Everyone who has a conscience wants some type of wealth redistribution, income equality, or minimum wage, so that everyone has the bare necessities of life, isn’t starving, has adequate healthcare, and is otherwise not living on the streets and homeless. And the argument that Socialism works in countries such as Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland have been played out repeatedly, again and again.
But those countries mentioned above are all relatively homogeneous with regards to race, religion, ethnicity, culture, and value systems. It seems that these countries, because they are so low-conflict anyway, would probably thrive and be stable even if they had a theocracy or God forbid, a Constitutional Republic capitalist style government, like ours in the United States of America.
But what about in a high conflict, racially/ethnically/religiously diverse and varied country that is internally balkanized and divided, where conflict is a daily occurrence due to racial tensions, sexual tensions, wealth tensions, religious tensions, and other tensions?
It appears that if the US Government was given magnified power by Socialism, where anything and everything that individual government workers did was protected, sanctioned, and safeguarded if it was for the “betterment of the state,” or for “state national security,” then all of our current underlying imperfections, conflicts, civil liberties and human rights violations committed by say, police officers, judges, congressmen, senators, Presidents, feds, child protective service workers, taxing authorities, and any other member of our governmental bureaucracy would become equally magnified and stronger, but this time, there would be no constitutional rights or separation of powers in order to either sue, seek redress, or achieve justice.
This is precisely what happened in Jozef Stalin’s Soviet Russia, in Hitler’s NAZI Germany, in Mussolini’s Fascist Italy, in all of those South American banana republics, in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and countless other socialist nations, where the welfare and security of the state were paramount as a means to “better care for the people,” but where hundreds of millions of people in total were “lost” or “disappeared,” murdered, jailed, tortured, harassed, assaulted, beaten or otherwise persecuted for any reason or whim that any government official willed it to be so.
And no one could sue or seek redress for such an assault on such basic human rights and civil liberties because of the government’s socialist nature, if it could be shown that said violation was for the “good of state,” which could be supported for literally any reason at all.
Can you imagine that kind of governmental power vested in today’s American police officers who are often caught beating, torturing, or even killing innocent young black men, but this time with no legal redress, consequences, or punishment?
Maybe these types of constant, internecine types of conflicts do not occur or are relatively non-existent in such homogeneous nations such as Norway or Sweden as mentioned above, but they are a constant, day to day, hour to hour reality in modern day diverse and “melting pot” America.
Human beings are human beings, but if some are given the ultimate power over life, liberty, and property for the “good of the state,” then they WILL use that power indiscriminately, routinely, and often against others in the state that do not have that power, for selfish or improper reasons, and with complete and total impunity.
Lord John Dalberg-Acton said, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
If the United States of America becomes Socialist, it will make the 100 million murdered in the “not-as-divided/balkanized” former Soviet Union, look like a minor skirmish.
The United States needs to figure out a better way.