Almost from the moment Communism was created, and certainly after the Communist Party seized control of the old Soviet Union, the ideology was the hobgoblin of American politics. America is the most capitalist country on earth; Communism is the opposite of capitalism. Under Communism, everything (“the means of production”) is owned by the State, which then distributes the goodies to “each according to his need.” The essence of capitalism, on the other hand, is that the most talented among us achieves his desires through hard work. Communism says no: people should achieve their desires regardless of whether or not they work to earn them. The State, in turn, will control everything, and then put smart bureaucrats in charge, who will determine what everybody gets.
It’s an odd ideology. There’s seldom, if ever, been anything like it in human history. Has there ever been a society whose leaders said, “If you don’t want to work, feel free to loaf. We’ll make sure you get everything anyway.” I don’t think so.
This brings up the subject of “rights.” What is a “right”? Communists and progressives like Carroll Fife have very strange beliefs concerning “rights.” According to them, “rights” are whatever they define them to be. Since housing—a place to live—is so essential to human well being, housing must be a “right.” Ditto food, healthcare, clothing, childcare and “dignity.” And this is the essence of progressivism: It is government’s responsibility to see to it that all “rights” are guaranteed by the State. Otherwise, why have government?
Anyone can see that this ideology is unworkable. This is for two separate but related reasons: one is a moral reason and the other is pragmatic. The moral reason is because we know, as reasonable beings, that getting free stuff in life isn’t right. We’re all in this together. Most of us understand that nobody is going to offer us goodies for nothing. Life doesn’t work that way. Nothing in the animal kingdom, which we are part of, gets a free lunch. Whether you’re a paramecium or a pigeon, you have to work hard for your sustenance. Hey, I didn’t design the system; something grander than me did, so if you think the system sucks, complain to the Supreme Engineer.
Communism doesn’t believe in a Supreme Engineer, which is why they’re so down on the notion of God. Marx, Engels and Lenin had no explanation for why life exists, and maybe no explanation is needed. They felt that believing in God was a waste of time. I’m not here to argue theology with anyone; whether or not God is real is up to you. But I do believe that this universe is not kind. Eat or be eaten: that seems to be the underlying law governing life. Had I been the Supreme Engineer, you can bet I would have made our universe a kinder, gentler place, where men didn’t have to struggle just to get a roof over their heads or have a bite to eat. But they do. And here is where Communism makes its tragic blunder.
The blunder is assuming that we’re all responsible for each others’ well being. I don’t buy that. I never assumed, growing up, that anyone would take care of me. I realized that if anyone was going to provide for me, it had to be me, not some generous State. I understood that America has Social Security, Medicare, food assistance and healthcare programs that, to some extent, make our lives a little easier than it would otherwise be without them. And for those entitlements, I’m enormously grateful. But I never for a moment thought that the government was obligated to give me everything I wanted or needed. I knew that, barring some miracle, what I would have in life was pretty much equal to the effort I put into achieving it. I realized that life isn’t fair (to quote JFK) and that it would be patently unfair to take what little I had and redistribute it to others who seemed to have a problem with working. Am I my brother’s keeper? Poetically it’s a nice statement. Realistically it’s ridiculous. Because living beings require motivations to work hard, and if the government is giving you free stuff, then what’s your motivation for getting off your butt and actually working?
What Communists, and I include most progressives in that category, fail to understand is that we humans are part of the universe, not separate from it. We can’t rewrite the rules. And this gets around to the pragmatic impossibility of true Communism: everything costs money. Yes, I hate that reality, and if I had designed everything, I would have eliminated what FDR called “the silly, foolish old dollar sign.” I hate that we’re all trapped in this capitalist system where everybody sees everybody else as a source of money. Yet here we are. What can we do about it?
