As more and more Americans put their heads into the smiling noose of socialism, some of the politicians stringing them up are dropping the pretense that they’re only interested in improving life for regular people.
Socialist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s hand-picked, three-person “Quadrennial Commission” just released its 127-page report recommending – brace yourself – giant pay raises for the city’s elected officials. They’d all get 18.2% raises and automatic yearly pay bumps. The mayor’s own salary would jump from $258,700 to $305,800.
Mamdani has said he won’t personally accept the extra money, which may be as authentic as offering the Brooklyn Bridge for easy monthly payments. But even if it’s true, the legislation enacting the pay raises would hike the salary of every city council member from $148,500 to $175,500, buying friends and votes on the council with tax dollars grabbed from the pockets of New York City residents and businesses.
Socialism, like communism and all other forms of collectivism, is looting. It’s based on the idea that everything produced in a society kind of belongs to everybody, and the government’s job is to distribute it.
Socialists seek power so they can collect the fruits of one person’s labor and, after a suitable deduction to pay themselves and their government-employee cronies, send that money off to someone they have chosen to receive it.
It never works, because production requires effort, and effort requires motivation. Collectivism reverses the incentives. People who set alarm clocks and spend years studying, working, investing, working harder and finally seeing financial rewards are told that they are not entitled to that money. Who is entitled to it? All the people who did nothing to earn it.
This is why socialism causes stagnation. It’s not always immediately apparent to voters, because capitalism produces a surplus that socialism can bleed dry for a few years before the effect of the waning alarm clocks is felt. Eventually, though, the people who didn’t go to medical school are not doctors for the “healthcare is a human right” crowd to underpay, and the manufacturing facilities that closed or never were built are not around to provide jobs, benefits and tax revenue. Inventions that withered for lack of investment are not solving costly problems or improving lives. The number of people creating wealth shrinks, while the number of people needing government benefits climbs.
Think of socialism as an economic crash test. On day one, the crash dummies are already getting out of the cars. When the socialist government sees the widespread refusal to drive head-on into the wall, it turns to the tool that only government can legally use: force.
In a country like the United States, which still has a Constitution that protects individual rights and requires the consent of the governed through elections of representatives, socialists need a justification for force that will win the approval of enough voters to keep them in power. They also need some kind of legal theory that will eventually convince enough judges to go along with it.
The creation of a justification for force is a big project, one that requires the cooperation of government agencies, universities, and media companies.
One way to achieve this cooperation is through the control of government funding and regulatory approvals. It’s amazing how many people will independently arrive at the same conclusion when they’ll be out of a job if they don’t.
For example, we’re learning now through the release of government documents and through lawsuits that much of what we were told about COVID was far less than certain, if not completely untrue. Under the Biden administration, COVID dissent was a justification for heads to be cut off, professionally speaking. Government-controlled censorship was imposed on social media platforms, and government-funded propaganda was generously distributed to media companies. Government edicts kept people isolated. Then the U.S. government printed money and redistributed wealth that was effectively seized from the inflation-ravaged currency Americans had earned or saved.
It was a model of totalitarianism, forced on a free country, justified by fear that was intentionally fanned by the government in defiance of what – we know now – they knew to be the facts.
Another example of a justification for force is climate-change alarmism. Consider California’s “cap and invest” program, in which appointed “air resources” regulators force productive enterprises such as refineries and utilities to buy permits to emit greenhouse gases produced by their normal operations. The money goes into a fund in the state treasury, where legislators split up the loot and give it to their political supporters, including $1 billion per year to the looters who are supposedly building the bullet train. This has no effect on the climate, but it’s a perpetual justification for the use of force against businesses, with the costs passed through to California consumers.
The biggest project to justify the use of force is the “Woke” industrial complex, the ongoing effort in academia, activist organizations and media companies to frame the entire history of the United States as a crime scene in order to justify collectivist redistribution.
Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
A large part of the project is visible in the new White House report, “Saving America’s Story,” about the sorry state of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. It’s now a propaganda mill to build a foundation for redistribution. For example, page 71-72 of the report shows the museum’s “toolkit” document on “whiteness and white culture,” informing the reader that “individualism,” “family structure,” “rational, linear thinking,” “work ethic,” “rigid time schedules” and having a “plan for the future” are part of an “oppressive culture.”
Defining qualities and values that lead to success as “oppressive” is a justification for using the force of government to seize the assets of the successful. Garbage like this has been fed to generations of schoolchildren, now grown up and voting for socialists.
Little do they realize the “Democratic Socialists of America” are monitoring their bank accounts to see if they’re oppressors yet.
Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on X @Susan_Shelley