Commie News Network | CommieNews.com Blog: 03.06

Capitalism and communism stand at opposite poles. Their essential difference is this: The communist, seeing the rich man and his fine home, says: 'No man should have so much.' The capitalist, seeing the same thing, says: 'All men should have as much.'

ADAMS, PHELPS

Socialism...confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all.

BASTIAT, FREDERIC, The Law

Socialists desire to practice legal plunder.

BASTIAT, FREDERIC, The Law

As it plays out in the movies, the blacklist story is vintage Hollywood: black hats vs. white hats. The evil government committee rides into town and, for no apparent reason, makes life miserable for a group of noble artists...The story carries considerable appeal, though it misses the irony that those who thought capitalism evil continued to take advantage of the kind of market that did not exist in the socialist regimes they extolled.

BILLINGSLEY, KENNETH LLOYD, Hollywood’s Missing Movies - Why American Films Have Ignored life Under Communism, Reason, June 2000

In practice, of course, full-blown socialism - including the nationalization of property - did prove the antithesis of liberty. The elimination of private property meant the elimination of the principal source of resistance to state power. Socialism promised freedom, prosperity, and community but delivered totalitarianism, poverty, and atomism.

BOAZ, DAVID, The Libertarian Reader

One difference between libertarianism and socialism is that a socialist society can't tolerate groups of people practicing freedom, while a libertarian society can comfortably allow people to choose voluntary socialism.

BOAZ, DAVID D., Creating a Framework for Utopia

Analysis of... seven [fascist] regimes reveals fourteen common threads that link them in recognizable patterns of national behavior and abuse of power. These basic characteristics are more prevalent and intense in some regimes than in others, but they all share at least some level of similarity.

1. Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism...

2. Disdain for the importance of human rights...

3. Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause...

4. The supremacy of the military/avid militarism...

5. Rampant sexism...

6. A controlled mass media..

7. Obsession with national security...

8. Religion and ruling elite tied together...

9. Power of corporations protected...

10. Power of labor suppressed or eliminated...

11. Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts...

12. Obsession with crime and punishment...

13. Rampant cronyism and corruption...

14. Fraudulent elections.

BRITT, LAURENCE W., Fascism Anyone?, Free Inquiry, Volume 23, Number 2

Socialize the individual's surplus and you socialize his spirit and creativeness; you cannot paint the Mona Lisa by assigning one dab of paint to a thousand painters.

BUCKLEY, JR., WILLIAM F., Up From Liberalism

[T]he Soviet has allowed its people to starve by the thousands...made itself a monopoly of monopolies...restored serfdom...indentured servitude...kept wages low and labor intense...It has pitilessly industrialized its women under the pretense of emancipating them...crowded the population into dingy quarters...stifled the growth of democracy...waged a class war against peasants, tradesmen, and mental workers...there is no opportunity for the expression of the public will...it has oppressed with unsurpassed barbarity men and women guilty of no other crime than the prosperity attendant upon enterprise industry, intelligence and thrift...it has refused the rights of habeas corpus, of trial by jury, of equality before the law; it has sent its secret police into a million homes...it has terrorized the public with marching armies, secret police, merciless penalties, and a million spies. It has deported or shot hundreds of thousands of men and women solely for political heresy and non-conformance...It has subjected to censorship every drama and every book...it has prostituted the press, the radio and the stage...It has suppressed all freedom of speech or assembly.

DURANT, WILL, The Tragedy of Russia, Simon and Schuster

At the time I wrote, socialism meant unambiguously the nationalization of the means of production and the central economic planning which this made possible and necessary...socialism has come to mean chiefly the extensive redistribution of incomes through taxation and the institutions of the welfare state.

HAYEK, F.A., The Road to Serfdom, 1976 Preface

[W]here the sole employer is the State, opposition means death by slow starvation.

HAYEK, FRIEDRICH VON, The Road to Serfdom

[T]here is literally nothing which the consistent collectivist must not be prepared to do if it serves "the good of the whole."

HAYEK, F.A., The Road to Serfdom, Chapter 10

[S]ocialism can be put into practice only by methods which most socialists disapprove.

HAYEK, F.A., The Road to Serfdom, Chapter 10

I was guilty of judging capitalism by its operations and socialism by its hopes and aspirations; capitalism by its works and socialism by its literature.

