WHY does the left effectively move society towards a form of totalitarianism? What is the “give away?” HOW can we tell?
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It has to be authoritarian to totalitarian because it wants people to do what they naturally don’t want to do, and does not want them to do what they naturally want to do. The only recourse, then, is coercion.
It largely has to do with the destination of naturally scarce goods, but it also relates to the thinking process behind the destination of goods.
People naturally want to acquire goods. We want to do it for a number of reasons; some bad, but mostly good. Almost everyone has a natural hierarchy of destinations. For some, it’s “me first”. For some it’s “spouse and children first, then me”. For many, and probably most, it’s “children first, then spouse, then me, then the neighbor I know, then the neighbor I don’t know”. That, in Catholicism, is deemed part of the Natural Law, and moral. It’s embedded in our minds as children of God.
The ultimate destination of good in the more radical versions of socialism is “state first, then to whomever the state deems worthy of anything, one of which might be the producer” Typically the “servitors” of the state are, in reality, the first, be they the party hierarchy, the enforcers and the bureaucrats who serve the higher servitors. But the core of it is state determination of the ultimate destination of scarce resources. This, they claim, is the only way to ensure “fairness”,and “equality”.
Since far and away most people naturally want the first kind of distribution and dislike the second, coercion is necessary in order to force the second on them.
It’s interesting. We have widely observed (Venezuela being one of the more recent examples) that leftism fails, and the more radical it is, the more radically it fails. Why?
One of the primary reasons is something economists refer to as “Mother’s dilemma”. Hypothetical Mother has only so much money. She needs to go to the store for milk. She has herself, her husband, her children and a cat. Her favorite thing to eat is pudding, made from milk. Husband likes milk in his coffee. Her children like and need milk. The cat very much likes milk. But she doesn’t have enough money to buy enough milk for all.
So what might mother do? The natural thing for her to do, and the probable thing for her to do is determine a hierarchy for the 'destination" of milk. She might first ensure that the children have the minimum amount of milk to maintain health and then some. Then she tells her husband that she really doesn’t have enough milk for his coffee as he prefers, so he gets half as much. Seeing that the neighbor is ill, she takes a little to her and puts off the pudding to next payday, and the cat gets a piece of old bread that has been sprinkled with milk.
So it’s not great, but it works. A mother here and there will make one big pudding and consume it all herself, but she won’t be in her family position long if she does.
The state, of course, has no idea at all what Mother’s and her family’s milk needs are. So it does some calculations and decides who gets what; perhaps an even distribution to each recipient, in which the cat and husband are long on milk and some goes to waste, Mother still has to defer the pudding because she doesn’t get enough to make one, and the children don’t get enough for healthy growth. The state tells mother it will take care of the sick neighbor and she’s not to bother with her.
The state is inherently incapable of knowing how to make as good an allocation as Mother is. Nor does it assign the same “relational value” to distribution that Mother does. It thinks all needs are the same and none are flexible. So it has to force everyone involved to accept its distribution scheme. And besides, seeing that a lot of people really aren’t happy about the milk they’re getting, the state decides to confiscate more of the farmer’s milk so it can keep the unhappiness level down. That gets distributed, but eventually farmer butchers the cow because feeding her is a losing proposition, and you have Venezuela.
And that’s why the left is inherently totalitarian.