The word freedom is rather frequently abused – perverted away from its actual meaning and made to serve an ideological agenda – by persons on the political Left. Marx started the “tradition” by redefining freedom as an absence of tension and conflict. Leftists who’ve come after him have taken that ball and run with it to the furthest reaches of totalitarian imaginings.
It’s no coincidence that the Left is rabidly opposed to private property rights. The right of private property is the indispensable prerequisite to freedom. As Robert Anton Wilson put it in the Illuminatus! trilogy, without private property there can be no private decisions. There can be no privacy of any sort. Indeed, one cannot defend the right to life in the absence of private property.
Yet throughout post-Enlightenment history there have been “thinkers” straining to condemn private property and all that goes with it. Most Gentle Readers will be familiar with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s statement that “Property is theft.” Where he got such an idea, I cannot imagine. The concept of theft is incomprehensible without an understanding of property rights; the two are the absolute antitheses of one another.
Respect for property rights enabled the West to rise from the squalor that originally enmeshed all of Mankind, while the rest of the world wallowed therein. To be an enemy of property is to be an enemy of human flourishing, and of freedom itself. Despite that, the Leftist will posture as your intellectual and moral superior because of his opposition to the property-rights-based economy of capitalism. He maintains that it marks him as “compassionate.”
Three relevant articles have found their ways to me this morning:
The first two articles illustrate the Leftist ideology without any of its “compassionate” disguises. Pope Francis, an unabashed Marxist, has said innumerable things of the sort reported in the first article. He’s relentless in promoting Leftist causes, every one of which involves the destruction of the right of private property and of human freedom. The second article, which appears at first to be about a “democratic socialist” publication (Jacobin magazine), is really about the Left’s complete dismissal of all rights. As this tweet from Jacobin editor Bhaskar Sunkara makes clear:
...that dismissal extends even to the right to life of innocent children, should they happen to have been born into the “wrong class.”
Such defenses of atrocities are typical among open Leftists. They know that they cannot have the sort of society they want unless they first eliminate the concept of inviolable individual rights. For it is that concept that forbids them to expropriate and impoverish without constraint. They can’t proceed with that unless they first liquidate all opposition, including the immature children of whatever adults have opposed them.
The third article illustrates the corrective available to us poor downtrodden serfs in a private-property / capitalist economy: the choice to go elsewhere:
After spending some time at our local Freedom Fest, surrounded by like-minded people enjoying a beautiful autumn day, we headed to our local Regal Cinema to see Infidel. Our preference was to see it at our locally owned independent theater, but it only showed for two days there, and we missed our opportunity to support Hayden Discount Theater. (Update: just discovered Infidel will be playing at HDT through Thursday.)When we arrived at Regal Riverstone, they were setting up their mask table in front. I approached the nice young people charged with dealing with the public, and said that neither my husband or myself was allowed to wear a mask. The young lady was only able to say, "Unfortunately", before I said, "Thank you, we're gone."
I'm well aware there will be peripheral blow back; thousands of people losing their jobs and businesses, who rely in part on the movie crowd to support them such as restaurants and other venues around the theater. I feel badly for these people.
However, (always pay attention to what follows "however" or "but") this scamdemic has opened the eyes of untold millions of people to certain facts. Most important is we don't need you. We don't need your over-priced immoral Hollywood dreck to entertain us.
Or, as Lenny Bruce once said, quite memorably:
Capitalism is the best. It’s free enterprise. Barter. Gimbels, if I get really rank with the clerk, “Well I don’t like this”, how I can resolve it? If it really gets ridiculous, I go, “Frig it, man, I walk.” What can this guy do at Gimbels, even if he was the president of Gimbels? He can always reject me from that store, but I can always go to Macy’s. He can’t really hurt me. Communism is like one big phone company. Government control, man. And if I get too rank with that phone company, where can I go? I’ll end up like a schmuck with a dixie cup on a thread.
(Gimbels was still around in Bruce’s time. Also, there was only one phone company. Imagine trying to explain that to your teenagers.)
There are no comparable corrective mechanisms under a socialist regime. The State controls everything. The public has no alternatives, nor any means by which to resist the State. Any attempt to resist, even by expressing an opinion contrary to the socialist line, is met with “re-education,” imprisonment, or – for the really recalcitrant and “ineducable” – execution.
The crowning irony of the anti-property-rights / socialist ideology is this: The proponents all claim to be pursuing “freedom.” Incredible. How free are you if you have no right to the fruits of your own labor? How free are you if you are forbidden to trade the products of your labor with others? How free are you if you’re not allowed to speak your mind – if your life can be extinguished whenever the State pleases, for the heinous crime of disagreeing with it?
Of course, this is in accord with the Marxist redefinition of “freedom” as the absence of tension and conflict...as long as you buy into the notion that once the State controls everything, all tension and conflict will magically vanish. But the history of socialist regimes makes plain that under socialism, the common man will know nothing but tension and conflict: the tension of being watched for signs of rebellion, and the conflict between what he desires and what the State will allow him:
Freedom is the opposite of socialist compulsion and prohibition. The socialist ideologues roaming among us want to deflect you from grasping that. Dare to mention it and they’ll call you everything but white.
They are the enemies of freedom.
1 comment:
Interesting you mentioned Regal Cinemas. Things aren't going too well for them right now.
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