone over twenty then who doesn’t yet get the lesson is confessing quite frankly that no fact can ever persuade them. They are self-admittedly intellectually dead.

Yet in the twenty-five years since the collapse, today’s intellectuals have evaded every fact that decades of socialism revealed, shunned every moral argument that explains the collective misery, and ignored every “prophet” whose predictions were proven correct.

They’ve wriggled, they’ve lied, and they’ve evaded.

They turned to environmentalism (ironically) to damn the production that proved impossible for socialism.

They turned to ‘multiculturalism’ to damn the west.

And, because “scientific socialism” was supposed to be based on reason (they claimed) they damned reason and embraced post-modernism –which allows them to damn the facts.

Anything to avoid the reality that the Wall’s Fall should have made obvious.

THE POST-COLLAPSE INTELLECTUAL embrace of post-modernism is no accident. The old socialists haven’t disappeared, they’ve mostly morphed into something else. As philosopher Stephen Hicks sagely observes in his book Explaining Postmodernism, “the failure of socialism made postmodernism necessary; the collapse of philosophy made it possible.”

In his book (which I thoroughly recommend), Hicks charts the failure and consequent “evolution” of socialism, which helps explain the apparent disappearance of the old “smokestack socialist”:

AS MY COLLEAGUE DR RICHARD McGRATH Richard McGrath said this morning, we should not let die the lessons of socialism, nor should we lose the memory of those who died trying to escape the East European slave pens.

They should be remembered, not forgotten.

“’Communism relied on watchtowers, snarling dogs, machine guns, and brick edifices topped with barbed wire,’ he said. ‘The Berlin Wall was the embodiment of this determination to rule by force. Today, twenty years since the wall was torn down, we should remember those East Germans who perished attempting to reach freedom in the West.’
    ‘The first person shot dead at the Berlin Wall was 24 year old Gunter Litfin, as he tried to swim across the Spree River on August 24, 1961. A year later, East German guards shot 17 year old Peter Fechter as he tried to scale the wall, and left him to bleed to death in that barren and desolate area of open land east of the Wall.”
    “The last person known to be killed at the Wall was 20 year old bartender Chris Gueffroy, shot ten times for good measure on February 5, 1989.”  

We should remember them, and their many brave confreres.

And perhaps, while remembering them, those who frequent Auckland’s Lenin Bar or Wellington’s Fidel’s Café -- or who wear a red star cap or a Che Guevara T-shirt -- might reflect on how long the authorities behind the Iron Curtain might have tolerated their petulant displays of dissent.

Remember these lessons because, as Richard Ebeling warns:

    Unfortunately, the Collectivist mentality did not end with either the fall of the Berlin Wall or the collapse of communism in the former Soviet Union. It remains alive and well …, with its insistence that the individual lives for and is to be sacrificed to ‘interests’ of the state.
    We still have our work cut out for us, to demolish the numerous political "walls" with which the government continues to enslave us through its police power in the growing interventionist-welfare state and the threatening economic fascist order.

And too the shaky philosophical foundations on which those walls are built.

** BONUS READING: How Reagan’s immortal words, quoted in this post’s title, almost didn’t make it into his speech at all …

* * LEST WE FORGET. Is there a more fitting reminder of the oppressive nature of communism than the Berlin Wall itself?

UPDATE: Other good commentary around the traps:

• “What is shocking but sadly unsurprising to me is this: after a seventy year experiment that lead to a hundred million deaths, we still have people in our universities and even on our streets who profess to be Marxists…. To this very day, our culture has not yet absorbed the lessons of Marxism, has not come to terms with the fact that it was not a noble experiment that failed, but rather a monstrous calamity that needs to be understood for what it was, lest it happen again.”
  A memorable anniversary, and those who would forget it – Perry Metzger, SAMIZDATA
• “A genuine celebration of the dismantling of the Berlin Wall would call for a re-affirmation, not of the immorality of Communism, but of the morality of capitalism. That would help make the event a symbol, not just of Communism's fall, but of freedom's rise.”
  Fall of Berlin Wall Does Not Guarantee Freedom – Edwin Locke, AYN RAND INSTITUTE
• “Today marks the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It did not fall, of course. It was felled. It was felled by ordinary East German men and women who decided they were not willing to spend the rest of their lives in a large prison pretending to be a nation. On the other side of the wall - the free side - far too many westerners were indifferent to the suffering of the east….
      “There were three key figures who stood against the détente fetishists, and in large part against the disposition of western electorates. Their names were Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II - all heroes in Eastern Europe to this day, yet, as Richard Fernandez notes, all absent from the coverage of today's observances. The A-list guest is Mikhail Gorbachev, whose plan was to preserve Soviet Communism by putting a cosmetic gloss on it. Today, the old passivity has returned: The Wall "fell".”
  The Will to Fell – Mark Steyn, STEYN ONLINE
• “Much of the media discussion around the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s fall will focus on American military politics and the politicians of the time. But to truly understand why the Soviet system in Eastern Europe collapsed, we must look to Mises’s pioneering work on economic planning.”
  The Economics Behind the Fall of the Berlin Wall – Ryan McMaken, MISES DAILY
• “But in the longer run, the battle between collectivism and a free individualism has been lost, as collectivism at the emoting booth has given every power of snooping and enforcement to the western tax state, short of shooting and torture…”
  Section 17: From Berlin Wall to 'The Lives of Others' – Mark Hubbard, LIFE BEHIND THE IRON DRAPE
• “But it was the end of more than a 20^th century story. Some of the East German protestors in the streets of Leipzig in early November carried banners that read, “1789-1989.” The storming of the Bastille in 1789 could be said to have marked the beginning of utopian revolutionary politics; now the storming of the Berlin Wall in 1989 marked its end. As Timothy Garton Ash observed, “Nineteen eighty-nine also caused, throughout the world, a profound crisis of identity on what had been known since the French revolution of 1789 as ‘the left.’”
  The Berlin Wall @25, Take 2 – Steven Hayward, POWER LINE
• “On the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Ayn Rand Institute’s Yaron Brook gave a talk on the relevance of Ayn Rand’s We the Living. The talk, which was given in Berlin, was part of the “The Triumph of Individual Liberty” gala hosted by the Liberal Institute and European Students for Liberty. The audience received free copies of We the Living. Video of the talk is available here. [How appropriate that these two adaptations of Ayn Rand’s great anti-dictatorship, anti-communist novel be published exactly twenty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.]”
     
