(Minghui.org) [Editor's Note] This series is a reprint of The Epoch Times' English translation of the book How the Specter of Communism Is Ruling Our World by the editorial team of Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party.
Table of Contents of the Book
Preface: How the Specter of Communism Is Ruling Our World
Introduction: How the Specter of Communism Is Ruling Our World
Chapter One: The Specter’s Strategies for Destroying Humanity
Chapter Two: Communism’s European Beginnings
Chapter Three: Tyranny in the East
Chapter Four: Exporting Revolution
Chapter Five: Infiltrating the West
Chapter Six: The Revolt Against God
Chapter Seven: The Destruction of the Family
Chapter Eight: How Communism Sows Chaos in Politics
Chapter Nine: The Communist Economic Trap
Chapter Ten: Corrupting the Legal System
Chapter Eleven: Desecrating the Arts
Chapter Twelve: Sabotaging Education
Chapter Thirteen: The Media – The Specter’s Mouthpiece
Chapter Fourteen: Popular Culture – A Decadent Indulgence
Chapter Fifteen: The Communist Roots of Terrorism
Chapter Sixteen: The Communism Behind Environmentalism
Chapter Seventeen: Globalization and Communism
Chapter Eighteen: The Chinese Communist Party’s Global Ambitions
Conclusion: How the Specter of Communism Is Ruling Our World
What is Included in This Part?
Chapter Nine: The Communist Economic Trap
Introduction
1. State Ownership and Planned Economies: Systems of Slavery
a. State Ownership: A Totalitarian Yoke
b. Economic Planning: Destined to Fail
2. Western Countries: Practicing Communism by Another Name
a. High Taxes and Welfare
b. Aggressive Economic Interventionism in Western Countries
c. How Socialist Economics Leads to Communist Totalitarianism
3. The Dystopian Socialism of the Chinese Communist Party
a. The Chinese Economy: No Relaxation of Communist Control
b. The Truth Behind China’s Economic Rise
c. Consequences of the Chinese Economic Model
4. The Ravages of Socialism in the Developing World
a. Eastern Europe: Haunted by Socialism
b. How Socialist Economics Failed Developing Nations
5. Marx’s Theory of Exploitation: An Inversion of Good and Evil
6. Hatred and Jealousy: The Origin of Absolute Egalitarianism
a. Economic Egalitarianism: A Stepping Stone to Communism
b. Communism’s Use of Unions to Undermine Free Societies
7. Communist ‘Ideals’: Tempting Man Toward His Own Destruction
8. Morality, Prosperity, and Peace
References
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Introduction
Communism’s influence is present in every sector of our present economic system. With the trend of ever-expanding government being the norm, virtually every country on earth is moving away from classic free-market principles and gravitating toward communist or socialist economics.
Looking at the countries that abandoned communism or the socialist economic model after the fall of the Soviet bloc, one would think that the communist specter had failed in its goals. But the reality isn’t so simple. The specter’s methods do not follow a rigid pattern. For the sake of a greater objective, it may abandon certain forms while adopting others to suit the historical or social situation. Nowhere is this truer than in the economic sphere.
More than 150 years ago, Karl Marx advocated the abolition of private property and ascendance of state ownership in his book Das Kapital. Totalitarian communist states tried to achieve this objective directly, using terror, violence, and mass murder. But as overt communist doctrine lost its appeal, leftists in democratic countries devised nonviolent forms. The multitudinous strains of socialism and communism they created and introduced throughout the years defy easy classification.
In addition to curtailing basic rights to private property and enterprise, communist economic policy fosters corruption and contributes to the erosion of traditional culture. To preserve their prosperity, way of life, and moral foundations, nations around the world must awaken to communist subversion in the economic realm, and take measures against it.
1. State Ownership and Planned Economies: Systems of Slavery
Heaven created man, endowed him with wisdom and strength, and decreed that in his life he would reap rewards for his labor — and thus be able to obtain enough to secure his life. The Declaration of Independence states, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” [1] Naturally, these rights include the power to possess and allocate property and assets.
In contrast, Marx and Engels stated in The Communist Manifesto, “The theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.” [2] This is a reference to state ownership, which, under a planned economy, is mandatory. In communist planned economies, the means of production are directly controlled by the state. The essence of this system violates heaven’s principles, runs contrary to human nature, and, ultimately, is a form of slavery.
a. State Ownership: A Totalitarian Yoke
Anti-communist pioneer Fred Schwarz told the following joke in his book You Can Trust the Communists … to Be Communists, about an interviewer who visits first a Soviet automobile plant and then an American one:
“Who owns this factory?”
“We do,” they replied.
“Who owns the land on which it is built?”
“We do.”
“Who owns the products of the factory when they are made?”
“We do.”
Outside in a corner of a large park were three battered jalopies. The visitor asked, “Who owns those cars out there?”
They replied, “We own them, but one of them is used by the factory manager, one is used by the political commissar, and the other is used by the secret police.”
The same investigator came to a factory in America, and said to the workers, “Who owns this factory?”
“Henry Ford,” they replied.
“Who owns the land on which it is built?”
“Henry Ford.”
“Who owns the products of the factory when they are made?”
“Henry Ford.”Outside the factory was a vast park filled with every make and variety of modern American automobile. He said, “Who owns all those cars out there?”
They replied, “Oh, we do.” [3]
This story vividly displays the consequences and differences between systems of private and state ownership. Under the system of state ownership, resources and the gains from labor are nationalized. Gone are the mechanisms that motivate individual enthusiasm, ambition, and innovation, along with the sense of responsibility conveyed by personal property rights. In name, state ownership means that the wealth of a country is shared by all citizens, but in practice, it means that the privileged class monopolizes resources and looks after itself first.
The ultimate factor in economic growth is people. State ownership chokes people’s vitality and motivation to be productive. It undermines morale, promotes inefficiency, and creates oversupply or gross shortages. From Soviet collective farms to the people’s communes in China to failed collectivization in Cambodia and North Korea, the system of state ownership brings starvation wherever it goes. For example, the man-made famine in China killed tens of millions of people between 1959 and 1961.
Both evil and kindness exist in mankind. Private property ownership allows man to develop integrity and encourages labor and thrift. Collective property ownership, however, encourages the evil in human nature, promoting jealousy and laziness.
Austrian economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek wrote that the growth of civilization relies on social traditions that put private property at the center. Such traditions spawned the modern commercial system and its attendant economic growth. This is an organic, self-generating order that does not require a government to function. Yet communist and socialist movements seek to shape the world according to their wishes — what Hayek called their “fatal conceit.” [4]
If private ownership and freedom are inseparable, then the same principle applies to state ownership, wed as it is to dictatorship and suppression. The system of state ownership nationalizes resources, degrades economic productivity, and turns people into the country’s servants and slaves. All people must obey the commands of the central party, and any ideas and voices inconsistent with the regime can be shut down. People are then powerless against state intervention.
Thus, the elimination of private ownership and the establishment of state ownership inevitably leads to totalitarian outcomes. Collectivism is a yoke affixed on the necks of humans by a totalitarian state. Freedom is stolen — including the freedom to be upright — and everyone is forced to follow the moral commands of the communist regime.
If power is privatized and wealth collectivized, disaster awaits mankind.
b. Economic Planning: Destined to Fail
Under a planned economy, an entire society’s production, allocation of resources, and distribution of products are based on a plan established by the state. This is completely different from supply and demand economics in a free market.
The planned economy has natural and obvious defects. First, it requires the collection of a huge amount of data in order to make reasonable arrangements for production. For any country, especially a modern state with a large population, the amount of required information is unimaginably large and impossible to process. For instance, the former Soviet Union’s commodity pricing bureau had to set prices for twenty-four million different kinds of goods. [5]
The complexity and variability of society and people cannot be solved through a unified planned economy. Even with the use of modern big data and artificial intelligence, human thoughts cannot possibly be inputted as variables, and so the system will always be incomplete.
Economist Ludwig von Mises discussed the relationship between socialism and the market in his article “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth.” [6] He notes that without a real market, a socialist society isn’t able to make reasonable economic calculations. Thus, the distribution of resources cannot be rationalized, and the planned economy fails.
