My ex-girlfriend used to make these unbearable YouTube videos featuring these really bad “life hacks.” The worst one hands down was her using raw chicken breast to clean the inside of her car (in all honesty it really does pick up every single last piece of dust and leaves your car interior shiny, but you also waste a perfectly good chicken breast and they already invented that, it’s called the “Swiffer”). I’m no vegan, but that’s a waste of perfectly good food, it was stupid and I told her so.
The next day I come over her house and she is violently ill, she’s got puke in her hair and she can’t stop throwing up, can’t even keep water down. So after I comb the vomit from her scalp we go to the doctor and he’s checking her out and he starts asking her if she owns any pets.
She said:
“no.”
He says:
“Well, at first I guessed it must have been from owning a turtle because you have salmonella poisoning so bad that I doubt it was from just eating some undercooked meat.”
That’s when I told the doctor about her stupid little life hack. She cleaned her car so many times with raw chicken breast that her salmonella poisoning made him even skip past the idea of her eating raw meat to literally sleeping next to a turtle.
If you think this is a stupid story it’s actually so much worse, she did it all again and the same thing happened. She got salmonella a second time from using a raw piece of chicken to clean the inside of her car solely because she just really liked the idea of the world’s stupidest life hack. Again, they already invented the Swiffer there is absolutely no need to use uncooked chicken to wipe your car’s interior. What do they call it when you repeat the same mistake over and over again expecting a different result?
Nobody is more guilty of repeating the same mistake over and over again than Socialists. As a former Socialist I can tell you that Socialism doesn’t work because private property rights are absolutely essential for prosperity and Socialism seeks to completely eradicate all private property.
Private property rights are absolutely essential in the fight against poverty because voluntary exchanges and private property rights lead to the greatest possible production of wealth. A redistribution of wealth, which is sought after under socialism negates private property away from those who produce to those who do not. This leads to over consumption and a tragedy of the commons with less production, thus transferring wealth in the least beneficial way to society. This absolutely creates a lower standard of living by creating enormous obstacles to wealth generation.
The tragedy of the commons is an economic theory which states that within a shared resource system such as socialism, individuals begin acting independently according to their own self-interest, and behave contrarily to the common good of all other users by depleting or overusing those resources through their collective actions.
Not only does socialism lead people to “act selfishly” and use up more than their fair share it prevents capital formation, it prevents wealth creation, and instead promotes capital consumption and wealth consumption. It prevents ordinary people from replenishing used goods and services it is absolutely contrary to the common good.
Because there is an abolition of private property there is no ownership. Let’s focus on an example: imagine you were living in a country where private property is illegal. You cannot own your home, you just happen to live inside of one that was probably built by some member of your family generations ago and you were born there and that’s what you know. In a world devoid of private property you can’t have a title that proves ownership, you cannot transfer ownership or sell that home or even rent it out. You cannot even own a business, so how are you supposed to improve your situation? The answer is you don’t. This is why you do not see a middle class in Haiti, only poor people and extremely rich people who have been given monopolistic grants by government to property.
What causes poverty? The answer is nothing it is the original state the default starting point, the real question is how do we create prosperity?
Capital formation is the default economic solution to human existence. The ability to freely trade your own private property (goods or services) on a voluntary level without government intervention is required to create prosperity. The moment you bring in a ruling class you no longer have capitalism.
You can have socialism, communism, fascism or anything else, but the moment government tells you what you can’t do, or have to do with your labor, or the product of your labor you no longer have capitalism. Socialists tend to (intentionally) confuse capitalism with state planned economics.
So, back to my ex-girlfriend, what is it that keeps people repeating the same mistake over and over again expecting it not to result in Salmonella? I call it “The Struggle Addiction”. There is clearly something satisfying to one’s ego by focusing on “the Struggle” and identifying with “the Struggle” and not the objective of “the Struggle.” Many politicians on the left, like Bernie Sanders enjoy Jedi Mind Tricking people into believing that they need to identify with “oppressed people” or “poor people” or “disenfranchised people” or some other group of struggling people in order to be cool, compassionate, liberal or whatever reasoning they use. When the opportunity for success comes, many people on the left will sabotage that opportunity subconsciously in order to continue “the struggle.” The left loves to promote activism for the sake of activism and they love to denounce anything at all that will deliver any form of actual progress.
Socialism is like a treadmill, lots of hard work gets done and nobody ever really gets ahead, because there is no way to uphold private property rights, so there is no capacity for capital formation when everything is collectivized. The entire purpose of socialism is to impoverish people by removal of private property rights.
I will tell you, as a former Marxist I had the same mentality that “If we just all shared and combined resources we could end poverty in a generation”, the only problem is that literal capital formation is the only conceivable way to accomplish that endeavor.
Socialists usually claim that “this time Socialism is gonna work” and the end result is always a hell of a lot worse than just some salmonella poisoning. The people of Venezuela wish they just had three days of combing puke out of their scalps, they’re living a nightmare and these Marxists think socialism is some kind of life hack that will have a different outcome this time! If it doesn’t work, they’ll just claim “it wasn’t their socialism!”
