Dialogue With a Leftist

If half the amount extracted from the workingman’s paycheck were instead placed into a simple savings account, for example, upon retirement the worker would have accumulated a substantial sum due to compound interest, which could then be passed down to the next generation. This would greatly reduce poverty.

You might call this “capitalist security.” The same principle could be applied to private health care accounts.

The key point is that these select corporations literally became the government. Private corporations, businesses and property in these societies were de facto controlled by these government corporations and their partner, the government.

Property was disposed of depending on what was viewed to be in the best interest of the government at any given time. The fact that my Jewish relatives were murdered in the Nazi Holocaust is proof that Nazi Germany did not respect private property.

Nazism was not as socialistic as communism, which made no pretense regarding who owned property or the "means of production." In a communist country, everything was owned by the state outright, which claims to be acting in the interest of "the people."

The first thing communists do when they take over – as was the case with the Bolsheviks, for example – is abolish workers unions (the state became the union), corporations (the state became the corporation) and virtually all forms of private property.

If you want to get a sense of what life was like in the Soviet Union at the time of the Bolshevik coup, I recommend the novel "We the Living" by Ayn Rand, who lived in Russia during those years. As an American living under the warm blanket of freedom, you have no idea what it would be like to live in a radical socialist state, communist or fascist.

Besides the fact that both advocate central economic control (communism more so than fascism), both are spiritually atheist, both believe in the theory of evolution as a cornerstone of their political faith, both oppose the family (the Nazis formed communes for racially pure men and women, the Communists viewed the family unit as a bourgeoisie affectation), both believed on a One World utopia, both slaughtered their own people to a degree unprecedented in history (the Nazis killed 6 million Jews and millions of others, the Communists killed over 100 million people in the 20th century who they viewed as not politically correct or because they stood in the way of progress).

The dictionary definition of socialism is a system that calls for "public ownership of the means of production." Public ownership can only mean State ownership; there is simply no other practical way for this to occur. No one is going to give up his right to ownership except by force and the only way force can be brought to bear is by government, which is, by definition, legalized force.

Therefore, both Nazism and Communism, in order to carry out their respective agendas, require a forceful authoritarian government, since to give up property voluntarily is simply against human nature. You might say that both systems are on the left, you may say that both systems are authoritarian, take your pick.

EXACTLY!!! Socialism is very much like the old czarist system and all other monarchal systems where the government, in the person of the king, controls everything and is supposed to act in the interest of "the people."

Don't you see? Socialism is a regression back to the days of absolute rule, except instead of having a monarch claiming divine right, you have a "dictatorship of the proletariat" claiming to act in the name of science.

For centuries, people have been duped into surrendering their property and their freedoms to the state and have become serfs. This is exactly how the monarchal system worked.

From time to time America helps people free themselves from tyranny. I don't recall your complaining about the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua by the Sandinistas. I don’t recall your calling for elections in Cuba, since you're all of a sudden such a champion of elections.

Instead, we took half measures resulting in 60,000 American deaths, untold Vietnamese deaths, hundreds of thousands of people fleeing and drowning in rickety boats and Pol Pot, one of the purest examples of a Marxist ideologue the world has ever known, taking power in Cambodia.

Pol Pot, who used to carry a copy of the "Communist Manifesto" in his hip pocket, fulfilled the tenets of communism to the letter when he depopulated Cambodian cities and collectivized property. Millions of people died.

Have you seen the award-winning film "The Killing Fields?" Have you ever actually read the "Communist Manifesto"? Are you familiar with its famous planks?