Additionally, economic planning requires coercive state control of resources. This ultimately requires absolute power, quotas, and commands. When the requirements of the real world fail to conform to state planning, state power tramples on natural economic trends, thus causing the mass misallocation of capital and all its attendant problems. The planned economy uses the limited power and “wisdom” of government in a doomed attempt to play God.
Moreover, an economics of power is first of all beholden to politics, rather than to the actual needs of the people. Economic planning and authoritarian politics are inseparable. Because national plans are inevitably flawed, when problems arise, the plans will be challenged both inside and outside government. Those in power then feel that their authority is being challenged and will fight back with political pressure and purges. Mao Zedong, for instance, ignored the laws of economics and forced through the Great Leap Forward, resulting in a three-year famine that caused tens of millions of deaths. This led to serious challenges to his leadership position in the Communist Party, which is a key reason he later launched the Cultural Revolution.
The disastrous effects of the planned economy and collective ownership have been fully exhibited in the current conditions of Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs). In recent years, a large number of Chinese SOEs have stopped or slowed production, have suffered losses every year, or have become insolvent. They rely on government subsidies and rolling bank credit to maintain operations. They’ve essentially become parasites on the national economy, and many are widely known as “zombie enterprises.” [7] Among the 150,000 state-owned enterprises in China, with the exception of state monopolies in the lucrative sectors of petroleum and telecommunications, other SOEs report minimal profits and suffer serious losses. By the end of 2015, their total assets accounted for 176 percent of GDP, debt accounted for 127 percent, and earnings accounted for only 3.4 percent. [8] Some economists believe that these zombie enterprises have essentially hijacked China’s economy, which for many years has remained dependent on cheap manufacturing made possible by extreme exploitation of low-wage workers and a complete disregard for the environment.
Meanwhile, economic planning deprives people of their freedom and forces the state to look after them. All aspects of people’s lives come under the control of the state, which locks people in an invisible prison, seeks to abolish free will, and alters the parameters of human life established by the divine. The essence of the project is about turning people into slaves and machines. This is yet another manifestation of the communist revolt against the divine and natural law.
2. Western Countries: Practicing Communism by Another Name
For individuals, Marxism’s “abolition of private property” entails the “abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom.” For society, it means that “the proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class.” [9]
Many economic policies or structures may not appear socialist on the surface, yet they play the role of restricting, weakening, or depriving people of the right to private property. Others weaken the mechanics of free enterprise, expand government power, and lead society further down the road toward socialism. The methods used include high taxation, generous social welfare, and aggressive state interventionism.
a. High Taxes and Welfare
High taxation is a covert way to gradually phase out the system of private ownership. The end result of high taxation is the same as the state ownership and “egalitarianism” imposed by communist regimes, with the only difference being whether nationalization is effected before or after production.
In the West, production is controlled privately, but the revenue is converted into state assets via taxes and redistribution schemes. This wealth-taking is achieved legally through democracy and legislation rather than through killing and violence.
An important feature of the communist or socialist economics seen in Western countries is robust social welfare, which is used to gradually erode moral wisdom and freedom. While some government aid is reasonable — such as social security for victims of disasters or accidents — it is easy for welfare to become a convenient instrument of deception. Its positive aspects become the excuse for increasing taxes and government control. In this regard, generous welfare has already achieved the same destructive consequences to people, society, and moral values as do overtly communist economics, without the need for violent revolution.
Social welfare in developed Western countries consumes a large portion of revenue, which comes from taxes transferred from private wealth. All socialized benefits must ultimately be paid for by the people, via taxes or national debt. There is no other method to maintain this level of government largesse. In the United States, more than half of the tax revenue is spent on Social Security and medical care. More than 80 percent of this money comes from personal income taxes and Social Security taxes; 11 percent is from corporate tax. [10] This kind of massive government spending only began in the past century.
In 1895, the US Supreme Court declared income taxes unconstitutional. The decision stood until the 1913 ratification of the 16th Amendment. Data from fifteen countries in the year 1900 show that only seven imposed an income tax, with Italy leading at a rate of 10 percent. Australia, Japan, and New Zealand had income tax rates of about 5 percent.
By 2016, according to data on thirty-five market economies published by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), twenty-seven countries had an income tax rate higher than 30 percent. The countries with the two highest income taxes, at 54 and 49.4 percent, are both in Europe. [11] On top of this, eating or shopping in Europe usually adds more than 20 percent in sales tax. Corporate and other taxes further add to the overall tax burden.
High taxation burdens not only the wealthy, but also those at the bottom of the tax scale. While the rich often have various legal means of shielding themselves from taxes, the poor’s welfare benefits disappear as their income increases beyond a certain threshold. After taxes, this income is often less than what they received on welfare. People are effectively penalized for working harder and thus incentivized to stay on welfare.
Expansive Welfare
In modern society, vast welfare systems have been expanded to cover unemployment, medical care, pensions, occupational injury, housing, education, child care, and more, far beyond traditional concepts of aid for those in immediate need.
A report from The Heritage Foundation shows that in 2013, more than one hundred million people in the United States, or about a third of the population, received welfare benefits (excluding Social Security and Medicare) worth an average of $9,000 per recipient. [12] According to Census Bureau data from that year, 14.8 percent of the population were classified as living below the poverty line — basically the same rate as in 1967, a few years after President Lyndon B. Johnson declared “unconditional war on poverty in America.” This suggests that greatly expanding welfare benefits — as was done under Johnson’s administration — hasn’t achieved the goal of reducing the percentage of people living below the poverty line.
As of 2014, in the fifty years since Johnson launched his War on Poverty, American taxpayers spent $2.2 trillion on welfare. Yet, as statistics from the US Census Bureau show, the poverty rate has remained steady for the past forty years. [13]
Moreover, poverty is calculated by income and doesn’t factor in the various benefits afforded to welfare recipients, such as food stamps, housing subsidies, and education benefits. Over a century ago, French thinker Alexis de Tocqueville said that by only using poverty thresholds to allocate aid, it is impossible to know whether eligible individuals are actually suffering from circumstances beyond their control or if their misfortune is of their own making. [14]
The deliberate categorization of large numbers of people into the “impoverished” demographic provides ample excuse for the expansion of welfare. Living standards in poverty today are far superior to those in the 1960s. According to a government survey conducted in 1999, 96 percent of parents in impoverished households said that their children had never gone hungry due to inability to buy food. Almost 50 percent of impoverished households lived in detached houses, and 40 percent lived in townhouses. Just 9 percent lived in mobile homes. Eighty percent had air conditioning and two-fifths owned widescreen LCD TVs. Three-quarters of impoverished households owned cars. [15]
Even still, the benefits provided by the US government are below average compared with those of other members of the OECD. Most people living in Nordic countries and other Western European nations enjoy far greater welfare than Americans. In Denmark, for example, even the wealthiest citizens enjoy a cradle-to-grave social safety net that includes free medical care, university education, and other generous benefits. Swedes are entitled to 480 days of paid parental leave when a child is born or adopted. Greeks, prior to their country’s economic collapse, enjoyed an annual fourteen-month-worth salary and retirement at the age of fifty-seven. The country spent 17.5 percent of its GDP on pension payments.
The expansion of welfare from its traditional role of emergency aid to long-term benefits for entire populations is, in fact, part of the goal of imposing a communist economy.
Social Benefits, Corruption, and Class Conflicts
From an economic point of view, the essence of welfare is to take money from some people and transfer its value to others. However, it is the government that is responsible for distributing the wealth, usually without requiring anything in return—thus de-emphasizing the wisdom that one must work in order to gain. The loss of this moral principle is particularly evident in Northern Europe.