• “"Remembering the Victims of Communism," produced by Meredith Bragg and Michael C. Moynihan. About 4 minutes. Original release date was November 9, 2009 and original writeup is here:”

"We were fools to think the fall of the Berlin Wall had killed off the far Left”

Skimming the newspapers to check their Berlin Wall coverage, Sean Gabb from Britain’s Libertarian Alliance discovered an unusually good piece in the Daily Mail.  It’s not just unusually good (especially for the Mail), but it offers a good lesson in activism, as Sean explains in the postscript:

    It's an article by Melanie Phillips and it titled "We were fools to think the fall of the Berlin Wall had killed off the far Left. They're back - and attacking us from within". The key paragraphs are:

"Soviet Communism was a belief system whose goal was to overturn the structures of society through the control of economic and political life. This mutated into a post-communist ideology of the Left, whose no-less ambitious aim was to overturn western society through a subversive transformation of its culture....
    "But as communism slowly crumbled, those on the far-Left who remained hostile towards western civilisation found another way to realise their goal of bringing it down.
    "This was what might be called 'cultural Marxism'. It was based on the understanding that what holds a society together are the pillars of its culture: the structures and institutions of education, family, law, media and religion. Transform the principles that these embody and you can thus destroy the society they have shaped.
    "This key insight was developed in particular by an Italian Marxist philosopher called Antonio Gramsci. His thinking was taken up by Sixties radicals - who are, of course, the generation that holds power in the West today.
    "Gramsci understood that the working class would never rise up to seize the levers of 'production, distribution and exchange' as communism had prophesied. Economics was not the path to revolution.
    "He believed instead that society could be overthrown if the values underpinning it could be turned into their antithesis: if its core principles were replaced by those of groups who were considered to be outsiders or who actively transgressed the moral codes of that society.
    "So he advocated a 'long march through the institutions' to capture the citadels of the culture and turn them into a collective fifth column, undermining from within and turning all the core values of society upside-down and inside-out."

    It's a good article and is worth reading in full. I mention it, however [says Sean], because Mrs Phillips might have been quoting from my book Cultural Revolution, Culture War. Indeed, I know that someone bought 50 copies of this two years ago and set them out to various opinion formers among whom was Mrs Phillips.
    I don't normally boast about influence. However, I had a long conversation yesterday with a friend who was rather depressed about the Libertarian Alliance's lack of impact in British politics. This is my answer. I will not claim that I am the only person putting this argument …  However, I do think it reasonable to claim that I have *helped*, since I began writing about "The Enemy Class" back in 2001, to provide the conservative and libertarian movement in this country with a narrative that explains what has happened in England over the past few generations.

And not just in England!  Here in New Zealand one person putting this argument has, of course, been Lindsay Perigo – who argues that “we lovers of reason and freedom have to do a Gramsci of our own.”

Who’s with us?

LIBERTARIANZ SUS: The Wall

Susan Ryder remembers The Day The Wall Came Down.

They say it’s a woman’s prerogative to change her mind and as far as today’s column goes, I’ve changed it twice already. So here we go, third time lucky.

I’d initially decided to elaborate upon a disagreement I had recently with someone for whom I have respect, even if I don’t always see eye to eye. Then along came Hone Harawira who, as if we needed more proof, showed once again what a fat-head he is. My fingers itched to give him the printed smack he’s never going to receive from the self-neutered, mainstream media, so option one went by the wayside.

And then I was reminded of something much more important. Something that shows the Hone Harawiras to be the trivialities, the sideshows, the non-entities they are. I remembered the 20^th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

People always say that they remember exactly where they were when they heard the news about President Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. In 1997 I was driving across the Auckland Harbour Bridge when I heard that Princess Diana was dead. And in 1989 I was in downtown San Francisco when the first crack appeared in the Berlin Wall.

The Wall was built the year before I was born. For me, nothing symbolised the Cold War greater than that bleak, barbed-wire monstrosity, fortified with soldiers, sirens and searchlights.

I never saw it for myself. I never went to Berlin. But I saw Eastern bloc communism first-hand during a short visit to Bulgaria in 1983, which made for pretty grim viewing.

