Make no mistake about it. It’s so easy to become a socialist. Why? Think about it, when you have access to free money, wouldn’t you be a socialist as well? When you live in a system where you don’t have to work hard just so you can keep body and soul together, wouldn’t you be a socialist?

You have to understand that socialism really is built on a very old concept. It’s build on one part of the human condition that has essentially gone unchanged for thousands of years. Ever since the dawn of time, people have been trying to get something for nothing. I know that sounds harsh and it definitely sounds judgmental, but it’s absolutely true.

Why should you work hard when you can take a free ride off somebody else’s labor? It really all boils down to a very interesting analogy from nature. The analogy is the coo-coo bird. The coo-coo doesn’t make nests. It doesn’t incubate its eggs. Instead, the female would look for the nest of unrelated birds from other species and lay its egg in their nests.

What do you think happens next? The coo-coo egg is genetically adapted to hatch faster than the host species of birds. The coo-coo is not dumb. It selects certain species because it has adapted the knowledge. It doesn’t know this directly, but just through sheer evolution that other species’ eggs hatch slower.

So the coo-coo chick hatches first and what do you think it does? It actually has evolved a notch in its back to make it easier for it to push out the eggs of the host birds. Soon enough, the host birds are clueless as to what happened and they keep feeding the coo-coo. They hunt and forage for food and they feed the coo-coo day in day out.

Soon enough, the coo-coo is actually much bigger than its “parents” Soon enough, the coo-coo chick leaves the nest and the process starts all over again. I give you this analogy because that highlights and sums up what being a socialist is like.

When you’re a socialist, you basically say that people must share your values and your values really revolve around the idea that you have some sort of moral claim to somebody’s labor. That’s really what it boils down to. Why? It takes labor to produce money.

So if you are claiming that a large chunk of a person’s money should go to some sort of social program to help people who have nothing, you are essentially making the source of that money your slave. You probably would feel better about yourself because you’re saying, “these are the rich that I’m taxing.” How do you think they got rich?

Do you think that money came out of nowhere? Do you think it fell on their lap? Of course not. Wealth, for the most part, is created through a voluntary exchange of value for value. In other words, Bill Gates became the richest man on the planet because people needed windows machines. People needed the windows operating system and all the other software created by Microsoft.

It’s not like people woke up the next day and said “That Bill Gates guy is a nice fellow, let’s send him a check.” It doesn’t work that way. For wealth to be created, there has to be an exchange of value. The same applies to Steve Jobs. He came up with the idea of the iPad and the iPhone. Do you see how this works?

It’s easy to become a socialist because you look at everybody else as your slave. But here’s the question. Would you want that done to you? It’s great when stuff is flowing one way, but when you’re on the receiving end, it’s not fun.

One of the god fathers, if you want to call him that, of the modern conservative movement is William F. Buckley. Mr. Buckley, of course, is the founder of The National Review magazine-American conservatism’s de facto house magazine going on seven decades. He published The National Review for a very long time. The The National Review, of course, is the organ of American conservatism.

Mr. Buckley is a very singular figure in the evolution of American conservatism because he really bent over backwards to define what conservatism is and what it isn’t. This was not easy because in the late 50’s, there were all sorts of crack pots and lunatics claiming to be conservative. These are people who believe in all sorts of weird conspiracies and they hated communism. It’s one thing to hate communism as an ideological system. It’s another to see communism in everything about American life and that’s how crazy this extremist fringe was.

Buckley, to his credit, completely eliminated that wing of the conservatives. He shamed them, humiliated them and essentially drummed them out of the conservative wing of American politics. He also articulated a series of beliefs that went a long way in defining what conservatism is.

Basically what he was saying is that society has its own internal mechanisms to evolve to where it needs to go. Government shouldn’t step in. Economic realities are often enough to make society change on its own pace. He doesn’t believe in active government intervention just as he doesn’t believe in over taxing.

This is the essence of conservatism. That’s what they’re conserving that this natural tendency for any kind of human system, regardless of how complex, to essentially tune itself. Whether you agree with classic economists or not, you would at least agree that capitalism has a self tuning mechanism.

When factories produce products that nobody wants, that tuning mechanism comes in the form of losses. On the other hand, when consumers demand a particular type of product and there’s not enough of it in stock or in the market, that kind of self tuning mechanisms takes the form of rising prices. Higher prices trigger people looking to make a buck to lease or buy factories to crank out stuff that is in high demand. This boosts supply and depresses prices. In other words, Americans are able to get more and more stuff for lower and lower prices. Best, of all, if the incentives are high enough, consumers are guaranteed a nice range of choices.

The reverse can also be true. When the state seeks to ‘protect’ one set of producers against competition, the state essentially robs consumers of choices and money because prices become artificially high. It makes for great social policy to guarantee an open platform where people can compete based on price signals.

This is the essence of conservatism. You leave these internal processes alone just as you can’t make jobs magically appear thanks to infrastructure spending, you can’t magically make people virtuous and non discriminating through government fiat an dictatorial regulatory state.

These are the values that conservatives are conserving because they’re valid now and they will probably continue to be valid long into the future.