Swedish scholar Nima Sanandaji demonstrated this point using data from the World Value Survey. In the early 1980s, 82 percent of Swedes agreed with the statement that “it is wrong to receive government benefits that you do not deserve.” In the 2010–2014 survey, only 55 percent of Swedes agreed with this statement. [16]
Under a generous welfare system, those who work hard receive fewer returns, and those who are less industrious are rewarded with benefits. Over time, this subtly distorts moral traditions, as those who grew up with high government welfare lose the industriousness, independence, responsibility, and diligence of their forefathers. They take the system for granted and consider welfare to be a human right. They have formed a habit of relying on the government and even holding it hostage for continuous aid. Thus, social values are changed almost irreversibly.
Expansive government welfare also squeezes out the role of traditional charities, depriving the donors of the opportunity to do good works and the beneficiaries of the chance to feel gratitude. In traditional society, charity was given by one’s own choice, either by giving aid directly to the less fortunate or by donating to charitable organizations such as churches. There were clear donors and recipients, and being able to receive assistance was a privilege, not a right. Recipients felt gratitude for the donors’ kindness and would be motivated to use the charity to supplement their own efforts to improve their lot. Those who received charity and turned their lives around would be likely to return the favor when others confronted the same challenges they once faced.
Tocqueville noted that charity combined the virtues of generosity and gratitude, which interact mutually to improve society and exert a positive moral influence. Meanwhile, the relationship between givers and receivers functioned to ease conflicts and antagonism between rich and poor, as charitable behavior on the part of individuals connected members of different economic classes. [17]
The bloated system of modern welfare interrupts the relationship between donors and recipients by bureaucratizing the process of charity. The “donors” of today are taxpayers who are forced to give up their wealth, rather than sharing it voluntarily. Meanwhile, recipients of welfare have no connection to their benefactors and feel no gratitude for their sacrifice.
Tocqueville believed that social welfare exacerbated conflicts between the rich and the poor. Having part of their wealth forcibly confiscated, the wealthy would come to resent welfare recipients. Tocqueville said that the poor, too, would feel discontent if they took their economic relief for granted: “One class still views the world with fear and loathing while the other regards its misfortune with despair and envy.” [18]
Bloated welfare also becomes a way for the communist specter to exacerbate jealousy and political conflict. This has been observed in the Greek economic crisis: Among the upper class, tax evasion became a “national sport,” according to Greek officials cited by The Economist. [19] With reduced tax revenue, the Greek government attempted to cut back on social welfare, only to meet with staunch resistance. So as to not upset its constituents, the government relied on taking out loans to offset diminishing tax revenue, while maintaining the same level of welfare found in other European countries. Greece eventually raised taxes on middle- to high-income earners, farmers, and businesses.
In 2009, an empirical study by Martin Halla, Mario Lackner, and Friedrich G. Schneider showed that social welfare disincentivizes hard work in the long term. The three economists concluded that the dynamics of the welfare state are inimical to the health of a nation’s economic base. [20]
The Culture of Poverty
Welfare should be an emergency measure to assist those in genuine need, effective in circumstances such as those involving occupational accidents, epidemics, natural disasters, and so on. It shouldn’t become the default form of subsistence, as it is incapable of resolving the dilemma of poverty.
Expanding the criteria that determines who is entitled to welfare creates an atmosphere of negative reinforcement that encourages the misuse of these benefits. For example, the term “disability” is being continually redefined to extend eligibility to more individuals. The result is economic malaise, which causes a regression in social morality.
In 2012, The New York Times ran an opinion article titled “Profiting From a Child’s Illiteracy,” which discusses the impact of welfare policy on low-income families living in the Appalachian Mountain region in the eastern United States. The article describes how impoverished families stopped sending their children to literacy classes in order to qualify for aid. “Moms and dads fear that if kids learn to read, they are less likely to qualify for a monthly check for having an intellectual disability,” the article states. “Many people in hillside mobile homes here are poor and desperate, and a $698 monthly check per child from the Supplemental Security Income program goes a long way — and those checks continue until the child turns 18.” [21]
The program began about forty years ago with the goal of helping families whose severely physically or mentally challenged children made it difficult for parents to work—about one percent of poor children. By 2012, more than 55 percent of qualifying children were categorized as mentally challenged, but did not have a defined diagnosis. Across the United States, there are now a total of around 1.2 million “mentally challenged” children for whom taxpayers provide $9 billion annually. [22]
Here, welfare and the flaws of human nature feed each other in a downward spiral. While those who advocate and devise welfare policy may do so with good intentions, the effects of these policies are often detrimental, both to individuals and society as a whole.
Welfare abuse doesn’t just tie down public finances; it also affects the futures of children who grow up inside its system. Research conducted in 2009 found that two-thirds of people who received welfare as children continued to receive it into adulthood. [23]
According to American economist William A. Niskanen, the welfare system has spawned a culture of poverty, which in turn has fed a vicious cycle of dependence on government aid, children born out of wedlock, violent crime, unemployment, and abortion.
Niskanen analyzes state data for 1992 and estimates the potential effects of increasing Aid to Families with Dependent Children benefits by 1 percent of the average personal income. He determined that the number of recipients would increase by about 3 percent; the number in poverty would increase by about 0.8 percent; births to single mothers would increase by about 2.1 percent; and unemployment would increase by about 0.5 percent. Abortions and violent crime would both increase by just more than 1 percent each. [24] Niskanen’s findings suggest that a robust welfare system fosters dependence on the system and discourages personal responsibility.
The disintegration of families is a chief ingredient in the culture of poverty. In a study of historical and contemporary poverty among blacks, economist Walter E. Williams found that in 1925 New York City, 85 percent of black families were two-parent. By 2015, black single-parent households had reached nearly 75 percent. The welfare system incentivizes this phenomenon, as it provides considerably more benefits to single mothers than to those who marry. By purposely remaining single, a parent can access more government subsidies, including welfare payments, housing subsidies, food stamps, and medical care. Welfare has been instrumental in pushing single parenthood, which has proven to cause more poverty. Alternatively, Williams found that the poverty rate among black married couples had remained in the single digits since 1994. [25]
The Left’s Use of Welfare Policy to Gain Votes
While welfare has been ever-expanding over the last few decades, the gap between rich and poor has also continuously increased. The average wage, adjusted for inflation, has increased at a snail’s pace, while wealth flows to the most wealthy, resulting in a larger class of working poor. The Left weaponizes these societal issues to push for a bigger government, higher taxation, and more welfare to combat poverty, exacerbating the problems even further.
Leftwing politicians use a variety of election slogans to convince voters of their noble intent, portraying themselves as possessing the moral high ground, despite that they are draining taxpayer money to fund their programs. Their method is to seize the wealth of the upper and middle classes and distribute it among the poor. This system of forced charity conceals the relationship between the donors (taxpayers) and the recipients. Politicians present themselves as the benevolent givers and receive the recipients’ gratitude in the form of votes, while telling the recipients that they should resent the “rich” — the actual donors.
b. Aggressive Economic Interventionism in Western Countries
In Western countries, the state, which traditionally only passed and enforced laws, has now become a leading participant in the economic arena. Like a referee joining a soccer match, the state has become responsible for controlling and regulating capital in what used to be a mostly self-regulating economy.
At present, governments in the free world are already practicing interventionism in their national economic systems. One driver of this trend came out of the Great Depression in the 1930s. Following the crisis, Western society was deeply influenced by the economic theory developed by British economist John Maynard Keynes. Keynesian economics advocates active state intervention and regulation of the economy through finance. In his seminal book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, Keynes opposes free market self-regulation and instead favors increased government spending and interventions such as bailouts to stabilize the market.
In a healthy society, the government’s role is limited. Only in exceptional situations should the state interfere in the economy, such as during natural disasters or other crises. But today, Keynesian theory has taken root around the world. Governments of virtually all countries are racing to take greater control over their respective economies.
When governments play an active role in the economy, each action creates a massive ripple effect in the markets. New policies and laws can make or break entire industries, forcing many businesses and investors to become overly beholden to government decisions.