The whole situation was farcical. Travel visas to the Eastern bloc were always short-term because they had to be. You see, the communists knew their system was crap, but they desperately needed hard currency to help keep the whole shebang going. Infuriatingly, westerners showed little interest in wanting to migrate to Eastern Europe with their dollars and D-marks, so the communists had to begrudgingly permit entry to tourists.

However, the longer the touring westerners were in their countries, the greater the expense of having to monitor them – and yes, we were monitored – and the greater their likelihood of fraternising with the locals, who in turn, might just hear about dangerous things like freedom, prosperity and plenty of food! Joseph Heller had a name for that sort of scenario.

Back to San Francisco. There had been reports of public disquiet behind the Iron Curtain for some time. Standing in front of the Brandenburg Gate two years earlier, US President Reagan had urged Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall,” whilst Gorbachev himself had been busy implementing his radical domestic twin-plan of perestroika (restructuring) and glastnost (openness).

I’d gone into town after work to meet friends. I came out of the parking building and turned into Market Street to find a vast crowd gathered outside a large store selling electronic goods. The crowd took up the whole sidewalk and spilled out into the street where traffic was also stopping. They were all watching the TV’s displayed in the store windows.

“What’s going on?” I asked nobody in particular. Then my blood ran cold. “Oh my God,” I said. “Has someone shot the President?!”

“No!” said a man in front of me. “The Berlin Wall’s coming down!”

I gazed at him blankly. I couldn’t seem to process what he’d just said.

“Here,” he said, “have a look for yourself! Hey you guys, let this lady through!” And the crowd generously made room for me towards the front where a dozen televisions were all tuned to the same channel, transmitting scenes of cheering Germans attacking the wall from both sides, with many more clambering over it, drinking, dancing and celebrating its long-awaited destruction.

We watched in stark disbelief. I turned to face the people behind me.

“Can anybody else believe this?” I asked. Everybody just shook their heads. It was completely unreal.

One man finally broke the spell. “This is amazing!” he yelled. “This is friggin’ FANTASTIC!” And then everybody was jumping up and down and hugging each other and yelling out to slowing traffic to spread the news. People were whooping and cars were tooting.

The bar to which I was heading was just down the road. I flew in and spotted Janna waiting for me.

“I know, I know!!” she yelled before I even opened my mouth. “Where the hell have you been? We’ve been watching in here!! Isn’t it amazing?! I can’t believe it!” The packed bar, in its entirety, was glued to the screen in the corner, while raising glasses to the brave Germans relishing their first moments of freedom that very instant.

That whole evening was like a New Year’s Eve in Edinburgh. It was one big party to which everyone turned up with total strangers expressing disbelief and excitement, but all saying the same thing that needed no further explanation.

“The Wall’s coming down.”

* * Read Susan Ryder’s column every Tuesday here at NOT PC * *

Remember, Remember the Ninth of November! [update 2]

Twenty years ago this week the Berlin Wall collapsed and hundreds of millions of enslaved Eastern Europeans were freed from decades of enslavement.

Freedom!  A word only whispered in Eastern Europe since the Iron Curtain fell across Europe was now, at its collapse, trumpeted across the world!

As Richard Ebeling says, “For 28 years, from 1961 to 1989, it stood as a symbol of the tyranny of the totalitarian state under which the individual was viewed as the property of the state.”  This slideshow comparing the death strip of the wall then with the prosperity that has replaced it now tells a graphic tale that is the most important story of the last half-century – and the most predictable result of both the birth and the failure of socialism.

In 1922 Ludwig Von MIses explained that socialism would eat itself and the people whom it enslaved – that it couldn’t plan, it couldn’t produce, that it couldn’t calculate -- that it was and always would be both morally depraved and economically unsustainable. Sixty-seven years later he was proven emphatically correct when the illusion that was socialist Eastern Europe collapsed, and the symbol of its totalitarian state was torn down.

The collapse when it came was peaceful, but when the Iron Curtain was finally pulled back after the decades of poverty and bloodshed, what was revealed was economic penury, human misery and an environmental basket-case.

One fact alone tells you the story: Hundreds of millions were enslaved behind the Wall; hundreds of thousands attempted to escape from the East; 171 were shot and killed at the Wall’s Death Strip . . . but nobody was ever killed trying to move from the West to the East*.

Today’s socialists like to forget about or dismiss the results of the twentieth-century’s greatest and most disastrous political experiment -- set up like a laboratory experiment by contrasting ideologies on either side of the Berlin Wall -- but in the collapse of the Wall and the reasons behind its inevitable collapse lie every lesson every student of socialism should have engraved on their soul. If they have one.

The simple lesson is this: "Man's mind is his basic tool of survival,” but "man's mind will not function at the point of a gun.”

    “Socialism [identified Ayn Rand] is the doctrine that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that his life and his work do not belong to him, but belong to society, that the only justification of his existence is his service to society, and that society may dispose of him in any way it pleases for the sake of whatever it deems to be its own tribal, collective good…

    “The alleged goals of socialism were: the abolition of poverty, the achievement of general prosperity, progress, peace and human brotherhood. The results have been a terrifying failure—terrifying, that is, if one’s motive is men’s welfare.”

Perhaps the single most astonishing result of the collapse is the reaction of the intellectuals.  Anyone over twenty then who doesn’t yet get the lesson is confessing quite frankly that no fact can ever persuade them. They are self-admittedly intellectually dead.

