Topic: Capitalism
Free Markets & Free People
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A treatise on the virtues of free markets and why free people cannot exist without equally free markets.
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by Alexander Massa
(libertarian)
Monday, November 2, 2009
Many left-wing liberals, who have long been the self-crowned champions of civil liberties, are now pining for a socialist command economy. They forget the long established concept that the free market and civil liberties are intertwined. One cannot live in a country that practices central planning while still retaining civil liberties. Likewise, one cannot live in a free market country that is devoid of freedom. Free markets and free people are one and the same; inseparable.
Leftists do not understand that people cannot be free under a socialist government. They see things through the red tinted glasses of a communist; they truly believe that what we see as economic freedom is actually the exploitation of the working class, and that it should be destroyed. However, that is an asinine assumption that fails when put to the test by facts. Communism and socialism are actually systems in which the worker is exploitated; the fruits of his labors are confiscated by the government and he is stripped of his civil liberties, reducing him to little more than a meaningless slave to the almighty State.
Capitalism and the free market actually empowers the worker, despite what the Red rhetoric and propaganda claims. In a free society, the worker has the right to choose his or her place of employment, join or even create a labor union, collectively bargain, and when he wants (if ever) to quit or change his job. Under a collectivist system, the worker has none of those choices. If, for example, a textile worker in the former Soviet Union (a communist state) wanted to change jobs, he would have to appeal to a myriad of bureaucracies and internal bureaus. Even after several months of bargaining, he most likely would stay where he was. If he spoke further about the matter of took action by staging a strike, he'd be either jailed or executed, probably both.
A prime example of the oppression inherent in collectivist systems comes from Maoist China during Chairman Mao Tse-tung's Cultural Revolution. During the Cultural Revolution and the ensuing Great Lead Forward (both failed government programs which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of millions of ethnic Chinese), people were forced by the provisional revolutionary government to take whatever job they were ordered to perform. During the Cultural Revolution, most, if not all doctors were executed for supposedly being "bourgeoisie" and, thus, an enemy of the People's Republic. Obviously, the country needed doctors to carry out medical care for the massive population, so they had to replace the workforce of doctors. Who did they pick to do this? Nurses, nurses assistants, and janitorial staff. Nurses, who had no real surgical training to speak of, were routinely ordered by armed soldiers of the PLA (Chinese People's Liberation Army) to carry out surgical procedures they were woefully unprepared to do. If they refused, they were executed for being "counterrevolutionary". How would you feel if you were having surgery that day? Moreover, how would you feel as a lowly nurse to be standing over a man on an operating table all the while being forced to carry out open-heart surgery with a gun pressed to the back of your head? So much for the "worker's paradise", huh?
Communist and socialist countries worldwide are notorious for their wanton use of propaganda and blatant lies when it comes to the true workings (and failures) of their economic system. The Soviet Union pioneered the usage of such techniques when used for communist means. The Soviets had several phrases to describe their type of government to make it attractive to others: "people's republic", "dictatorship of the proletariat", "worker's paradise", etc. These phrases in and of themselves are meaningless and often contradictory words. However, these words can be wielded as weapons by socialists, who still use them today to make Marxism look appealing to the masses of workers, who often buy into the lie that communism "sets them free" (from what, happiness?). The real tragedy inherent in Marxist theory is that the workers only realize they've been tricked after they've already been enslaved. Unfortunately for them, once you've sold yourself lock, stock, and barrel into slavery, there isn't an easy way out of it, short of armed revolution.
As I stated above, free markets equal free people. Generally speaking, the freer the market, the freer the people. The sinister danger lurking in the feel-good socialist policies of the Marxists is that totalitarianism is simply inevitable under a socialist economic system. No government can totally own the economy and not touch civil liberties. The socialist state has an inherent, unquenchable thirst for total power and control over the populace, and the economy is simply the first casualty in an ongoing Marxist crusade against liberty. Civil liberties come after the economy; liberty under a collectivist system is sequentially eliminated like dominoes knocking each other over, a chain reaction, if you will.
Evidence supporting the above statement abounds. Take, for example, East and West Germany. After World War Two, Germany was carved up into two parts, a Communist East controlled by the Soviet Red Army, and a Capitalist West controlled by the Allied armies. Soon enough, the infamous Berlin Wall was built to prevent East Germans from defecting to West Germany and border crossings in general. Over the next forty years, East Germans illegally climbing the Berlin Wall were shot in droves for trying desperately to escape the tyranny of Communism. Men of all walks of life literally gave their lives in an elusive search for freedom. East German soldiers jumped over the Wall themselves to perhaps get a taste of freedom. Even children defected - a twelve year old boy was shot at least five times in the back by East German border guards (Grenztruppen) while swimming across a canal to West Germany. He miraculously survived, and went on to be a successful West German doctor.
All the while, not a single West German died in an attempt to defect to East Germany. This, of course, was due to the fact that the West was a capitalist country with a free market, and, thus, a free people. East Germany, a socialist nation and puppet state of the USSR (Soviet Union), was a terribly oppressive nation. The population constantly lived in fear, and were always under the watchful eyes of the Stasi, the East German equivalent of the KGB. The tyranny was simply too much for some people to take, and they died trying to escape rather than tolerate socialism. Think of it this way - if children are being shot trying to escape the country with their lives, chances are something very wrong is going on there. That, of course, would be Marxism, which people would rather die than endure. This led to the anticommunist chant "better dead than Red". We must never forget the terror of socialism, and we should never let anyone try to bring socialism to the United States.
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