Active financial control combined with high-welfare policies has caused many governments to incur huge debt. According to data from the OECD, more than one-third of its member states have government debts higher than 100 percent of GDP. One country’s debt has exceeded 237 percent of its economic output. [26] This presents a major vulnerability for the social and economic futures of many countries.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Ronald Coase wrote multiple research papers on the impact of government intervention. In his work, Coase found that interventionist policy almost always produces negative results. The most probable explanation, he said, is that “the government now operates on such a massive scale that it [has] reached the stage of what economists call negative marginal returns. Anything additional it does, it messes up.” [27]
The Consequences and Reality of Interventionism
There are at least two major consequences of extensive government intervention. First, the power of the state expands in terms of its role and scale. Government officials develop increasing hubris about their ability to interfere with the economy and have the state play the role of savior. After handling a crisis, the government is wont to retain its expanded powers and functions.
Second, interventionism creates more reliance on the government. When the populace encounters challenges, or when the free market cannot provide the desired benefits, the people will lobby in favor of more government intervention to satisfy their demands.
As the power of the state increases, private enterprise weakens and the free market has less space in which to function. People who have benefited from and grown dependent on politicians will increasingly demand that the government take responsibility for allocating wealth, and enact laws to enforce this.
In the West, there is a strong political current pushing society toward the Left. This encompasses followers of the original left wing, including socialists and communists, as well as those not traditionally associated with the Left but who have been co-opted by it. This emboldens leftist politicians to take greater measures to intervene in the economy and interfere with the functioning of private enterprises. This erosion of normal economic activity appears to be caused by various social movements, but in fact, it is the specter of communism that pulls the strings.
Western governments wield their authority under the banner of equality and other political excuses to increase intervention, while enacting laws to give themselves more permanent power. There is no doubt that this behavior deprives market economies of their principal arbiters — the free will of the people.
The state is essentially expanding its authority over the free market to turn it into a command economy. The long-term implications are that all aspects of the economy and popular livelihood will come under state control. Economic means will be used to consolidate political power, enslaving society and its citizens.
c. How Socialist Economics Leads to Communist Totalitarianism
High taxes, high welfare, and widespread state intervention are manifestations of socialism within Western economic systems. As things stand, the only difference between the planned economies of communist countries and heavy state interventionism in the West is the law and some basic aspects of the system are protecting human rights from total government control.
Hayek, the economist and philosopher, cautioned against state-controlled planning and wealth redistribution, saying that it would inevitably tamper with the market and lead to the rise of totalitarianism, regardless of whether the system was democratic or not. Hayek believed that although the socialism practiced in Europe and North America was different from state ownership and planned economies, it would nevertheless arrive at the same outcome — people would still lose their freedom and livelihood, just in a slower and more indirect fashion. [28]
As has been discussed earlier in this book, Marx, Engels, and Lenin all saw communism as the final goal, with socialism a mandatory step on the journey. A train’s destination will not be affected by its stopping at a station along the way — in fact, it might pick up more passengers. Likewise, the specter of communism is the driving force behind a country’s move toward socialism. Once humanity forsakes tradition, whether in the economic sphere or in other areas, and accepts communist ideology, the pace of this development is irrelevant.
The destination at the end of this path is not heaven on earth, but the destruction of humanity. The specter is not concerned with whether “heaven” is realized or not — this promise is merely bait to lure people to their doom.
3. The Dystopian Socialism of the Chinese Communist Party
In 1978, after state ownership and the planned economy had reduced China to a poverty-stricken disaster, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was compelled to introduce economic reforms to keep its hold on power. Embarking on a process of “reform and opening up,” the CCP introduced elements of a free market. This led many to believe that the Party had become capitalist, but this was far from the truth.
a. The Chinese Economy: No Relaxation of Communist Control
Out of expedience, the CCP liberalized some aspects of the Chinese economy, such as allowing private business. But the communist cadres have not loosened their grip. Although private enterprises exist, the CCP has never promised the people any fundamental right to private property. All resources and land remain ultimately at the Party’s disposal.
At the same time, the CCP imposes strict controls on economic matters, including large-scale national planning. The market is only a means used by the state to stimulate production; it is not truly independent, and neither are there institutions in place to support a free market.
The Chinese communist model is a monstrous combination of socialism, statism, and market economics. There is no rule of law or clear system of property rights. The exchange rate is not allowed to adjust itself naturally. The flow of wealth in and out of the country is controlled, and international firms operating in the country are tightly restricted. The CCP uses government subsidies and export tax rebates to boost exports with the aim of defeating competitors with a price war. This has disrupted the normal order of world trade. It is precisely for these reasons that the World Trade Organization has long refused to acknowledge China as a market economy.
Many in Western governments harbored the naive hope that economic development would bring political liberalization and democracy to China. Instead, with greater financial means, the CCP subjected its people to more brutal and sophisticated forms of repression. In July 1999, the regime launched the persecution of one hundred million people in China who practiced the spiritual discipline Falun Gong. In order to carry out the nationwide campaign, the CCP greatly expanded and empowered its security forces, pouring funds into advanced surveillance systems and promoting those responsible for “successful” persecution to high-ranking positions. This war against the universal principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance continues to this day. Inevitably, the instruments used to persecute Falun Gong were repurposed to repress other faiths and the general population. Since 2009, the CCP has spent far in excess of 500 billion yuan (US$75 billion) annually to cover the costs of “maintaining stability,” that is, policing the Chinese population.
b. The Truth Behind China’s Economic Rise
Because of China’s rapid GDP growth over the past forty years, many have come to believe in the superiority of socialist economics. It has made many Westerners, including elites in political and academic circles, marvel at the efficiency of the totalitarian system.
In fact, the economic model the CCP has built cannot be replicated. On the one hand, despite its economic rise, the socialist system has great internal instability. On the other hand, the Party’s model enshrouds an abundance of corruption created by its unscrupulous political system. China’s economic growth has been based in large part on the following factors.
First, the relaxation of the state-owned economy and central planning, and the revitalization of the private sector gave the Chinese economy a powerful productive drive. The Chinese people, who had their industrious potential stifled for decades, showed their desire to rise out of poverty and their drive to do business. Moreover, China’s vast population of more than one billion provided a pool of almost inexhaustible cheap labor.
A second factor was the massive influx of Western capital and technology into China during the reform era. Under the command economy, China’s vast expanses of underutilized land, labor, and markets were like gold for which prices were not yet determined. The combination of capital investment and undeveloped resources ignited the blaze of China’s economic growth. Had it not been for the Party’s totalitarian rule, this fire could have started decades earlier, and in a much more controllable and sustainable fashion.
The scale of Western investment in China is immense. According to published figures, American annual direct investment in China reached almost $117 billion in 2018, up from $11 billion in 2000. [29] The total value of foreign capital entering China from 1979 to 2015 amounted to about $1.64 trillion, according to China’s Ministry of Commerce. [30]
Western countries gave the People’s Republic of China preferential trade status along with broad market access. In May 2000, the US government granted Beijing “permanent normal trade relations.” On December 11, 2001, China formally entered the World Trade Organization and joined the international market. Consequently, a huge amount of Western wealth was transferred to China, making it the “world’s factory.”
However, it cannot be forgotten that the PRC’s economic power fed on unethical practices: the extreme exploitation of workers, the use of sweatshops and of forced labor in prison camps across the country, the demolition of housing and forced relocation of the occupants, and the like. For the sake of short-term growth, the CCP welcomed environmental destruction and ignored public health hazards in order to squeeze every last drop of profit from its land, people, and resources. The Communist Party took advantage of Western capital, technology, markets, favorable trading status, and cheap domestic production costs to make vast sums in foreign reserves. The trade deficit between the United States and China rose from about $83 billion in 2000 to more than $345 billion in 2019.