In the twenty years since the collapse today’s intellectuals have evaded every fact that decades of socialism revealed, and ignored every “prophet” whose predictions about socialism was proven correct**. They’ve wriggled, they’ve evaded, they’ve turned to environmentalism to damn the production that proved impossible for socialism; to ‘multiculturalism’ to damn the west; and they’ve even embraced post-modernism to damn the facts – anything to avoid the reality that the Wall’s Fall should have made obvious. 

And by the way, the post-collapse intellectual embracing of postmodernism is no accident. The old socialists have disappeared, they’ve mostly morphed into something else. The political crisis of socialism made several other revolutions necessary, including a political one – or as philosopher Stephen Hicks sagely observes, the failure of socialism made postmodernism necessary; the collapse of philosophy made it possible. 

In his book Explaining Postmodernism, Hicks charts the failure and consequent “evolution” of socialism, which helps explain the apparent disappearance of the old “smokestack socialist”:

As my colleague Richard McGrath said this morning, the two decades that have passed since the Berlin Wall was torn down should not let die the lessons of socialism, nor the memory of those who died trying to escape the East European slave pens. They should be remembered, not forgotten.

“’Communism relied on watchtowers, snarling dogs, machine guns, and brick edifices topped with barbed wire,’ he said. ‘The Berlin Wall was the embodiment of this determination to rule by force. Today, twenty years since the wall was torn down, we should remember those East Germans who perished attempting to reach freedom in the West.’
    ‘The first person shot dead at the Berlin Wall was 24 year old Gunter Litfin, as he tried to swim across the Spree River on August 24, 1961. A year later, East German guards shot 17 year old Peter Fechter as he tried to scale the wall, and left him to bleed to death in that barren and desolate area of open land east of the Wall.”
    “The last person known to be killed at the Wall was 20 year old bartender Chris Gueffroy, shot ten times for good measure on February 5, 1989.”   
    “Perhaps those who frequent the Lenin Bar in Auckland or Fidel’s Café in Wellington, or wear a red star cap or a Che Guevara T-shirt, should consider how long the authorities behind the Iron Curtain would have tolerated displays of dissent during the era of the Cold War.”

Oddly enough, it’s the buffoon Boris Johnson who offers the timeliest lesson,

“that it is precisely now, when the public mood is so bitter towards bankers, so hostile to profit, so seemingly brassed off with the very idea of wealth creation that we should remember how ghastly, grim and unworkable was the alternative – state-controlled socialism.” 

Remember, remember, the ninth of November!

Remember these lessons and that warning as you regird your loins for the battle that Richard Ebeling outlined last week:

    “Unfortunately, the Collectivist mentality did not end with either the fall of the Berlin Wall or the collapse of communism in the former Soviet Union. It remains alive and well in America and around the world, with its insistence that the individual lives for and is to be sacrificed to ‘interests’ of the state.
    “We still have our work cut out for us, to demolish the numerous political "walls" with which the government continues to enslave us through its police power in the growing interventionist-welfare state and the threatening economic fascist order. “

And too the shaky philosophical foundations on which those walls are built.

* * * * *

** For example: Economist Paul Samuelson for example was still writing in 1989 in his best-selling textbook Economics that “the Soviet economy is proof that, contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed, a socialist command economy can function and even thrive” (Samuelson and Nordhaus 1989, 837).  Samuelson’s textbook (in revised editions) is still a best-seller, and a prescribed texts at many universities. By contrast Ludwig von MIses, who predicted the economic collapse in 1922 in his classic Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth (and who predicted the Great Depression in his 1912 Theory of Money and Credit and elsewhere) is still largely unknown by today’s intellectuals, and his books are untaught at nearly every major university. Unbelievable.

UPDATE 1: An unusually good piece here from Ed Hudgins: The Berlin Wall Then and Now.  Here’s an excerpt:

    “The wall was a breathtaking moral obscenity, a concrete manifestation in concrete of the philosophy on which it was built. The communists held that the good of society took priority over the interests of selfish individuals. They maintained that individuals must be required to work for society. Of course, the will of “society” was to be divined and carried out by a small ruling elite who would have the exclusive right to force all to serve whether they wanted to or not.
    “And no one could be allowed to opt out and leave, to escape their duty to serve. The reality of this philosophy was most starkly on display in East Berlin. Communist countries were giant prison camps holding the slaves in bondage and shooting them if they tried to escape.
    “Today there are only a few regimes, like North Korea, that are literal prison camps along the lines of the Soviet bloc. But the philosophy, and its manifestation in culture, that gave rise to the Berlin Wall is still very much alive.

UPDATE 2:  Watch this inspiring, thrilling and informative short video around the events of November 9, 1989:

It was posted at the Austrian Economists blog, where they say, “we can still rejoice in this shinning example of the victory of the individual over the collective.  Freedom was celebrated that day by people who were oppressed by their government for far too long.”

    “Let's remember the sheer joy of that day, and the celebration of life evident in the faces of the young (and old) as the tore down the wall figuratively and literally and reclaimed their basic human freedoms.  And let us also remember the intellectual arguments . . .  that so thoroughly demonstrated that tyranny fails to deliver the goods, while freedom actually works.  Even us cool-headed academics can get passionate about the fact that there is only one economic system that simultaneously delivers individual autonomy, generalized prosperity, and peaceful cooperation among diverse groups.  Capitalism is not just ruthlessly efficient, it is civilizing . . . “

Muddling while Tehran yearns [updated]

The sound of freedom is still ringing around the streets, houses and souks of Tehran, even if that sound hasn’t yet reached the White House or the man within it.

