Socialism by any other name (Part 1) - Commentary by Joan Hough

Joan Hough

Joan Hough is a Southern lady from an old Louisiana family now living in Houston, TX. She is the widow of two decorated military husbands.

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Socialism by any other name (Part 1) – Commentary by Joan Hough
Part 1 of a 3 part series

"...a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government."
--Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1801

"All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression."
--Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1801

"Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."
--George Washington

It has been said that in the last century and a half, our central government has created over 50,000 laws. These are documented by 190,000 cubic feet of records (380 million pages) and require 33 miles of shelving!

The Hate Crimes Bill [ H.R. 1592], a repugnant proposal, offers loathsome proof of the existence of SOCIALISM in American government. That bill, unconstitutionally, criminalizes free speech. It is a direct, frontal attack on the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America.

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

The Bill of Rights was added to the U.S. Constitution due to the insistence of many Founders including Thomas Jefferson, who wrote: “Let me add that a bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth, general or particular, and what no just government should refuse …”

The First Amendment was ratified December 15, 1791 as a part one of the first ten Amendments, now known as THE BILL OF RIGHTS.

The Hate Crimes Bill places the behavior and thoughts of each of us completely under the control of our Big Brother Central Government which, obviously, has the omniscience and telepathic abilities required to read our minds, judge our words, and the omnipotence to control our tongues and our pens or keyboards. If the law determines that we are guilty of hate, then our government can imprison us. If we resist THE LAW (the government) it can, legally, kill us, not because this is the penalty for our disobedience to the Hate Law, but because we refuse to submit to the government’s punishment for our failing to obey it. If we defend our God-given right to express our beliefs, for example-- concerning sodomy -- we can die. We are held responsible for the effect that any word we utter may have on any listener, be they super- sensitive or crazed.

It is ironic that this bill, which muzzles even our preachers, prohibits even our Bibles, bans even the works of Shakespeare, is pushed upon us by men and women who, according to Frederic Bastiat, are SOCIALISTS wanting to play God. Bastiat, you no doubt remember, is one of the world’s great philosophers, a man whose discourse on LIBERTY took the entire concept out of ivory towers and made the ideas of liberty so clear that they can be understood by even us ordinary citizens.

“Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.” --Frederic Bastiat
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act." --George Orwell

After reading the two brilliant Hate-Bill relevant commentaries of Jeff Davis and Jim Dean in this very Georgia Heritage Council publication, I could not help but think back and relate the infamous HATE BILL to a most powerful something I found in a book entitled The South Under Siege-- written by a third genius of an author named FRANK CONNER. I hope Mr. Conner will forgive me for herein paraphrasing some of his comments on Socialism (found on his pages 262-264) and interspersing throughout them, Frederic Bastiat’s ideas as well as some of my own less profound thoughts on that subject.

The writings of Bastiat, Davis, Dean and Conner serve as the foundation for most of my thoughts expressed here. You should be able to find The Law by Frederic Bastiat at your local book shop or public library. Davis and Dean’s words can be found elsewhere on this site. Conner’s tome may be obtained from Amazon.com. Don’t look for it at your local library, as those high stepping library professionals are far better than we are at deciding what we all should read. They abide by the guidelines of their national organization, The Library Association and do not carry Frank’s absolutely magnificent work on their shelves.

With all of that as preface, I now leap into the fray of Socialism versus our Republic with these words: Goodbye American rights! Goodbye the natural rights we have—those rights that come from God—to defend our persons, our liberty and our property. Goodbye the right God gave us to defend, even by deadly force, our God-given rights. Is this our America? Do we live in World War II Russia or WWII Germany, or WWII Italy? How does one find freedom, happiness and truth in a time warp? But why compare our U.S. government with Russia, Germany and Italy? -- Because all three of those nations had totalitarian governments. No matter that the Russian Commies managed to label and have the world label the Fascists, the “rightwingers” and themselves the “leftists”—--the three nations were all practitioners of Socialism designed to give total power, ultimately to dictators for the supposed purpose of allowing them to, supposedly, protect the workers from Capitalists.

The Russian, the German and the Italian governments continued to practice nearly identical types of SOCIALISM, even after Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini became dictators and elected to fight their traitor Socialist-comrade Russia. (Remember Russia and Germany started WWII as allies.)

And just what is SOCIALISM? Most Americans have little knowledge of its definition or of its faults. Today’s dictionary definitions parrot the old ones, “government ownership and control of the means of production and distribution of goods,” but now add to this that socialism is impossible to define because there are so many varieties of it. Since Socialism failed so miserably and the wall came down in the Soviet Union, government ownership of business is no longer the criterion which defines socialism.

Socialism is now used by people as a word meaning “statism”—--that is, the concentration of economic planning is in the hands of highly-centralized government—--one which regulates the production and pricing of goods and the wages of labor by taxation and other means. Socialism is found in a central government which REGULATES THE SOCIAL CONDUCT OF THE CITIZENS. -- Telling folks what they can and cannot say or write certainly falls under that definition.

When government controls almost every aspect of society, Conner explains, the issue as to whether or not it owns the factories and directly tells folks where they can work and where they can live becomes immaterial. Thus we can conclude that a nation in which the central government engages heavily in central planning and social engineering is a socialist nation, and its politics is always to the left.

Bastiat gives us the simplest definition of all for SOCIALISM. He terms it LEGAL PLUNDER. We know that the law is supposed to protect citizens from plunder. Sadly, the law (our U.S. government) today, not only fails to do so, it participates in it.

“Sometimes the law defends plunder and participates in it. Sometimes the law places the whole apparatus of judges, police, prisons and gendarmes at the service of the plunderers, and treats the victim - when he defends himself - as a criminal.” --Frederic Bastiat, from The Law, p. 17

It is quite easy to identify legal plunder. Bastiat explains the identification process--

“See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime...” --Frederic Bastiat, from The Law.

A rose by any other name is still a rose. Bastiat tells us that legal plunder has many names—--We have here in America an infinite number of plans, Bastiat contends, designed to organize legal plunder, including---- “Tariffs, protection, benefits, subsidies, encouragements, progressive taxation, PUBLIC SCHOOLS, guaranteed jobs, guaranteed profits, minimum wages, a right to relief, a right to the tools of free labor…”

All these plans, as a whole—--with their common aim of legal plunder---- constitute socialism.

Part II and Part III of this essay will further explore Socialism: Then and Now.

Contact Joan Hough at joanhough@aol.com.