HOOK, SIDNEY, Out of Step

Communism is merely the imposition of Socialism all at once by violence, and Bolshevism is the insistence that the Proletariat shall administer such imposition.

HOOVER, HERBERT, The Challenge to Liberty, Chapter V, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1934

For Socialism to maintain its hold against those who still aspire to liberty every guaranty of freedom - free speech, free press, assembly or a free legislative body, a free judiciary - ultimately must be suppressed.

HOOVER, HERBERT, The Challenge to Liberty, Chapter V, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1934

Because of ambitions to change human beings, communitarianism is a form of elitism. Its advocates have the feeling that they have been chosen to advise, to moralize, to know better than the 'normal' people what is right or wrong, what the people should do, what will be good for them. They want us not only to be free, but to be good, just, moral as well. Of course, in their definition of what is good, just and moral.

KLAUS, VACLAV, Society and the Crisis of Liberalism, Policy, Summer 1998-99

Wages are not paid for labor expended, but for the achievements of labor, which differ widely in quality and quantity.

MISES, LUDWIG VON, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, Action Within the World

The market economy or capitalism, as it is usually called, and the socialist economy preclude one another. There is no mixture of the two systems possible or thinkable; there is no such thing as a mixed economy...Production is directed by the market or by the decrees of a production tsar.

MISES, LUDWIG VON, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, The Market

Whatever some people may consider as just and fair, the only relevant question is always the same. What alone matters is which system of social organization is better suited to attain those ends for which people are ready to expend toil and trouble. The question is: market economy, or socialism? There is no third solution. The notion of a market economy with nonmarket prices is absurd.

MISES, LUDWIG VON, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, Prices

A government can no more determine prices than a goose can lay hen’s eggs.

MISES, LUDWIG VON, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, Prices

No socialist author ever gave a thought to the possibility that the abstract entity which he wants to vest with unlimited power—whether it is called humanity, society, nation, state, or government—could act in a way of which he himself disapproves.

MISES, LUDWIG VON, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics

There is simply no other choice than this: either to abstain from interference in the free play of the market, or to delegate the entire management of production and distribution to the government. Either capitalism or socialism: there exists no middle way.

MISES, LUDWIG VON, Liberalism

Socialism is not in the least what it pretends to be. It is not the pioneer of a better and finer world, but the spoiler of what thousands of years of civilization have created. It does not build, it destroys. For destruction is the essence of it. It produces nothing, it only consumes what the social order based on private ownership in the means of production has created.

MISES, LUDWIG VON, Socialism

The fundamental error of socialism is anthropological in nature. Socialism considers the individual person simply as an element, a molecule within the social organism, so that the good of the individual is completely subordinated to the functioning of the socio-economic mechanism. Socialism likewise maintains that the good of the individual can be realized without reference to his free choice, to the unique and exclusive responsibility which he exercises in the face of good or evil. Man is reduced to a series of social relationships, and the concept of the person as the autonomous subject of moral decisions disappears.

PAUL II, POPE JOHN, Centesimus Annus

Contrary to the Marxists, the Nazis did not advocate public ownership of the means of production. They did demand that the government oversee and run the nation’s economy. The issue of legal ownership, they explained, is secondary; what counts is the issue of control. Private citizens...may continue to hold titles to property - so long as the state reserves to itself the unqualified right to regulate the use of their property.

PEIKOFF, LEONARD, The Ominous Parallels

Yet what dictator ever brought prosperity by interfering with the economy? History is littered with catastrophes that occurred because dictators couldn’t keep their hands off the economy. A century ago, exporting beef and wheat helped make Argentina one of the world’s wealthiest nations; but by the late 1940's, after dictator Juan Perón had introduced pervasive economic controls, there were chronic beef shortages...In China during the late 1950's, Mao Zedong ruthlessly enforced his orders about what people must produce, and the consequence was a famine in which as many 30 million people died. Russia used to be a major grain exporter; but the Bolshevik Revolution and decades of Five Year Plans brought shortages of grain and just about everything else ordinary people wanted...Wherever there is dictatorial power over an economy, wherever economic liberty is denied, people are sure to be suffering agonies of the damned.