While the people of Iran cry out for change from their fearful oppressors, the ObaMessiah who once promoted such a concept as something you could believe in is struggling to avoid any believable stand at all.  The policies of Ahmadinejad and Mousavi are practically the same, says President Zero, all but wondering what the big deal is here.

The big deal, you big oaf, is that freedom is breaking out where hitherto we might have least expected it. Mousavi is hardly Thomas Jefferson, but that’s hardly the point – and it rather makes the perfect the enemy of the good, doesn’t it. Bret Stephens in the Wall Street Journal explains the point well,

    Just as in Hungary in 1956, a popular uprising has coalesced around a figure (Imre Nagy in Hungary; Mir Hossein Mousavi in Iran), who had once been a creature of the system. Then as now it was buoyed by inspiring American rhetoric about freedom and democracy coming over Voice of America airwaves.
    And then as now the administration effectively turned its back on the uprising when U.S. support could have made a difference. Hungary would spend the next 33 years in the Soviet embrace. One senses a similar fate for Iran, where Mr. Ahmadinejad's "victory" signals the ultimate ascendancy of the ultra-militants in the Revolutionary Guards Corps and the paramilitary Basij, intent on getting what they want and doing as they please even in defiance of their old clerical masters. Which means: Get ready for a second installment of the Iranian cultural revolution. [Thanks to Shari for the link.]

On top of that, President Zero and his cardboard cut out Vice Biden look to the god of democracy as the balm that will fix all, ignoring some simple advice that rings down through history, advice that the people on the streets of Tehran might pass on to Obama – if he would but listen and if they weren’t banned from communicating by any means other than Twittering: That even if the majority did vote for Ahmadinejad, that doesn’t make it right.

As  Walter Williams reminds us,

Democracy and majority rule [can] give an aura of legitimacy to acts that would otherwise be deemed tyranny.

Principled government is not built on majority rule, but on individual rights.  Hanging your hat on the verisimilitude of a vote is not the way to bring freedom to Iran, or to anywhere.  Freedom is not a popularity contest, it’s a human birthright.

Meantime, the sounds of freedom continue to ring out around Tehran and the peaceful demonstrations continue, even in the face of brutality by the pro-government militia (the Basij) and from the Hamas and Hezbollah ring-ins trucked in to take the place of the Iranian military who are reportedly refusing to fire on the protestors. Andrew Sullivan posts this quote below from a women protestor that gives some context::

    Ahmadinejad called the opposition as a bunch of insignificant dirt who try to make the taste of victory bitter to the nation. He also called the western leaders as a bunch of 'filthy homosexuals'. All these disgusting remarks was today answered by that largest demonstration ever. Older people compared the demonstration of today with the Ashura Demonstration of 1979 which marks the downfall of the Shah regime and even said that it outnumbered that event. The militia burnt a house themselves to find the excuse to commit violence. People neutralized their tactic to a large degree by their solidarity, their wisdom and their denial to engage in any violent act.

It worked in the Philippines when Marcos was overthrown and in Portugal with the “Carnation Revolution.” It worked in Prague’s Velvet Revolution and the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and the later “Colour Revolutions” when the cracks within those society finally and peacefully opened up.

Let us hope it happens here in Tehran too, with or without the help of a President who can apparently only muddle while Tehran burns.

UPDATE: Michael asks in the comments what Obama should do, just as if the poor chap had nothing to work with. 

“If you were Obama, what would you do? Sure, he could point all that out about it being wrong, but would would it actually achieve?”

Well, there are several tangible things he could do to help.  After all, he has no compunction about meddling in the affairs of Israel, or of the world’s tax havens, so the problem is clearly not one of reluctance to meddle in another country’s internal affairs – and in this case (as Scott says) it’s akin to “your next door neighbours saying "mind your own business" when you witness their kids bruised and bleeding after hearing them screaming saying ‘stop’.” And Obama’s troops over the border in Iraq are practically neighbours, and since Iran is the world’s primary sponsor of world’s terrorism ending the Ahmadinejad regime at a time when it’s already weakened would be within its ambit.

But even that may not be necessary.  Yet.  Moral courage is sometimes enough, even if it is about as rare as an honest lawyer.  It was enough when Ronald Reagan stood up in Berlin and said “Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”  And eventually, the logic of that was accepted and Mr Gorbachev did.  And it was enough when Reagan spoke out in support of striking Polish workers, who took the moral courage from his words and used them as fuel to overturn the oppressive regime of Soviet puppets that was stifling their freedom.

And we know that while Obama very rarely has anything to say, we know as well as we know anything that he sure as hell can talk when he wants. If only he could say anything approaching what Reagan said when the Soviets began crushing the Polish Solidarity uprising, it might be enough:

We view the current situation in Poland in the gravest of terms, particularly the increasing use of force against an unarmed population and violations of the basic civil rights of the Polish people.

Violence invites violence and threatens to plunge Poland into chaos. We call upon all free people to join in urging the Government of Poland to reestablish conditions that will make constructive negotiations and compromise possible.

