O’Reilly the Slightly Conservative Socialist
Those of you who have read much of what I’ve written, have often heard me go on about the “liberal socialists”. This is because I think that liberalism has become synonymous with socialism in recent decades. In fact it may have been synonymous for the better part of this past century, only I didn’t notice because I wasn’t aware of it. I used to be a liberal. It wasn’t until the late Ã?¯Ã?¿Ã?½90’s that I started shifting towards becoming a libertarian. Part of that shift happened because I could absolutely no longer stomach what I saw liberalism becoming.
But there are other kinds of socialists too. In fact I think we could simplify the political spectrum greatly by realizing that there are essentially only two kinds of political philosophies in the world. There are various forms and degrees of coercive collectivism, which is essentially forming a big enough mob and forcing everyone else to obey your every whim. Then there’s libertarianism which is based on the non-initiation of force principle, that it’s morally wrong to initiate force against others, or to delegate its initiation.
Even totalitarian dictatorships can be considered a form of coercive collectivism because anytime the collective people decide to stop obeying the dictator, it can end, and there’s little the dictator can do about it that won’t get him into even more hot water after that.
So here I was, watching O’Reilly and he’s ranting on and on about gas prices and “gouging”. Now gas prices in a free market are very dependent on demand. In a previous show, O’Reilly even said that if the American public cut their driving by just 3%, it would crash gas prices. Now that’s a great free market libertarian approach. We even witnessed the free market at work after 9/11 when people were shocked, depressed and afraid to drive as much for a few months, and gas prices dropped in response.
But here he was ranting about “gouging”. Us libertarians know that there’s really no such thing in the free market, it’s purely a coercive collectivist term for when people don’t want to pay the price that the free market is demanding. And of course it’s become the political hot button issue of the week, as the President and Congress try to draw attention away from the fact that they haven’t got the courage to defend this nations borders anymore and take the steps necessary to put an end to the illegal invasion. So they’re all harping on “gas price gouging” this week.
Well here I am watching O’Reilly and he’s going ballistic over the fact that people need gas and the oil companies are charging so much that people can’t afford it, so something has to be done. It should be investigated and maybe Congress should hit these evil companies with a windfall profits tax. Evil capitalist companies are making too much profits and we can’t have that, can we?
Is this reminding any of you older readers of Jimmy Carter in the 70’s? Gas price controls? The call for windfall profits taxes, even wage and price controls? What a mess that caused. The free market is the most powerful market force there is, and anytime you mess with that, you get even more trouble than you already had. Ask the former Communists.
So as O’Reilly ranted, it started reminding me of the novel “Atlas Shrugged”, by Ayn Rand.
“”I do not see why industrialists should be considered at all,” said Scudder. “When the masses are destitute and yet there are goods available, it’s idiotic to expect people to be stopped by some scrap of paper called a property deed. Property rights are a superstition. One holds property only by the courtesy of those who do not sieze it. The people can sieze it at any moment. If they can, why shouldn’t they?”
“They should”, said Claude Slagenhop. “They need it. Need is the only consideration. If people are in need, we’ve got to sieze things first and talk about it afterwards.”
It also started reminding me of, “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.”
Who originally said it? Ted kennedy? Jessie Jackson? John Kerry? or Hillary Clinton? Well no, it was actually Karl Marx. Which brings us right back to socialism. That statement is the essence of what socialism really is. Whenever you see someone ranting about there being a need, and having to sieze property or money from people to fulfill it, that’s socialism you’re seeing.
So in all fairness I’d like to point out that it’s not just the liberal socialists who are helping to destroy this country, but the conservative socialists as well. I still have an old cartoon scan that I cut from a newspaper years ago, showing an elephant and a donkey, chopping away with axes at the tree of liberty, from both the left and the right. It’s been true all along and it’s never been more true than today.
Melissa Rhiannon is a libertarian free lance writer living somewhere in Colorado
