Halloween has a socialist tenor. Menacing figures arrive at your door uninvited, demand your property, and threaten to perform an unspecified “trick” if you don’t fork over. That’s the way the government works in a nutshell.
Thanksgiving has been reinterpreted as the white man, after burning, raping, and pillaging the noble Indian, trying to make amends with a cheap turkey dinner. New Year’s can be ruined as the beginning of a new tax year, and the knowledge that the next five or six months will be spent working for the government.
3. Centralist and Syndicalist Socialism
The question whether or not our economic development is already “ripe” for socialism originates in the Marxian idea of the development of the productive forces. Socialism can be realized only when its time has come. A form of society cannot perish before it has developed all the productive forces that it is capable of developing; only then is it replaced by another, higher, form. Before capitalism has lived out its course, socialism cannot take over its inheritance.
4. Socialist Imperialism
The older socialists were opponents of democracy. They want to make the whole world happy with their plans and are impatient with anyone who is of another opinion. Their favorite form of state would be enlightened absolutism, in which they always secretly dream of themselves occupying the position of enlightened despot. Recognizing that they neither occupy this position nor can attain it, they seek the despot who would be ready to adopt their plans and become their tool.
Socialism and Imperialism
2. Socialism and Utopia
Marxism sees the coming of socialism as an inescapable necessity. Even if one were willing to grant the correctness of this opinion, one still would by no means be bound to embrace socialism. It may be that despite everything we cannot escape socialism, yet whoever considers it an evil must not wish it onward for that reason and seek to hasten its arrival; on the contrary, he would have the moral duty to do everything to postpone it as long as possible. No person can escape death; yet the recognition of this necessity certainly does not force us to bring about death as quickly as possible.
1. Socialism and Its Opponents
The authoritarian-militaristic spirit of the Prussian authoritarian state finds its counterpart and completion in the ideas of German Social Democracy and of German socialism in general. To hasty observation the authoritarian state and Social Democracy appear as irreconcilable opposites between which there is no mediation. It is true that they confronted each other for more than fifty years in blunt hostility. Their relation was not that of political opposition, as occurs between different parties in other nations also; it was complete estrangement and mortal enmity.
5. Covering the State’s War Costs
There were three ways available to cover the costs that the State Treasury incurred in the war.
The LA Times reported on December 16:
Tucked deep inside the 1,603-page federal spending measure is a provision that effectively ends the federal government’s prohibition on medical marijuana and signals a major shift in drug policy.
War and the Economy
2. War Socialism
So-called war socialism has been regarded as sufficiently argued for and justified with reference mostly to the emergency created by the war. In war, the inadequate free economy supposedly cannot be allowed to exist any longer; into its place must step something more perfect, the administered economy. Whether or not one should return after the war to the “un-German” system of individualism was said to be another question that could be answered in different ways.