POWELL, JIM, FDR’s Folly, Chapter 18 (2003)

From Plato’s Republic onward, all statist-collectivists have looked longingly up at an anthill as at a social ideal to be reached...a society where each particular kind or class is physiologically able to perform only one specific function.

RAND, AYN, To Young Scientists

The Pilgrims began the practice of a principle held up by Karl Marx two centuries later as the ideal of the Communist Party: From each according to ability, to each according to need - and by force! There was a good reason why these communalistic or communistic practices were discontinued. It was because the members of the Pilgrim colony were starving and dying.

READ, LEONARD E., The Essence of Americanism, 1961 Address

Government control and ownership of the means and/or results of production is authoritarianism, be it called state interventionism, socialism, or communism. It rests on the premise that certain persons possess the intelligence to understand and guide all human action. It is advocated by those who sense no lack of omniscience in themselves, by the naive followers of such egotists, by the seekers of power over others, by those who foresee an advantage to themselves in these political manipulations, and by those "do-gooders" who fails to distinguish between police grants-in-aid and Judeo-Christian principles of charity. All in all, they are a considerable number, but still a minority in terms of the tens of millions whose lives they would regulate.

READ, LEONARD, Anything That’s Peaceful

[S[tudents of liberty and the socialists have one position in common: the human situation is not in apple pie order; imperfection is rampant. The student of liberty, however...balks at halting the evolutionary process.

READ, LEONARD, Anything That’s Peaceful

[S]ocialism has a double-barreled definition, one of which is the state ownership and/or control of the results of production. Our incomes are the results of production. That portion of our incomes is socialized which the state turns to its use rather than our own.

READ, LEONARD, Anything That’s Peaceful

How do you tell a communist? Well, it’s someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It’s someone who understands Marx and Lenin.

REAGAN, RONALD, Remarks in Arlington, Virginia, September 25, 1987

... the so-called "third way." That's a fancy name for that elusive system which maintains the facade of the free market while letting politicians wield as much power as they wish.

RICHMAN, SHELDON

For Liberalism, the individual is the end and society the means...For Fascism, society is the end, individuals the means, and its whole life consists in using individuals as instruments for its social ends.

ROCCO, ALFREDO, The Political Doctrine of Fascism (1925)

The [[Virginia] colony was...being run on "communist" principles - each person contributed the fruit of his labor according to his ability to a common storehouse...and...each received produce according to his need. The result of this communism was what we might expect: each individual gained only a negligible amount of goods from his own exertions...and hence had little incentive to work, or to exercise initiative or ingenuity under the difficult conditions in Virginia. And this lack of incentive was doubly reinforced by the fact that the colonist was assured, regardless of how much or how well he worked, of an equal share of goods from the common store. Under such conditions, with the motor of incentive gone from each individual, even the menace of death and starvation for the group as a whole - and even a veritable reign of terror by the governors - could not provide the necessary spur for each particular man.

ROTHBARD, MURRAY, Conceived in Liberty, Vol. 1, The Virginia Company

They have the usual socialist disease; they have run out of other people's money.

THATCHER, MARGARET, Speech to a Conservative Party Conference, October 10, 1975

[C]ommunist regimes were not some unfortunate aberration, some historical deviation from a socialist ideal. They were the ultimate expression, unconstrained by democratic and electoral pressures, of what socialism is all about...In short, the state [is] everything and the individual nothing.

THATCHER, MARGARET, Speech of March 8, 1991

Democracy attaches all possible value to each man; socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint.

TOCQUEVILLE, ALEXIS DE, Discours Prononce a l’Assemblee Aonstituante le 12 septembre 1848 Sur la Question du Droit au Travail

Communism is idiocy. They want to divide up the property. Suppose they did it - it requires brains to keep money as well as make it. In a precious little while the money would be back in the former owner's hands and the communist would be poor again.

TWAIN, MARK, quoted from his notebooks in Mark Twain: A Biography, Chapter 121, Harper & Brothers, 1912

The basic problem is not terrorism itself, but totalitarianism. Terrorism is just the weapon. The war is not against terrorism any more than World War II was a war against kamikaze-ism.

WOOLSEY, R. JAMES, Former CIA Director, Esquire, February 2005
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