Eventually, the CCP overturned the conventions of international trade and took full advantage of the opportunities available to it, regardless of whether they were legitimate. It adopted a national strategy of plagiarizing intellectual property in attempts to overtake other countries in industry and technology. This constitutes the biggest case of theft in history. A 2017 report by the Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property stated that China’s fake goods, pirated software, and stolen trade secrets caused the United States a loss of between $225 billion and $600 billion every year, a figure that did not include losses due to the theft of intellectual property. The report states that over the three preceding years, the United States lost $1.2 trillion due to intellectual theft, the majority of which was perpetrated by China. [31] A report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence stated that 90 percent of cyber attacks on US businesses originated from the Chinese regime and inflicted an estimated $400 billion in total economic damage every year. [32]
The PRC’s economic model utilizes state authority to induce rapid economic development while employing underhanded tactics to increase its competitiveness. It also has encouraged other countries to adopt heavier state intervention. These countries have made the grave mistake of idolizing the Party’s model as a success while ignoring the human and moral tragedies it created.
c. Consequences of the Chinese Economic Model
The CCP’s economic model has put society in moral freefall, exactly in line with the communist specter’s aim of destroying humankind. The Party’s economic power goes hand in hand with the erosion of morality as it drags people into a bottomless sea of indulgence, toward eventual annihilation.
Today’s China is inundated with fake goods, poisonous food, pornography, drugs, gambling, and gangs. Corruption and debauchery have become achievements to take pride in, while social trust is virtually nonexistent. The widening gap between rich and poor is accompanied by social strife and abuse of justice. In the PRC’s economy of power, Party officials use their authority to amass wealth. The severity of the corruption increases with rank. The misappropriation of billions is a normal occurrence. There is simply no government as corrupt or morally degenerate as the Chinese communist regime.
Within this environment of corruption, citizens turn a blind eye to the suffering of their compatriots. In October 2011, the world was shocked by the death of Yueyue, a two-year-old girl in Guangdong Province who was hit by a truck. Instead of getting out to help, the driver rode over Yueyue again as he left the scene. Minutes later, another vehicle ran over her legs. Eighteen people walked by without helping Yueyue, until a scrap collector finally moved the crying toddler to safety. She later died in the hospital. International media wondered if China had lost its soul. It might be understandable that people are reluctant to come to the aid of others when there is danger involved, such as in an armed robbery, yet Yueyue did not pose any conceivable threat to anyone as she lay dying in the street.
The communist movement leads to enormous destruction of traditional values and culture, and in communist China, moral standards have already dropped far beyond what one can easily imagine. The harvesting of organs from living people, good people who practice spiritual cultivation and strive for self-improvement, has become a state-sanctioned industrial operation. An unknown number of prisoners of conscience have been killed on operating tables as their organs were plundered for profit. Communists have turned medical personnel, who are supposed to help people, into murderers. The CCP’s evil has reached across the world; through economic incentives, the Party entices countries that are supposed to be upholding human rights to turn a blind eye to its crimes.
Economic growth without morality is chaotic, unsustainable, and disastrous. Under the inhumane policies of the CCP, social conflicts abound, and the environment is on the verge of collapse. The consequences of moral decay are fatal. China calls itself a strong country, but its strength is an illusion. Its superficial prosperity, built upon the reckless pursuit of wealth, is doomed to collapse.
There is no good future in store for China if it cannot escape the snare of the CCP. The specter of communism has no intention of implementing healthy and sustainable growth, as its true goal is to destroy China, and the world.
4. The Ravages of Socialism in the Developing World
a. Eastern Europe: Haunted by Socialism
Nearly thirty years after the fall of the Soviet Union, communism continues to haunt Eastern Europe, as there has never been a full reckoning of the crimes committed by former communist regimes.
The lingering presence of communism can be seen in various facets of Eastern European politics and economics. Russia and Belarus, for example, retain powerful state-owned enterprises, high welfare, and aggressively interventionist policies. During the transitional period from communism, Eastern European countries experienced crises of slow economic growth and high unemployment. All this encouraged the relapse of communism and socialism in new forms. Left-wing parties were animated with renewed vigor, feeding off a sense of nostalgia for the socialist past. [33] The ghost of communism has not been banished.
b. How Socialist Economics Failed Developing Nations
In the developing nations of Asia, Latin America, and Africa, many newly independent countries had declared their allegiance to socialism by the 1960s, with disastrous results. In the early 2000s, Venezuela’s economy collapsed as a direct result of its socialist policies. Once the richest in Latin America, the country is now rife with poverty, crime, and starvation. Zimbabwe was once the richest country in Africa; today, it has sunk into complete catastrophe, with inflation spiralling beyond imagination.
Venezuela: How Socialism Bankrupted a Prosperous Country
Venezuela is blessed with considerable oil reserves. In the 1970s, it was the fastest-growing economy in Latin America, enjoying the lowest level of income inequality and the highest per capita GDP in the region. [34] Venezuela’s relatively free economy attracted skilled immigrants from Italy, Portugal, and Spain. Together with the protection of property rights, these factors enabled the nation’s economy to grow rapidly from the 1940s to the 1970s. [35]
In 1999, when the new president took office, he embarked on an ill-fated program of nationalization that eventually threw the Venezuelan economy into chaos. The president publicly declared: “We must transcend capitalism. But we cannot resort to state capitalism, which would be the same perversion of the Soviet Union. We must reclaim socialism as a thesis, a project, and a path, a new type of socialism, a humanist one, which puts humans and not machines or the state ahead of everything.” [36]
To build socialism, the Venezuelan government requisitioned or nationalized many private companies across industries including oil, agriculture, finance, heavy industry, steel, telecommunications, energy, transportation, and tourist enterprises. This process was ramped up following the president’s 2007 reelection. His government expropriated 1,147 private companies between 2007 and 2012, with catastrophic effects.
Companies in once-productive industries were shut down and replaced by inefficient state-owned enterprises, scaring off investors. As production sank, Venezuela turned to relying heavily on imports. Coupled with a series of government interventions involving foreign reserves and price controls, disaster inevitably struck when the price of oil dropped. Some attributed this tragedy to the oil crisis, but according to data provided by the World Bank, seven countries that relied even more heavily on oil exports than Venezuela continued to experience economic growth from 2013 to 2017. [37]
The root cause of Venezuela’s dramatic failure was the socialist economic system. Venezuela’s economic policy essentially marched to the tune of the ten revolutionary demands Marx proposed in The Communist Manifesto, starting with abolition of private ownership and high taxes and moving to a centralized economy and means of production. [38] Venezuela met its economic fate at the hands of the communist specter.
Zimbabwe: From Africa’s Breadbasket to Land of Famine
After Zimbabwe’s declaration of independence in 1980, it endeavored to build a socialist state according to Marxist-Leninist principles. Its first prime minister was a Marxist believer and his guerrillas, guided by Mao Zedong Thought, received unconditional assistance from the PRC. Unlike other African countries that implemented socialism, Zimbabwe did not immediately impose policies of nationalization.
Zimbabwe’s economic woes began in 2000 following the start of land reform. Land belonging to white farmers was seized and redistributed among landless blacks, as well as politically connected individuals. Many were inexperienced in farming, and the result was a sharp decline in agricultural productivity. In an attempt to evade the crisis, the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe printed more money, leading to endless hyperinflation. Figures from the central bank indicate that in June 2008, the country’s annual inflation reached 231 million percent. By mid-November 2008, inflation peaked at nearly 80 billion percent, after which the authorities gave up publishing monthly statistics. [39]
In 2008, a great famine struck Zimbabwe. Of the country’s sixteen million people, five million were threatened with starvation. Today, malnutrition is chronic and widespread.
Communism plagues the world in ways that can be observed or foreseen across all countries. Developed Western countries are beginning to experience crises. Meanwhile, the tragedy of socialism is already a reality in the developing world. This is the principle: The communist specter uses economics to promise comfort and satisfaction, then lures people into moral degradation and the abyss of poverty.
5. Marx’s Theory of Exploitation: An Inversion of Good and Evil
Through a set of elaborate theories, Marxism deceives people into replacing traditional morals with its ersatz standards that invert right and wrong. In the Marxian view, whether an individual is good or bad is based not on his morality and actions, but rather on his place in the (inverse) hierarchy of capital.
One who belongs to what Marxists call the “capitalist” class is guilty of exploiting the proletariat, and since the proletariat is supposedly the oppressed and exploited class, its members naturally occupy the moral high ground. No matter how they treat business owners, property owners, and the affluent, they can hold their heads high. Marxism turned the possession of property into a crime and advocated violent expropriation.