... The Polish nation, speaking through Solidarity, has provided one of the brightest, bravest moments of modern history. The people of Poland are giving us an imperishable example of courage and devotion to the values of freedom in the face of relentless opposition. Left to themselves, the Polish people would enjoy a new birth of freedom. But there are those who oppose the idea of freedom, who are intolerant of national independence, and hostile to the European values of democracy and the rule of law.

Two Decembers ago, freedom was lost in Afghanistan; this Christmas, it’s at stake in Poland. But the torch of liberty is hot. It warms those who hold it high. It burns those who try to extinguish it.

Would that the current President had either the courage or the understanding to say what’s needed.  It would assuredly save a lot of future heartache, and undoubtedly avert a lot of present bloodshed.

Regime change Iran? [updated]

UPDATE: If it does happen, it's looking like the revolution will be Twittered.  Search term is now #gr88.

With hundreds of thousands of Iranians taking to the streets of Tehran in response to what they say is a rigged election, this is looking more and more like it could end with either hope or disaster.  It could be either the toppling of “another Berlin Wall” – this time with the toppling of Tehran’s thirty-year Islamic dictatorship – or else the onset of another Tiananmen Square.  Don’t know about you, but I’m keeping up with events at Michael Totten’s blog, Andrew Sullivan’s blog, and at Twitter – especially Persian Kiwi.  From Andrew Sullivan:

A reader writes:

    I just talked to my father in Iran a few minutes ago. He had been in the demonstrations. He was telling me people were chanting: "Ahmadi, Ahmadi 24 millionet koo?" ("Ahmadi, Ahmadi were are your 24 millions?") and "Ahmadi, Ahmadi 63-dar sadet koo?"("Ahmadi Ahmadi, where is your 63%").
    He said that the protesters were chanting "Nirooye Entezami Hemayat Hemayat" (asking police for support) And he was also confirming that at the beginning when there were smaller groups, the police was attacking them, but as the crowd built up thay had to stand back.

We might be experiencing a true revolution here.

Some recent reports from all sources:

• There are reports of about 3M ppl out on the streets. Millions of people marching in absolute silence.
• The demonstrators headed toward the capital's huge Freedom Square in the largest display of opposition to the election results to date. "Mousavi we support you! We will die but retrieve our votes!" shouted supporters, many wearing the trademark green colour of Mousavi's election campaign.
• And all these people are now breaking the law. The riot police are apparently standing back . .
• “Some Football Match, Mr Ahmadinejad. Some Crowd.”
• Car horn protests could be heard throughout the city, as could chants of "Bye bye dictator", "Ahmadi Nejad is the biggest liar in Iran," and "The president is committing a crime and the supreme leader is supporting him."
• Press TV is now reporting on “hundreds of thousands” in today’s rally from Enqelab Square to Azadi Square, protesting the outcome of the Iranian election. The gathering is in defiance of the Ministry of Interior’s refusal to give a permit. So far, based on video and on the correspondent’s report, the rally appears to be peaceful and calm.
  Just to bring home the significance of the previous item, Press TV is state-owned media. Until this morning, it has given almost no attention to the protests against Ahmadinejad’s election. The sudden change to in-depth, even effusive coverage of the demonstrations points to a wider political shift . . .
• Iranian poet Sheema Kalbasi: Today is the day that the Islamic Republic officially transformed from a theocracy supported by Pasdaran to a Junta supported by a handful of clerics.
• Grand Ayatollah Sanei in Iran has declared Ahmadinejad's presidency illegitimate . . .
• Robert Tait, the Guardian's former Tehran correspondent, has been poring over leaked reports of the official results, allegedly leaked by disaffected officials. He and our diplomatic editor Julian Borger write: "The figures have been accompanied by claims from interior ministry sources that fake statistics were fed into a software program and then distributed to vote counts among polling stations to produce a plausible outcome. The same sources have also claimed that the interior ministry's statements announcing the results were prepared before Friday night's count." Such claims are being reported on websites that Iran is frantically trying to block, according to our blogs editor, Kevin Anderson. He explains the cat-and-mouse game between the authorities and internet users.
• Was Ahmadinejad's Win Rigged? at Time magazine.
• Bolton on the basic facts of the #iranelection that reporters are happier ignoring: http://bit.ly/1a4bow
• Former president Khatami has just called for the election to be declared VOID at todays protests in Tehran.
• Grand Ayatollah Saanei accompanies today's anti Ahmadinejad rally.
• NBC offices in Tehran raided, equipment confiscated. BBC told to leave Iran immediately.
• “Our ppl are tearing apart this regime by protesting on the streets”
• “Iran / today / Tehran. Is this really happening????”
• “Thousands has morphed into MILLIONS of people marching in Tehran. Truly SPEECHLESS.”
• “Most important world event since 9/11.”
• 3 students killed at Univ of Tehran.
• “World should know that ppl attending pro-Ahmadinejad rally were civil servants, they are sacked if they don’t participate.”
• “Very glad to see Twitter making a huge difference in information getting out about #iranelection . Hope there's change coming to Iran.”
• “Isn't this the type of change that #Obama should support? Should and Do are 2 separate things.”
• People were holding signs saying: We are not sheep.
• Hundreds of thousands of people are demonstrating from Engelab to Azadi.  The number of people is constantly increasing as more people join to protest against the coup d’état.
• “@persiankiwi is now the world's most vital journalist #iranelection”
• “Juan Cole's evidence that the Iranian election was stolen http://bit.ly/pINRc - Juan knows his stuff.”
• “Al-Jazeera reporter - restrictions on media tightening. Unsafe to take camera/mobile on street - relying on ppl sending pics”
• Other cities also having their own parades but with MORE oppression; Mashhad, Babol, Tabriz, ...
• Students are being surrounded in Shiraz Uni civil police (Basij) is in fight with people.
• The BBC's Jon Leyne, in Tehran, says he understands plain-clothed militias [Basij] have been authorised to use live ammunition for the first time.
• Reuters reports gunshots have been heard at the pro-Mousavi rally!
• @abzole: People are getting killed in Azadi Sq.
• @BreakingNews BULLETIN -- GUNFIRE ERUPTS AT PRO-MOUSAVI RALLY IN TEHRAN, PEOPLE RUNNING. #IranElection
• #Tehran Apparently conventional Police's leaving field to Basij. This is usually the way brutal attacks begin.
• Andrew Sullivan over at The Atlantic is under digital attack (guess who). http://tinyurl.com/kt66sp
• Ambers posts some wise words about how to judge the torrent of information we and others online are bringing you. This is raw data - riveting raw data, but subject to subsequent review, analysis. Skepticism is merited. But open eyes and ears are as well.
• Unconfirmed as yet - Mousavi newspaper offices raided.
• “CNN gets some video, finally. But then you hear a simple statement from the anchor that Mousavi lost the election and telling us to wait for the official results in ten days' time. CNN no longer qualifies as a news channel.”
• Persian Kiwi: reliable soure from Ahvaz. Situation there is bad - violent clashes in streets.
• “Bassej are out in force in darkness. this is when they operate best. Streets are dangerous now for young people.”
• Persian Kiwi: “confirmed - there is shooting in Azadi sq. protesters wounded and shot, no numbers yet, still hearing gunfire.”

