Better Living Through Slavery

Socialism and Other Power Games

We are constantly being told that our lives would be so much better if we were to embrace socialist ideology. I think the whole philosophy can be summed up best as “better living through slavery,” borrowed from the old advertising slogan “better living through chemistry.” The idea, of course, being that the promises of socialism are that life will be better, but you will very much be a slave. Perhaps you will own nothing and be happy.

Of course, it's not just socialists, they are really just that latest fashion in the game of 'let's control the rubes.' It seems like the ancient seduction by the powerful can be summed up as; “give us your freedom and we will give you security.” Since there are many people who just want to be taken care of, this is often a winning point of view.

Always when listening to the politicians we are promised a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage, an old cliché. Such arguments with their multitudinous variations are everywhere as the power hungry jockey for power.

"Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed." ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Politics can be thought of as the game of how does one do the best job of convincing the most people to give up their freedom in exchange for security in one form or another, and there are many different forms of security. It's not just safety, but also things like food, shelter and all of the things that the Socialists promise, so think of their promises as just another form of “give us your freedom and we will give you security,” or rather “better living through slavery.”

The “Great Society” program of President Lyndon Johnson did a good job of getting citizens to trade in their freedom for slavery. Welfare programs were established locking people in to going nowhere types of lives. They effectively removed rungs from the ladder of success so that an underclass of voters would would remain faithful to the Democrat party. The welfare system would penalize one for working his way up by removing welfare upon employment. It enforced an economic penalty for living as a normal family, leading to fatherlessness and broken lives for the children, with government dependency all around. Not slavery in the traditional sense, but close enough.

A sliding welfare system, or a negative income tax system would have allowed people to prosper more easily, and they would not have been trapped in semi-slavery. A negative income tax would have sent the recipient money, but on a sliding scale such that, like workers generally, their taxes go up with increasing income, meaning in their case the welfare payments go down. At some point they reach the zero tax range, then they start paying taxes at higher income levels. This would have improved upward mobility and lifted people out of poverty, but with the loss of Democrat voters.

We do have a problem as voters in that their actually are politicians who would try to do a good job for the people, but how do we recognize them? Others will try to do a good job, but only for the minority that they use for their elections, and even there what they do might actually not be good for that minority.

We once expected that the news reporters would give a fairly unbiased report on the latest governmental proposal, or at least some of them would. That situation seems to have withered away, with reporters now coming into the job fresh from journalism school but with little life experience. Many of them seem to suffer from urban provincialism.

"The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrender, or submission." ~ John F. Kennedy

It's not just an issue of being supplied with money and goods, it's also “ We will make your life better by taking away your rights.” You don't need the right to self defense, we the state will protect you.

Their arguments can be very subtle, to the point of making it almost impossible to see where the slavery part begins. One may note that the solution to virtually any problem is more governmental control, never less. For example, after 9/11, why was not the decades old policy of requiring airline pilots to be armed with handguns not reinstated? There was great resistance to the idea, and was done only with great regulation rather than the previous blanket rule.

Of course, always there is the an attempt to mostly eliminate the private possession of weapons by the people as a whole. Ron Paul summed it up this way:

"The gun control debate generally ignores the historical and philosophical underpinnings of the Second amendment. The Second amendment is not about hunting deer or keeping a pistol in your nightstand. It is not about protecting oneself against common criminals. It is about preventing tyranny. The Founders knew that unarmed citizens would never be able to overthrow a tyrannical government as they did. They envisioned government as a servant, not a master, of the American people. The muskets they used against the British Army were the assault rifles of that time. It is practical, rather than alarmist, to understand that unarmed citizens cannot be secure in their freedoms." - Dr. Ron Paul

"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction." ~ Ronald Reagan

The welfare state has managed to create a condition of vast fatherlessness throughout the land.

"I think myself that we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious. Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have ... The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases. The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first." ~ Thomas Jefferson

Human nature has not at changed to the extent that people will not indulge in slave holding. Actual slavery is alive throughout the world.

"It surprises people that there's actually a very large number of slaves in the world today-our best estimate is 27 million. And that is defining a slave in a very narrow way; we're not talking about sweatshop workers or people who are just poor, we're talking about people who are controlled by violence, who cannot walk away, who are being held against their will, who are being paid nothing." ~ Kevin Bales

It would seem that the leaders of the free world want to be leaders of, if not the slave world, perhaps a new form of feudalism. The kings and queens of the Middle Ages had their people divided into two main groups, the nobility and everyone else. Human nature seems to work that way; if you have part of your populace with power over the other part they will start to see themselves as being fundamentally superior. I would imagine that a person alive in the Middle Ages would accept that reality as just being the normal state of things, so think what a revolutionary place the U.S.A. must have seemed at it's founding. The royalty of Europe were not amused.

Some thoughts on the possible coming of a new form of feudalism are in my essay:

https://drp314.substack.com/p/the-new-feudalism

"And they can appreciate, through personal experience, that the really decisive battleground of American freedom is in the hearts and minds of our own people... Each day we must ask that Almighty God will set and keep His protecting hand over us so that we may pass on to those who come after us the heritage of a free people, secure in their God-given rights and in full control of a Government dedicated to the preservation of those rights." ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

Stay Brave, stay free.