Maggie's Farm

A distinction without a difference. They weren't fleeing socialism what they were fleeing were the intolerable conditions that socialism creates. They chose to flee to countries that were not yet socialist and that could be in spite of or because of those non-socialist countries beginning to play around with socialism.

It is the nature of socialism that both the pre-socialist "promise" of free stuff and the early post-socialist free stuff is very appealing. After all you couldn't get free people to choose socialism unless there was something in it for them. It is the later post-socialism that is deadly. When all the rich and middle class wealth has been stolen and redistributed and all the productive intelligent people have either left or gone underground socialism collapses onto itself. How could it possibly be otherwise? Ask yourself how hard would you work to give away your income to people who you can see do nothing for themselves?


I am reminded of a trap that Africans used to catch monkeys. They put a fist sized fruit into a hole in a tree. The monkey would find the fruit and in their greed would reach in and grab it. But the hole was just big enough for the fruit to pass through and would not allow the monkey to remove the fruit while holding it. But the monkey really wanted the free stuff, the fruit, so they refused to let it go. Even as the human hunter rapidly approached them to capture or kill them they hung onto that free stuff. It is a fatal flaw in primates and perhaps all thinking mammals that they want free stuff and will do stupid and even fatal things to get it. Thus socialism!