Learning from Brezhnev

It's not every day Helen Clark makes you think of Joseph Stalin (insert obvious jokes here), but I have to confess when I heard Helen Clark praising previous National leaders while bagging the current model I had to think she's been learning taking her lessons in public relations from the likes of Brezhnev and Stalin.  The subtitle from this post might be 'What Helen Clark Learned from the Five Year Plan.'

You see, over the weekend she compared National's present leader, John Key, to previous holders of the job.  Don Brash, she declared, has "presence and authority -- "which must surely have surprised Brash since three years ago she told New Zealanders "I regard him as a cancerous and corrosive individual"!  And she performed the same job on past opponents whom she's previously dispatched with similar alacrity, including Bill English( "a clever man" she says of a man deservedly taken lightly), Jenny Shipley (a "very considerable presence" says Clark) and Jim Bolger ("someone people could relate to").

What a crock -- and how like the way the leaders of the former Soviet Union hid their disasters publicly, as Ayn Rand describes in the introduction to her first novel, We the Living:

  To those who might wonder whether the conditions of existence in Soviet Russia have changed in any essential respect since 1925 [when the novel was set], I will make a suggestion: take a look through the files of the newspapers.
    If you do, you will observe the following pattern: first, you will read glowing reports about the happiness, the prosperity, the industrial development, the progress and the power of the Soviet Union, and that any statements to the contrary are the lies of prejudiced reactionaries; then, about five years later, you will read admissions that things were pretty miserable in the Soviet Union five years ago, just about as bad as the prejudiced reactionaries  had claimed, but now the problems are solved and the Soviet Union is a land of happiness, prosperity, industrial development, progress and power; about five years later, you will read that Trotsky (or Zinoviev or Kamenev or Litvinov or the "kulaks" or the foreign imperialists) had caused the miserable state of things five years ago, but now Stalin has purged them all and the Soviet Union has surpassed the decadent West in happiness, prosperity, industrial development, etc.; five years later, you will read that Stalin was a monster who had crushed the progress of the Soviet Union, but now it is a land of happiness, prosperity, artistic freedom, educational perfection and scientific superiority over the whole world. How many of such five-year plans will you need before you begin to understand?

Fortunately the Soviet spin is long dead and buried -- buried under the rubble of the Berlin Wall.  Clark's own spin is just as threadbare, and equally doomed.

Whatever happened to the "smokestack socialist"?

I asked yesterday if readers could identify the author of this remarkably vigorous piece of prose in praise of human production:

The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all the preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature's forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents or cultivation, canalisation or rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground - what earlier century had even an inkling that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?

These words, as I said, were written in the mid-nineteenth century - its author achieved worldwide popularity in the twentieth. How rare to hear such a hymn to human industry in the twenty-first.

I'm delighted that several knowledgeable readers identified the author as one Karl Marx -- a surprise perhaps to some who know the bearded apostle of "scientific socialism" only as the god of today's braindead man-haters. How come, you might ask, we so rarely hear such hairy-chested sentiments from socialists these days? The answer is quite simple: the abject failure of socialism to live up to the promise implied in the old fool's wee hymn to human production.

The old style hairy-chested, smokestack socialist was a fan of production -- of colossal productive forces, of the steam-driven subjection of nature by productive forces, forces that in earlier centuries had "slumbered in the lap of social labour" and had now erupted out of the feudal past in the promise of a glorious socialist future! Communism, said Lenin, is "socialism plus electricity"! Communism, Nikita Kruschev told Richard Nixon, will "bury the west." For many a socialist, the optimistic voice of socialism did sounded like the voice of the sunlit future.