Marx said that only labor creates value. If a company owner invests $10 million in a company in a year, and the revenue that year is $11 million, in the Marxian view, this $1 million in profit is “surplus value” created by the employees but unfairly expropriated by the “capitalist” company owner. Thus, Marx claimed that exploitation was the secret to how capitalists made money and, therefore, the “original sin” of the bourgeoisie. Marx concluded that to eliminate this sin, the entire capitalist society must be destroyed — that is, the bourgeoisie would be eliminated and their assets confiscated, while the vanguard of the party would collectivize property and institute communism.
Marx’s theory of exploitation divides people into two opposing classes: the bourgeoisie with capital, and the proletariat without. In fact, since industrialized societies came to the fore, class mobility has increased rapidly. The class mobility in Marx’s era (the early 1800s to the 1850s) was similar to that in the 1970s in both the United Kingdom and the United States. [40] The interchange between classes is a dynamic process; a supposed member of the proletariat is no longer among the proletariat if he buys public equity in a company, for example. If one’s class assignment can be changed so easily, attempts at dividing people into groups like this have no other purpose than to incite class hatred.
In China, the Soviet Union, and the communist states of Eastern Europe, the communist parties stole land, lynched landlords, and robbed business owners of their factories. They murdered “class enemies” and confiscated generational wealth, waging campaigns of state terrorism against the people. All this evildoing was a result of communism’s hate-filled theories. Meanwhile, traditional moral standards, as well as belief in the divine, saints, and classical sages, were branded as belonging to “the exploiting classes” and were to be attacked and eradicated.
Marx’s theories have been widely criticized in economic and philosophical circles. The following are merely a few examples that illustrate the absurdity of Marx’s theory of exploitation.
Marx argues that labor creates value, and that value is determined by the labor time necessary for production. This is a ridiculous theory. The value of a commodity is not one of its intrinsic properties. Most of the time, humans add a subjective element to each commodity — most saliently, supply and demand.
Many economists have explored the process of valuation, and unlike Marx’s narrow doctrine, most economic thinkers agree that numerous factors are involved in the creation of value — including land, capital, labor, science and technology, management, the risk of investment, and so on. Economic activities are a complex system, involving different links in the chain of production. Different factors of production have certain managerial requirements, and different people play different roles, which are indispensable to the whole chain and contribute to the creation of “residual value.”
For example, a business owner plans to spend $1 million hiring two engineers to design and produce a certain new toy. A marketer also is hired to promote the new toy. Two years later, the new toy gains popularity and earns a profit of $50 million. Is it the labor of the engineers and marketer that created the residual value of $50 million? Of course not. The reason the new toy earned millions is that people wanted it. The business owner’s insight into the market, ability to organize and manage others, and courage to take a risk all contributed to the value of the toy.
Suppose the creativity in the toy came from one of the engineers — then, does the residual value of the $50 million come from the fact that the business owner exploited the engineer’s creativity without giving anything in return? Of course not. If the engineer thinks his creativity was not being adequately rewarded, he could find another company that offers higher pay.
In a free market, a balance will ultimately be struck in matching skills and ambition with capital. Business owners who demand unreasonable profits will lose to the competition or be unable to attract talent. In addition, since waiting for a return on invested capital delays spending or other enjoyment of that capital, the profits are also due to the efforts of the investor. Therefore, it’s normal that an additional sum will be gained in return. The principle is no different than lending at interest.
There also are many “accidental” factors involved in deciding the value of a commodity. Such accidental factors can only be reasonably explained by a frame of reference founded on traditional beliefs and culture.
In certain situations, the creation and destruction of value can be entirely unrelated to the question of labor. A diamond worth $10 million today may have been worthless five thousand years ago because no one wanted it. A barren patch of land inherited from a grandfather could suddenly be one hundred times more valuable due to the prosperity of a nearby city or the discovery of rare-earth metals underground. Here, the increase in value involves no labor. Such vast, unexpected wealth is simply a matter of good fortune. Both Western and Eastern cultural traditions recognize that fortune is a form of divine blessing.
In order to demonstrate the “rationality” and “necessity” of state ownership, Marx concocted the exploitation theory based on surplus value, which turned the economic activities that people engage in as a normal part of life into negative and unethical behavior. His theory poured hatred and scorn on the existing economic order as part of his attempt to undermine and overthrow it.
In fact, the employers and the workers, the landlords and the peasants, form a community of shared interests. Their relationship should be one of cooperation and interdependence; each group supports the other to survive. Marx deliberately exaggerated the differences between classes, seeing them as absolutes — like the antagonism between mortal enemies.
There are good and bad people among employers, just as there are among workers. In economic exchange, what should really be exposed and sanctioned is anyone who violates ethical standards. The basis of judgment should be moral character, not wealth.
People can change their economic and social status through their own efforts. Workers can become investors through the accumulation of wealth. Investors can become workers due to failures in their investments. The role of labor and investors in modern society often changes. Most people also play both roles — putting the profits they made into future productive capacity, thus creating employment, increasing social wealth, and benefitting the general public. Even the founder of the US labor union movement said, “The worst crime against working people is a company which fails to operate at a profit.” [41]
The absurd “surplus value theory” affixes the label of “exploitation” to the normal activities of landowners and capitalists. It has incited incalculable hatred and struggle, muddled thinking, and has destroyed the lives of millions.
6. Hatred and Jealousy: The Origin of Absolute Egalitarianism
Communism advocates absolute egalitarianism. Superficially, this may sound like a high-minded aim, leading many to blindly believe it is righteous. In reality, it evokes hatred and jealousy, as people believing in absolute egalitarianism can’t tolerate the success of others, or others being wealthier and having better lives, easier work, and more luxurious living conditions. Everyone must be equal, and believers say, “I should have what you have, and I can get what you get.” In such a worldview, everyone is equal and the whole world is the same.
Absolute egalitarianism manifests in at least two main ways. First, when people are not yet equal, they are encouraged to be dissatisfied with their economic status. People come to covet what others have and even seek it through improper or violent means. In extreme cases, they destroy others’ property and even kill to get rich.
The worst manifestation of these tendencies is violent revolution. In order to provoke dissatisfaction, Marx divides society into two opposite classes: those who own the means of production, and those who don’t. In the countryside, this was the landlord and the peasant; in the city, it was the business owner and the worker. The aim was to incite class hatred and use the supposedly disenfranchised members of society to carry out violent revolution. The peasants are poor and landlords are rich — seize their wealth! Everyone should be rich! Thus, the CCP called on peasants to engage in “land reform” — that is, attack landlords and divide up their land. If the landlords refused to comply, they were killed. The Party did this by first inciting hooligans to start trouble, then encouraging the peasantry to join them in rising up and attacking the landlord class. The heads of millions of landowners fell.
Second, once groups have basically achieved a state of “equality” — in which any benefits are divided up among everyone — anyone who stands out is penalized. Everyone is treated the same whether one works more, works less, or doesn’t work at all. This fails to acknowledge a universal principle: While people may appear to be the same on the surface, in truth, each individual’s personality, intellect, physical strength, morality, occupation, role, education, living conditions, endurance and perseverance, inventiveness, and so on are all different, and what one contributes to society is also different. Thus, why should the same outcome be applied to all? In this sense, inequality is actually true equality, while the equality pursued by communism is true inequality and true injustice.
The ancients in China said that heaven will reward one according to the effort one puts in. Absolute egalitarianism is impossible in the real world.
Under the cover of egalitarianism, the lazy benefit, while the capable and the hardworking are penalized and even resented or hated. Everyone slows their pace to match the speed of the slowest. This causes everyone to become lazy, waiting for someone else to contribute so that one can take advantage and jump on for the ride, gaining something for nothing or stealing from another. The result is widespread moral decline.
The hatred and jealousy that drive absolute egalitarianism are the poisonous roots of communism’s economic perspective. Human nature has both good and evil inherent in it. Western faiths refer to the seven deadly sins, while Eastern culture teaches that man has both Buddha nature and demon nature. Buddha nature manifests itself as kindness, the ability to endure hardship, and consideration for others. Demon nature manifests as selfishness, laziness, jealousy, malice, hatred, rage, lust, and tyranny, as well as having a disregard for life, inciting discord, spreading rumors, getting something for nothing, and so on.