It’s hard for me to understand just what Carroll Fife’s ideology is. I “get” that she broadly defines “rights” in a sense I believe is exaggerated. But she never explains how these “rights” came into being. Everything that exists must have a cause, right? So if the “right to housing” exists—and it’s central to Fife’s political work—where did it come from? If there’s no God, then did the “right to housing” suddenly pop into existence with the Big Bang? If it did, what else came into being with the creation of the universe? There are lots of things other than housing that I want and need: warm clothing, satisfying food, sex. If. there’s a “right to housing,” why is there not an equivalent right to sex? Clearly there is no “right to sex.” Why not? Why is there no right to sushi (which is very expensive) or to a nice cashmere sweater to keep me warm when the fog blows in? It may sound snarky, but the point is that, once you start compiling a list of “rights,” where does it end?
And who pays for it? Here, Communists have an answer: Taxes! There’s potentially an infinite source of money in society: all we have to do is tax people, which is really the equivalent of theft. The theory is, if there are, say, ten thousand people in Oakland who can’t afford a nice cashmere sweater, then all we have to do is raise that amount of money by taxing everyone. Let’s say a nice cashmere sweater costs $150. Multiple that by ten thousand, and it comes to $1.5 million. That’s not every much if you spread it out among the estimated 200,000 people who pay taxes in Oakland. True: but the Communists won’t stop at free cashmere sweaters. They want free healthcare, free childcare, free rent, free college education, free everything for the poor. I won’t even attempt to estimate how much that would cost, but let’s just say, conservatively, it would be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars for each individual, for a total of hundreds of millions of dollars each year. Now we’re talking real money!
Where does Carroll Fife expect to find this money? She never explains, because apparently her mind doesn’t function in fully logical ways. But we can infer that her answer would be, again, Taxes! It’s as if she believes there’s a bottomless well of cash available to be had if only taxes were raised on every Oakland resident…and if there’s still not enough money to pay for everything, then raise taxes again.
Okay, so let’s play out this scenario. Eventually people get tired of taxes. Businessmen get tired of payroll taxes, homeowners get tired of transfer taxes and parcel taxes, consumers get tired of sales taxes. People start to move out of Oakland, in protest or desperation or both. Suddenly that cushy little tax base the progressives love evaporates. The golden goose stops laying. But now—in our scenario—Oakland still has unfunded liabilities. All those poor people still need those sweaters; they still need their subsidized apartments, their kids need childcare, they all need doctors and nurses, and of course we all still need police and fire protection. What happens when the well is dry?
I think you know. Bankruptcy. Which is where Oakland is headed. This is directly related to the latest news, as reported by Oakland Report, that Oakland has “the highest violent crime rate of any California city.” Normal people do not care to live in criminal societies; they pack up their stuff and move. What was once cutely termed “the tax base” turns out to be non-existent. It’s like the football that Lucy keeps snatching away from Charlie Brown. You can’t kick something that’s not there; you can’t spend money that’s not there, either, not if you want to have a city where people actually wish to live.
This is the fundamental mistake of Communism: it violates the natural laws by which all life is controlled. People do not like to share the results of their labor with those who labor not. Nor would I have it any other way. I sympathize with the progressives who want only the best for poor people. My heart is not hardened against the poor. Yet I’m enough of a realist to understand that we, as a society, cannot afford to underwrite the poor. There’s simple not enough of “the silly, foolish old dollar sign.” What can we do about that? We can’t simply print more money because inflation would go through the roof. At some point, we have to tell the poor, “Look, we really do feel for you, but there’s a limit to what we can do for you.” And we should promote the message, which I absorbed as a youngster, that no one is going to take care of us if we don’t take care or ourselves. For Carroll Fife, who seems to feel that she has a “right” to free stuff, like the house on Magnolia Street she stole with Moms 4 Housing, reality is irrelevant. As long as there’s a taxpayer with a single untaxed dollar left in Oakland, Fife will remain in the business of the Communist purveyor of free stuff.
Tomorrow: A closer look at Fife’s crazy Communism
Steve Heimoff