When the state is in charge of everything economically, whether nationalizing property or using threats to scare private owners into doing what the government says, there is no other option for the individual to make a living. Once the state is everyone’s employer, the individual is always the servant of the government. Hard working people must be obedient to the arbitrary whims of lazy political officials.
Ukrainian peasants learned this the hard way from Marxist party activists. Originally the farmers thought that their old landlords were responsible for their poverty. They were taken in by Marxist idealistic slogans. But they found out that the social justice advocates had been lying in order to take control of their farms. The peasants were promised economic equality. What that really meant was that everything belonged to the Marxist state and nothing belonged to the individual.
Stalin stole the land from the peasants, put them in government controlled farms, and would soon starve them systematically. What government control of the economy meant was that 5 million Ukrainians would die from starvation while the Marxist were shipping grain to other countries. When the social justice policies failed catastrophically, Stalin did not blame his own bad ideas. Rather, he claimed that the reason for the failure was that the government’s right to own all land needed to be made more secure by codifying it into law. These actions in the late 1920’s struck the Ukrainian peasants as tyranny. But it was a tyranny that they could not fight because the government owned everything.
Marx made the confiscation of private property central to the communist program. When Democrat politicians speak of nationalizing companies or resources they often say they are doing it for the people who are being exploited. In doing so, they show the same contempt for private property that all Marxists show. But the real lesson of history is that once the government controls pay for individuals and prices for goods then the people are truly exploited. They have no other options. Government control is always the surest road to exploitation. As John Stuart Mill said:
Every function superadded to those already exercised by the government, causes its influence over hopes and fears to be more widely diffused, and converts, more and more, the active and ambitious part of the public into hangers-on of the government, or of some party which aims at becoming the government. If the roads, the railways, the banks, the insurance offices, the great joint-stock companies, the universities, and the public charities, were all of them branches of government; if, in addition, the municipal corporations and local boards, with all that now devolves on them, became departments of the central administration; if the employés of all these different enterprises were appointed and paid by the government, and looked to the government for every rise in life; not all the freedom of the press and popular constitution of the legislature would make this or any other country free otherwise than in name.
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