The economic perspective adopted by communism deliberately stimulates demon nature, amplifying people’s jealousy, greed, laziness, and other evil factors, causing people to lose their humanity and forsake the traditional values held for thousands of years. It amplifies the worst in human nature and turns people into communist revolutionaries.
In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, eighteenth-century economist and philosopher Adam Smith said that morality is the foundation of mankind’s prosperity. Observing common rules of morality “is required for the very existence of human society, which would crumble into nothing if mankind were not generally impressed with a reverence for those important rules of conduct.” [42]
Lawrence Kudlow, director of the US National Economic Council, believes that morality must exist alongside economic prosperity. He wrote in 1997 that if the United States could abide by the “foremost principle” — to adhere to the moral values the nation was founded on — the development of the United States would be limitless. [43]
a. Economic Egalitarianism: A Stepping Stone to Communism
Under the influence of absolute egalitarianism, vigorous calls ring out in the West for “social justice,” as well as minimum-wage laws, affirmative action, and other demands. What lies behind these is a desire for equality of outcome, of which communist elements can take advantage. From the communist perspective, it doesn’t matter whether these vulnerable groups obtain equality or if their social status improves. They are merely pawns for inciting resentment.
If communists get what they demand, then they simply make new demands for equality — there is no end to it. If they don’t achieve their demands, they strengthen people’s notions about the justice of equality and turn this into a major platform upon which to gain more influence. Because communism incites resentment in multiple fields and via so many different means, if it’s allowed to spread unchecked, the inevitable result is social turmoil. Communists will always be able to find vulnerable groups and demand financial or social equality for them, repeating the process until the path toward communism is paved.
Moreover, the implementation of these policies often results in the opposite of what is promised. Those who are supposed to be protected by these policies instead lose out. Take minimum-wage laws, for example: On the surface, its goal is to protect the rights of workers, but the effect is that many businesses simply stop hiring because it is uneconomical for them to do so. As a result, workers lose their jobs. Eliminating lower-wage jobs also means the loss of skill-building, as young people and those new to an occupation then have few opportunities to be trained and work their way up to higher-paying jobs. The one-size-fits-all approach also violates economic theory and results in excessive government intervention.
People also use the excuse of “equal pay for equal work” to demand social revolution based on fighting racism and sexism. They cite statistics that, for example, the average wage of black males is less than the average wage of white males, that the average female wage is less than the average male wage, and that these discrepancies are the result of racism and sexism. In reality, such comparisons are not appropriate. When comparing apples to apples, the results are different. Some scholars’ research has found that college-educated, married black couples earned slightly more than their white counterparts. [44] After decades of communist tactics to destroy the traditional family and promote welfare, black families of this type are relatively fewer, and this is the main reason why there are overall discrepancies between the races regarding income. Making meaningful and accurate comparisons should be common sense, but communist elements tend to incite discord and struggle, which leads people to look at things irrationally.
Communism does not care about the well-being of vulnerable groups. It is simply interested in slogans that drag people down the road to destruction.
b. Communism’s Use of Unions to Undermine Free Societies
The loss of US manufacturing jobs in the past few decades is a well-known phenomenon, but many people don’t realize that unions, hijacked by leftist causes, are one of the main culprits. Many of today’s unions claim to help obtain benefits for the working class, but they often do the opposite. This is evident in the history of unions and the transformation of their mission.
Trade unions were initially founded by members of the working class with few or no skills, for the purpose of negotiating with management. To a certain extent, a trade union is able to broker and resolve conflicts between workers and owners. But communist elements took unions and turned them into tools to promote communist policies and movements. The unions became a powerful weapon for destroying free enterprise and carrying out political struggle.
Friedrich Engels wrote on the topic, “The time also is rapidly approaching when the working class will have understood that the struggle for high wages and short hours, and the whole action of Trades Unions as now carried on, is not an end in itself, but a means, a very necessary and effective means’ but only one of several means towards a higher end: the abolition of the wages system altogether.” [45]
Lenin believed that the formation and legalization of trade unions was an important means for the working class to wrest control from the “capitalist” class, and that the unions would become the pillar of the Communist Party and a key force in class struggle.
In a speech, Lenin proposed that trade unions become “a school of administration, a school of economic management, a school of communism,” and a link between the Communist Party and the masses. The daily work of the trade union was to convince the masses to transition from capitalism to communism. “The trade unions are a ‘reservoir’ of the state power,” he wrote. [46]
In the mid-to-late nineteenth century, communist and left-wing forces used trade unions to incite workers to go on large-scale strikes, make harsh demands on owners, and even take violent measures, such as destroying machinery and factories. In October 1905, more than 1.7 million workers in Russia participated in a nationwide political strike that paralyzed the country’s economy. During this time, a particularly aggressive union, the Central Workers’ Group, was formed and became the main precursor to the Petrograd Soviet, a “council” of workers and soldiers that played a central role as the vehicle for the Russian Revolution. [47]
Trade unions in Western and developed countries also have been widely infiltrated and used by communist elements. The relationship between employers and employees is a symbiotic one, yet communists try to provoke, expand, and intensify discord between them. Unions are used to escalate conflicts during the bargaining process between management and workers. Additionally, unions rationalize and intensify the confrontational side of the management–worker relationship and use this to legitimize their own existence. From there, they inflame workers’ dissatisfaction and blame the “capitalists” for any problems. This has been key to unions’ survival.
On the surface, trade unions are fighting for the interests of workers, but in reality, they are undermining industrial competitiveness. There are two reasons for this. First, under the pretext of protecting workers’ rights and interests, unions make it difficult for enterprises to lay off employees who don’t perform well and who achieve little. This gives rise to a culture of laziness. Not only is this unfair to employees who work diligently, but it also makes them less proactive. The most important factor in the growth of a company is its workers, but with the union’s umbrella of protection over employees who fail to perform, enterprises lose their competitiveness. Enterprises that fail to meet these union demands are then the targets of struggle, including strikes and protests, which further disable the business. The powerful United Auto Workers union routinely called for strikes in Detroit. Prior to the 2008 financial crisis, the union demanded $70 an hour in wages and benefits. Consequently, the US automobile manufacturing industry was on the brink of bankruptcy. [48]
Second, under the pretext of protecting employees’ welfare (including pensions, health insurance, and the like), unions constantly raise costs for enterprises. This forces companies to curtail growth and to cut their investment in research and development, which hurts competitiveness. It also results in companies having to increase product prices, which harms consumer interests. Studies show that this is why companies without unions, such as Toyota and Honda, were able to produce high-quality cars at a lower cost, and why Detroit-based automobile factories with labor unions became less competitive. [49]
As Edwin Feulner, founder of US think tank The Heritage Foundation, said of unions, “They function like an albatross around a company’s neck — making it less flexible, less able to react wisely to the demands of a changing marketplace.” [50]
While the loss of job opportunities in the US manufacturing industry has been recognized and discussed for decades, many people don’t know that unions are a key driver of the job losses. Unionized manufacturing jobs fell by 75 percent between 1977 and 2008, while nonunion manufacturing employment increased by 6 percent over that time, according to a report by The Heritage Foundation.
The situation in the construction sector is similar. A report by Heritage Foundation research fellow James Sherk states: “Unlike the manufacturing sector, the construction industry has grown considerably since the late 1970s. However, in the aggregate, that growth has occurred exclusively in nonunion jobs, expanding 159 percent since 1977. Unionized construction jobs fell by 17 percent.” [51]
In addition, labor unions are the tools employed by communist elements to promote egalitarianism in enterprises. Sherk notes that unions demand that companies pay wages according to the length of service of the employee (the same is done in socialist countries), without regard to the employee’s contribution to the company or performance. “Union contracts compress wages: They suppress the wages of more productive workers and raise the wages of the less competent.” [52]
The idea at work here is the same as absolute egalitarianism under communism, which is effectively the redistribution of wealth among employees within the enterprise. The interference in the internal decision-making of enterprises and the monopoly of the labor market erodes the free market.