The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of every socialist experiment ever tried, however, put paid to that dream.

The revelation when the Berlin Wall fell that socialist Eastern Europe was an economic, environmental and humanitarian basket case brought on a crisis for socialists worldwide that made it clear for all time that it was impossible to be an honest socialist. Socialism could not produce. Capitalism does. At this revelation, the smokestack socialist had three fundamental choices: either abandon support for socialism, or production, or of reason.

• He could continue to revere production and human fecundity by abandoning socialism altogether (Christopher Hitchens is one of this honest breed), or he could try and shackle capitalist producers to his own socialist ends (Tony Blair, Jim Anderton and most of the Third Way 'social democrat' types adopted this approach).
• Or: he could retain his socialism but abandon instead his praise of production and wealth. The environmental movement beckoned. In damning production he could continue the promotion of socialism as if nothing ever happened. If you've ever wondered at the take-over of the environmental movement worldwide by assorted Trotskyites, Maoists and Leninists, or by the number of Jim Anderton's former colleagues now at home in the 'Watermelon Party,' then this is your explanation.
  
• Or: as Stephen Hicks so eloquently explains, he could abandon reason, science, and optimism altogether, and embrace instead the postmodern promotion of anti-reason, anti-science, double standards, and cynicism. As Hicks says in the thesis of his superb book Explaining Postmodernism, "the failure of [philosophy] made postmodernism possible; the failure of socialism made postmodernism necessary."

The fall of the Berlin Wall was the crisis that created this mostly misbegotten diaspora, and it's the reason now that to be an honest socialist is no less impossible than it is to find an honest lawyer.

Cue Card Libertarianism - Socialism

SOCIALISM: Socialism is just Communism without the courage of its convictions.

ORIGINALLY CONCEIVED BY Karl Marx as a transitional stage between Capitalism and Communism, during which the working class would exercise a dictatorship over the dispossessed capitalists and their flunkeys, Socialism (said Marx) would allow certain features of Capitalism to linger-–wage-labour, inequality of earnings, profit-making (by the state) etc.-–before class divisions spontaneously disappeared and the state eventually withered away.

After constant experimentation on every continent and in every decade of the twentieth-century however, we can now say confidently that no Marxist state ever just ‘withers away,’ and nor did Mark himself ever explain the mechanism by which this delightful apparition would all of a sudden appear from the dictatorship so firmly created by his proletariat.

Conceived in its non-Marxist guises as an end-in-itself, with the state assuming a dominant role in the economy--usually by owning everything–-Socialism has come to mean the nationalisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange. Such an end was once the stated goal of the Labour Parties in both Britain and New Zealand. Such is the sorry history of nationalised industries, however, that the effects of nationalisation are now widely known, and nationalisation itself frequently disavowed--publicly at least. Tony Blair for example fought a courageous battle to remove the commitment to nationalisation from the the constitution of the British Labour Party, but local Labourites have shown recently with full or partial renationalisations of the rail lines, Air New Zealand and Telecom's lines (and barriers being quietly put in the way of the sale of Auckland Airport to a bidder from Dubai) that this destructive stupidity is sadly still not dead.

Blatant nationalisation is still espoused by modern-day socialists even in the face of the evidence of the poverty it creates, as can be observed with the cheerleaders for the modern-day destruction of Venezuela. 

But while nationalisation of the physical means of production was once a defining characteristic of Socialism, it was not always a necessary one. Hitler’s National Socialists, it's worth noting, saw nationalisation as crude and unnecessary. “Why need we trouble to socialise industry?” Hitler asked. “We socialise human beings.” The partial nationalisation of NZ's children by the Bradford/Key anti-smacking bill would seem to be an example of this more subtle form of nationalisation.

SOCIALISM WAS ONCE promoted by its adherents as being an engine of production. The ‘Socialist Calculation Debate’ between Ludwig von Mises and Oskar Lange exposed the fallacy in this view; the final collapse of the Berlin Wall and the misery previously hidden by lies and deception showed that Mises was right: Socialism when introduced produced nothing but misery.

SOCIALISM IS OFTEN characterised as being a system that involves the ‘redistribution of wealth’ in an attempt to make everybody equal – an expression of egalitarianism perhaps best characterised as one of theft based on Envy, in which human liberty is sacrificed on a ‘Procrustean bed’ of equality. Indeed, students of envy have noted its close links with the egalitarianism of Socialism, and agree on one fascinating conclusion: the desire of the envious is not so much to have themselves raised up to the level of those whom they resent, but to bring the achievers down to their own level.

As Ayn Rand said of collectivists everywhere, they begin by trying to raise everyone to the mountaintops, and end by razing the mountains.

Whatever its guise, Socialism is a form of Collectivism, with all the denial of freedom that entails. One would like to believe that, because of its history, it is indeed history – but while collectivism remains the mind-set of most people, Socialism is never far away.

This is part of a continuing series explaining the concepts and terms used by New Zealand's libertarians, originally published in The Free Radical in 1993 and being progressively updated for republication now. The 'Introduction' to the series is here, and the archives for the series so far can be found here, and down there on the right-hand sidebar.