20110120

The sun seems to have faded from the skies over the US and over Western Europe. I don’t mean this from a geographical standpoint, but from a political and ideological one. It’s a well accepted fact that the people of these regions are more unhappy, more depressed and more discouraged than a few decades ago. Of course that you can blame the economy, the increasing poverty, the bad governance, the war in Iraq, but if there is one thing that watching House MD taught us is that multiple diseases are never the answer. There must be an underlying cause, a chronic condition that aggravated slightly through the years until it found an opening and burst into the scene at full speed.

Back in 2008, in the middle of the economic crisis, I watched every forum come alive to  the theory that we were witnessing the failure of capitalism. Every bleeding heart socialist from the States was in an outrage at what Bush and the right had done to the economy and how capitalism is a wrong system to begin with, how it was doomed to fail, how Karl Marx was a genius and how we should all turn against the rich because they are really the only thing keeping us down and we should tax the shit out of them so that the state can start redistributing that wealth. The Europeans, on the other hand, loved pointing the finger at the Americans back then, dumping the problems of the world on their shoulders and quipping from the sidelines how most states in Europe are more socialist and how you should really pay a hell of a lot more attention to social needs that those barbaric Yankees. And how, somehow, the cause of all evil became for them that the US was not socialist enough.

Well, guess what, capitalism didn’t die. Of course it couldn’t die, if nothing else, then for the lacquer of a system to replace it with. Because one of the things these idiots seemed to gloss over in their rants back in 2008 was that almost all of the purely socialist states, the so called socialist republics, failed miserably at the end of the 1980s. The only ones that are out there still are the likes of Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea and the People’s Republic Of China and all of them have major issues in the human rights department. I don’t exactly see a mass migration towards any of those countries, despite the fact that China’s economy is currently the best in the world so living in those lovely socialist states isn’t exactly a priority for the down-trotted of capitalist oppression. Therefore, I would say to all those preaching the death of capitalism to shut the hell up and sit their asses back down in front of their TVs, or computer screens or whatever they use to brainwash themselves into this kind of stupor.

Insufficient regulation of the financial markets and inept distribution of risks caused the financial crisis. It had nothing to do with capitalism. It had everything to do with idiots running the financial engine of the economy into the ground by selling and reselling debt thus making the whole system extremely susceptible to defaulting. Yeah, by the way, this wasn’t all done by the Americans either. Every bank in Europe took a hit when Lehman Brothers and Goldman and Sachs fell. They can point their fingers all they want at the evil Americans, but the fact remains that the European banks bought bad debt, they bought stuff they shouldn’t have touched so they have no right to cry when the deal they made backfired in their face.

However, these ideological discussions that took place amid the crisis, spawned an idea in my mind and, like a well planted seed, it finally blossomed. Not only is capitalism the best and only way that we have to aptly navigate reality, but I will go one step further and say that one of the underlying causes for westerners not being as happy and content with their lives and their respective societies is, in fact, that we have allowed too much socialism in our day to day.  I know that sounds so counterintuitive that it must be stupid, but let’s take a long way around the arguments and better explain what I mean.

If we are to reduce both doctrines to their respective cores, capitalism cares about money and socialism cares about people. You can easily see why the two have been put in such a stringent opposition over the years. Obviously either one of the two systems taken alone, will not function. The socialist movement was born as a way to fight back the oppressions of the owners over the workforce. I don’t think I need to bring back the problems that the average worker faced back in the early 1900s. Shitty pay, hazardous conditions, no such thing as a guaranteed contract and everywhere it was the same. If you weren’t happy digging in a mine  12 hours a day and dying of lung cancer or asthma and making 2 bucks per hour or less, you could just as easily die falling off a sky scraper or have yourself run over by a truck while shoveling dirt on a construction site for the same shit pay. There we no unions, no negotiations, no regulations, nothing. So yes, somebody needed to unite the workers, to have them push back. Socialism, at that time, was needed and when it led to strikes and angry mobs and protests it was fought against with police and guns and riot control. It was a bloody street fight, but eventually the people won and the owners understood that the exploitation days were over. Nowadays workers have rights, guaranteed retirements, disability pay and one form or another of health insurance and a lot of other stuff that has no theoretical reason for existing in a world concerned solely with profit increase. Socialism has won the battle that spawned it in the first place and if socialism were to disappear tomorrow we would still not return to those dark days of the 1900. We were there once, we saw how shitty it was, we learned out lesson and if anyone even dares to argue otherwise then they’re a fucking moron who loves arguing for the sake of arguing.

However, I feel that we came to a point where socialism has outgrown its utility, where it has become nothing more than a hindrance. Left without a reason for being, socialism was unable to reinvent, instead it chose to recycle the battle. The owners are still the villains looking the exploit the poor workers, when in fact this isn’t the case anymore. No matter what the quality of wages, socialism can never say that they’re enough, because then it just needs to disappear. The fact is that, perhaps it should have said enough many years ago.

I feel that today’s socialism consistently promotes stupidity and laziness and that there is no further gain that can be obtained by continuing on this path. Take France for instance, one of the most preeminent western socialist countries. They tax the hell out of their people, and they feel it’s justified to go up to a level of 50% income tax on the wealthy. In rough terms that means for every buck you make or Euro as is the case, you have to give one to the state. That might not sound as bad, but let’s say you’re an economic genius and you manage to get a return of 20 million Euros out of your business. Guess, what? You’ve only made 10.