Unions’ aggressive advocacy for what they describe as workers’ welfare ends up favoring some workers over others and puts a drag on individual companies and the economy as a whole. A survey conducted in 2005 showed that “most union households disapprove of American unions” and that “the main reason for their disapproval is never openly discussed in union media or addressed at union conventions.” [53]
Labor unions infiltrated by communism, and under the guidance of the progressive movement, have often become tools to wage struggle against the free market. Corruption and vested interests are common among union leaders. Their single-minded battle against what they call injustice in the workplace creates a burden on industry and productivity, preventing corporate reform and rational attempts to streamline manufacturing, services, education, government bureaucracy, and other fields. Politically, the Left draws support from unions to promote their social movements and drive wedges in society.
7. Communist ‘Ideals’: Tempting Man Toward His Own Destruction
Although communist theory is full of loopholes and contradictions, many are still deceived by it. This is because Marx described a utopian communist paradise that people all over the world could enjoy. This is the central fantasy and delusion. His depiction included “overwhelming material abundance” and much higher moral standards for society. Each person would work “according to his ability” and receive “according to his need.” There would be no private ownership, no gap between the rich and the poor, no ruling class, and no exploitation. There would be freedom and equality for all, and each person would be able to develop his or her particular talents. Life would be wonderful.
This set of deceitful arguments attracted many to fight for it. Many Westerners today have never had the tragic experience of living in a totalitarian state. They continue to harbor an illusory hope for a communist paradise, and therefore fan the flames by advocating communist and socialist ideas.
In fact, all the ideas put forward by Marx are dangerous illusions. Marxism claims that a communist society will enjoy a superabundance of material goods. However, human desires and human wants are endless. Under the constraints of limited human knowledge, limited working hours, and limited resources, shortages and deprivations are inevitable. This is the most basic starting point for all economic studies. Without these constraints, people wouldn’t have to explore which kind of production method was most efficient, as the supposed superabundance would provide for all and could be squandered at will.
Marxism also claims that moral standards would be greatly improved in a communist society. However, as good and evil coexist in each person, the improvement of moral standards in a society requires the guidance of upright beliefs and values, as well as personal efforts in self-cultivation. What Marxism preaches is atheism and class struggle, which enlarge the evil side of humans. People are not allowed to have freedom of belief, and religion is only a political tool of the Communist Party. What’s more, under communism, religious institutions are used to safeguard tyranny, to mislead the world, to resist and oppose the divine, and to turn people further away from the divine. Without righteous belief in the divine and self-discipline, morality can only decline. Moreover, once in power, all communist leaders prove to be tyrants — arrogant, lewd, and completely unethical. To expect their followers to be so vastly improved in moral standards runs counter to reason.
Marxism also proclaims there will be equality for all. But as discussed earlier, socialism inevitably leads to totalitarianism. Power is the basis of resource distribution, yet the distribution of power under a totalitarian state is most unjust. Therefore, resource distribution under totalitarianism also will be most unjust. In all countries where socialism rules or has ruled, people see a privileged stratum form, as well as extreme gaps between the rich and the poor and the suppression of people by the state. Resources are exhausted for military purposes, and people’s belongings are robbed to make the privileged class more powerful, while the majority are left to labor in poverty.
Marxism deceives with the promise of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” [54] Communism deceives people by promising that every member of society can give full play to his or her abilities. In socialist economies, people are unable to act at will according to their own ability, as they do not have basic freedoms.
Marxism says that the division of labor creates alienation. But in fact, division of labor is necessary for any society. Smith argues in The Wealth of Nations that a division of labor can greatly increase productivity and promote prosperity. The differences created by the division are not necessarily conflicts, nor do they necessarily lead to alienation and depersonalization. People from all walks of life, regardless of their station, can contribute to society, elevate their morals, and help to bring happiness to humankind.
However, communism uses individuals’ pursuit of goodness to mislead them into becoming religious fanatics for communist ideology. It uses the pursuit of goodness as its banner to pull people away from the divine. It pollutes people’s minds, strengthens their evil nature, and leads them to commit all manner of crimes. Under this influence, people indulge in material enjoyment, casting aside loftier and nobler beliefs in the higher purpose of life. Communism poisons everything it touches and slaughters people by the millions, as seen in every country where it came to power. If the world’s people do not wake up now, they will face horrifying consequences.
8. Morality, Prosperity, and Peace
Striving for happiness is human nature. A prosperous economy can bring happiness, yet the economy does not exist in a vacuum. When the path of economic development deviates from ethics and morality, an economic crisis may follow. A society that is merely wealthy is not only incapable of bringing joy and happiness, but its prosperity will also be short-lived. As the foundation of ethics and morality crumbles, a disastrous outcome awaits.
In 2010, People’s Daily, a mouthpiece for the Chinese regime, reported that despite economic development, China had been declining for years on the Forbes’ Gross National Happiness Index. The world’s second-largest economy is plagued with corruption, environmental pollution, and food-safety incidents, making the Chinese people extremely insecure about their lives. In this case, wealth has increased as morality and happiness have declined.
This reflects the fatal flaw in communism: Human beings are composed not only of flesh, but, far more so, of mind and spirit. The divine laid down the path that man’s life would take. The Chinese say “every bite and every sip is preordained,” which is analogous to the Western spiritual belief in the concept of fate, or that lives are preordained. People who believe in the divine understand that wealth is a grace bestowed upon them by their Creator. They value having a humble and thankful heart, and hence they are content and happy.
Among those aboard the doomed Titanic as the ship sank in 1912 was millionaire John Jacob Astor IV, whose fortune could have built thirty Titanics. Yet when facing death, he chose what he thought was morally correct and protected women and children — he gave his spot in the final lifeboat to two terrified children. [55] Similarly, Isidor Straus, co-owner of Macy’s department store, said, “I will not go before the other men.” His wife, Ida, also refused to get on a lifeboat, giving her place to Ellen Bird, their new housemaid. Ida chose to spend her final moments with her husband. [56]
These people of great wealth chose to put traditional values and faith before the opportunity to save their assets and lives. Their choice of morality and justice manifests the radiance of human civilization and human nature: A noble character is more valuable than life, which is yet more valuable than wealth.
Mr. Li Hongzhi, the founder of Falun Gong, wrote in “Wealth With Virtue”:
“It is the duty of the ruler and officials to bring wealth to the populace, yet promotion of money-worship is the worst policy one could adopt. Wealth without virtue (de) will harm all sentient beings, while wealth with virtue is what all people hope for. Therefore, one cannot be affluent without advocating virtue.
“Virtue is accumulated in past lives. Becoming a king, an official, wealthy, or nobility all come from virtue. No virtue, no gain; the loss of virtue means the loss of everything. Thus, those who seek power and wealth must first accumulate virtue. By suffering hardships and doing good deeds one can accumulate virtue among the masses. To achieve this, one must understand the principle of cause and effect. Knowing this can enable officials and the populace to exercise self-restraint, and prosperity and peace will thereby prevail under heaven.” [57]
If humankind maintains the aforementioned values for wealth and life, the economic challenges rooted in human beings’ greed, sloth, and jealousy will be reduced considerably. Once mankind suppresses its selfish desires, the ideology of communism will no longer be able to lure the human heart, and moral standards will remain high.
The communist specter has made intricate arrangements to destroy mankind. Its economic arrangements are only one part of the story. To free ourselves from the control of communist “ideals,” we need to expose the conspiracy, identify the fraudulent messaging, and stop putting hope in this bankrupt ideology. We also need to restore traditional values and recover morality and virtue. Thus, humanity will be able to embrace everlasting prosperity and happiness and obtain true peace. Human civilization will then radiate with new vitality.
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57. Li Hongzhi, “Wealth With Virtue,” in Essentials For Further Advancement, January 27, 1995, https://www.falundafa.org/eng/eng/jjyz02.htm.
Category: Perspective
