:very-smart:

The Capitalist Manifesto: Socialism not only makes people worse off, it also makes them worse

lmao this mf writing manifestos :youre-laughing:

Matthew Lau: With greed and envy central to socialism, the picture painted by socialists of their economic system as compassionate is a fraud Author of the article:Matthew Lau Publishing date:Dec 15, 2021 • 45 minutes ago • 4 minute read

A portrait of the political economist and philosopher Adam Smith (1723-1790) by an unknown artist. PHOTO BY PHOTO ILLUSTRATION/POSTMEDIA NEWS

oops guess the meritocracy didn't work out for the artist :shrug-outta-hecks:

(appropriated symbol of raised fist with added cash being clenched)

:capitalist-woke:

By Matthew Lau

The ongoing decline of economic freedom and rise of socialism in Canada is a march towards absurdity. The sure results of this trend are excess poverty and moral decay. The latter point is an important one, for it is often believed that socialism “merely” makes people worse off. In fact, socialism also makes people worse: more envious, greedy, uncharitable, unco-operative, unfair, irresponsible, careless, wasteful, slothful, childish, short-sighted, intolerant, corrupt, controlling, dishonest, and stupid. Of course, people are to some extent all of these things whatever the economic system, but socialism makes them much more so, and has no redeeming qualities.

thank u Contra

Socialists often castigate capitalism for promoting greed, when in reality, greed and envy are at the heart of the socialist system. “I have never understood,” Thomas Sowell wrote, “why it is ‘greed’ to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else’s money.” Socialists insist that they are entitled to a “fair share” of other people’s money, but why any share greater than zero is fair, they fail to explain. Nor do socialists generally say what share they would consider fair, as it seems that whatever the share, they want more — even when top earners pay a marginal income tax rate of more than 50 per cent, as they currently do in all but two provinces.

With greed and envy central to socialism, the picture painted by socialists of their economic system as compassionate is a fraud. It is no coincidence that as government economic control expands, charitable giving is reduced. In fact, it is difficult to point to a time and place with greater charitable activity than the United States in the second half of the 19th century — the heyday of free market capitalism. Unfortunately, as the government increasingly coerced “donations” via the tax system, it destroyed a significant amount of private charitable activity. The replacement of private charity by government spending, in the United States, Canada, and elsewhere, has been disastrous.

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With “donations” to government, donors give not out of love, but because they do not want to go to jail. Many capitalists voluntarily give to private charities, but if large numbers of socialists are happily remitting to the government higher amounts than they owe in taxes, it has not been widely noticed or reported. Replacing private charity with legal entitlement has also deleteriously affected recipients, who have become ungrateful and demanding. The best example might be the heavily subsidized university undergraduates from middle-upper-class families who demand that their entire tuition bills get shoved onto the backs of taxpayers, many of whom are from far less privileged backgrounds.

:improve-society:

In addition to making recipients thankless, the ruinous “compassion” of government programs has also, by introducing moral hazard, provoked a wide range of destructive behaviours and attitudes. Government welfare programs that entitle people to subsidies if they are in unfortunate situations may make sense when limited and targeted to those experiencing real hardship, but today such programs are so numerous and bloated that they effectively subsidize people to be lazy, waste their time, take foolish risks, squander money, take their education unseriously, neglect their health, become unproductive, behave as irresponsible idiots, and otherwise act in ways that are socially and economically destructive.

:xi-reactionary-spotted:

The capitalist system promotes co-operation: in order to earn profits, businesses must make, both to workers and to customers, better offers than they receive anywhere else, or else risk losing them to competitors. People are free to choose, under the capitalist system, what to buy and sell, from where, and at what price. By contrast, the top-down control of socialism unfailingly promotes disorder. The “man of system,” as Adam Smith called the conceited central planner, “seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board.” But people aren’t chess pieces, and forcing them in a direction they did not choose — for example, by dictating how they must spend their money, or what industries they must work in — causes society to be miserable and, as Smith said, “at all times in the highest degree of disorder.”

:brainworms:

Enamoured by their top-down economic and social designs, and convinced of their righteousness, socialists are overwhelmingly intolerant of diversity, hostile toward individual choice, and close-minded to ideas not their own. In recent years, partly because blatant large-scale government economic planning is disreputable in many quarters, socialism has become intertwined with climate alarmism and the enforcement of wokeness — both ideologies that, like socialism, politicize commercial activity and rely on a privileged ruling class exercising oppressive top-down control. Turning increasingly from free-market capitalism to head down this path is an act of absurdity. Socialism leads invariably to less freedom, more misery, and a society where people are not only worse off, but worse.

:galaxy-brain: