Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

Way down south in Venezuela, they’ve eaten their cats and dogs—and the animals in the zoo. In North Korea, I’ve heard they’re eating one another. And in Sweden (as in much of Europe) hostile barbarian savages are eating Western Civilization alive.

California is eating itself.

In each case (and many another you and I could both name) it’s all because of an obsolete and discredited 19th century idea, an insidious, poisonous, obscene idea first promulgated by hustler and flimflammer Karl Marx in 1875: “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”. It’s the same idea that killed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and is presently killing the Kingdom of Great Britain. It has killed perhaps hundreds of millions of individuals in the past century.

The key word, here, of course, is “socialist” which refers to an economic and political buzzing bonnet-bee defined by that quote of Marx’s about needs and abilities. Given what we used to call “current world problems”, this is hardly the appropriate historical moment in which to attempt to re-introduce it into the only country on the entire planet that seems to be working right.

Enter, however, an attractive but extremely tone-deaf, short-sighted, and historically ignorant young woman by the name of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In the highly unlikely case you missed it, she recently unseated a ten-term incumbent Democratic candidate for the United States House of Representatives by promising voters to bring Venezuela, North Korea, Sweden, and California here to America where we can truly appreciate them, and the news-channels. including FOX are all in swept off their feet in love. She calls it “Democratic Socialism”. I call it “Bend Over Here It Comes Again”.

This unexpected event becomes somewhat easier to understand when you realize that it took place in a state so full of regressively stupid idiots that it keeps sending that oily reptile Charles E. Schumer (in an effort to butch up, he wants you to call him Chuck) to Washington, D. C. Except that Chuckles has a problem now: apparently the Democratic Socialist Party doesn’t really consider itself a part of the Democrat Party, and is grimly determined to suck as many votes from the older party this November as it can, reducing the foolishly anticipated “Blue Wave” to a bloopy piddle and enhancing Donald Trump’s hold on Congress. Bernie Sanders, that fatuous hypocritical moron has assured them he will help.

“From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” Not only is it bad politics and bad economics, it is profoundly immoral, and the reason the Soviet Empire collapsed. I work extremely hard, and have done so all my life, producing books that are as full of action, adventure, good ideas, decent philosophy, and even a little sex as I can make them. But why in the sacred name of John Moses Browning should I do that if some government gangster is going to steal the pittance they earn, or even the books themselves as a pitiable- handful of addled simpletons who falsely call themselves libertarians desire?

And if the same thing happens to every other productive individual in society, why the hell should any of us work? Maybe we should all just kick back, chill out, and watch civilization disintegrate the way it has in so many other places? It gets tempting, sometimes. It’s said that, in the days just before the Soviet Empire fell, the majority of men in Moscow were alcoholics.

I’m having beer.

Yes, socialism is an evil notion and I don’t believe there’s any significant moral difference between it and, say, communism. It’s the same menace we and our fathers believed we were fighting and killing and dying over in Vietnam and Korea. Nazi Germany was a socialist regime, as well. If those struggles had been expressly spelled out in those terms, we might even have won the last two. But the trouble was, most of the United States’ 20th century leaders were socialists, themselves, at heart. Name me just one, possibly excepting Ronald Reagan, who wasn’t. Socialism and all of its mealy-mouthed, weasel-worded variations are collectivism, under which the putative rights of the group coercively supersede those of the individual. But the group, as such, has no rights, beyond those of its constituent members. All rights are individual and are not at all additive in character.

I’ve been saying and writing this stuff for more than half a century, ever since “I wore a younger man’s clothes”, but with only my tiny, two-inch soapbox, here, to stand on. I need your help to spread the word. Western Civilization needs your help. It’s time now for every individualist in America who gives a rusty fuck (to quote the great Rod Steiger) to declare war on domestic socialism.

It sure as hell has declared war on you.

No quarter, Alexandria, no quarter.