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.