This type of progressively layered taxation that sits at the core of every socialist fiscal system is literally a discouragement tool for enterprising people. The better you do, the more penalties your results incur. Yet there are people, ideological monkeys, that will take that last line, look you straight in the eye and tell you you’re wrong. They’ll tell you that you don’t understand, that those fortunate should pay their fair share and these monkeys will become so worked up over the course of their reply that they will stop, if they do stop, just short of calling you a hooligan for even thinking of challenging their ideas. Point in question, this exact type of exchange happened between a talk show host and an outraged politician when they were talking about the phenomenon of the wealthy leaving France for Switzerland because of the harsh French fiscal regime. The reason why France is so desperate for money, by the way? Is because they have one of the most active and involved social policies of all developed countries and they see how, if they keep this up, in twenty years’ time they won’t be able to afford it.

The state has now become an entity of its own and it needs a lot of money to survive. That’s not such a bad thing in itself because, in most countries, the state is well optimized and it, alone, doesn’t imprint enough pressure on personal income.

Speaking of personal income and insurance and retirement funds and all that jazz, does anyone have any kind of idea what the difference is between a person’s net income and the actual amount of money they cost the company they work for? In most countries, they cost double, in some, even more than that. But it’s not the state that’s mandating all of that money be taken away, not entirely anyway. There’s a little thing called unions that will also bite a hefty chunk out of the money pile.

Don’t get me wrong, we need unions. In all the places that I worked that didn’t unionize, things were crappy as hell. The HR department was there only to block the access of the employees to the justice system and to trick them into signing away as many of their rights as possible. However, unions have grown these days into this huge amoebic parasite that spreads into every corner of the country, that has branches in every little town, that instead of just presenting a common front to negotiate with the owners, has taken unto itself to pay disabilities and unemployment and all other kinds of shit and act as a sort of a state within the state. Can anyone tell me why in God’s name should the public transport of Cologne come to a complete stop because there is a payment dispute somewhere in the Lufthansa Technical Department? There is no common owner, just a union sisterhood that decided to protest out of solidarity. And its this type of damn solidarity that is misunderstood, that is portrayed as the foundation of socialism and that is the root of most evil nowadays.

The sums that are sunk into these machines that are the unions are staggering. Get your mind around this, people, there is an entire army of individuals making money doing absolutely nothing! It’s the best job in the world, work for the union. It used to mean that being a member of the union was something you did on top of your full-time job. Not the case today. Today you can actually work for the union itself. And there’s a shit-load of these people that make a living out of organizing rallies and collecting subscriptions and managing databases of union members, and all the while, this whole organization serves nothing. The services it provides are the same as those provided by a local union limited to pooling its members from a single company, only the overhead costs are much bigger because they have to synchronize with the network, or it doubles services already provided by the state like welfare, medical benefits, disabilities and other such things. More than this, the size and spread of these parasites, has allowed them in some cases to exercise pressure on the mechanisms of the state itself. In some countries, unions force the state’s hand to alter economic polices and that is just plain wrong because this enables the existence of another power within the state. The people should have influence on the state’s policies only during the electoral process. If any mass of non-elected people can exercise power over the mechanisms of state then the whole electoral principle is ruined as far as I’m concerned.

Somehow related to the development of unions but yet parallel to it is the idea of the social state creating this army of advisors and hand-holders whose only purpose is to meddle into people’s lives. They’ve effectively created a whole generation of drones that get counseled the entire duration of their lives. What job to take, how to plan their home, how to plan their family, how to function in their family life. This generation proves more and more to be without initiative and perpetuates the cancer as they accede to leadership positions and have no clue what to do and how to do it. All of these advisors and assistants and hand-holding services are payed out of public money; money that goes out of the pockets of the workers and doesn’t have a flying fuck in common with the redistribution of wealth. The socialist state, ends up ironically screwing the workers out of the money it helped them obtain in the first place, just so the ideology can spread and we can all experience more of their brand of solidarity.

Seriously, it’s the existence of these money sucking entities that prevented the American economy from wining the manufacturing race with countries like Japan in the 80s and China since the late 90s and up to now. The same principle applies for all developed economies. You find that your products simply can’t compete with the Made In China brand because the costs of labor have become so big here that we just can’t afford to make a good, decently priced product anymore. And it makes no sense for the consumer to hear “Buy American” when the product is not that much better and almost twice as expensive as a chinese one.

And the reason the cost of labor has gotten so out of hand, isn’t that all the workers are living in castles and making trains of money off their day job. When compared to the cost of living, the average net income isn’t all that dandy, but the actual cost of labour included into the product simply drives the price too high. The profit margin per product (the only company interest into any piece of merchandise) is minimal at best and almost infinitesimal when compared to the social expenses incurred by the workforce that are projected onto that same product. So when people point their angry little fingers at the big corporations as the root of all evil, they should just turn that finger around and point it at themselves, irregardless of wether or not they are employed. In fact, more so if they aren’t.

The only way we can recover out of this hole is if we give the enterprises some kind of leeway because only the creation of value can dig us out and, let’s face it, that’s something that the left side of the political spectrum just doesn’t have the tools and mentality for. We’ve been too exposed to socialism for our own good. We’ve become to preoccupied with talking and assisting and health-care and no child left behind and in the meantime nobody’s working and when the well will run dry, all shit’s gonna hit the fan. But, since this will still be perceived as a problem of capitalism, the left will win another term all over the world and sink us deeper. The skies aren’t darker because they’re clouded, it’s just that the sun seems farther away from the bottom of the hole we’re in, my comrades.