Communism

The effects of Communism
A satellite photo of the Korean peninsula at night. Can you tell which half is Communist and which half is Capitalist?

Communism is a form of socialism. It puts control of all property into the hands of the government directly. The results have been impressive: over 100 million people killed in the last century.

Communism is the bloodiest form of government ever conceived. It enslaves the entire population, and rules through fear. Because it destroys property rights, it makes the production of wealth almost impossible. Since the use of one's mind is no longer a method of creating wealth, communism has only one method of production: Through hard physical labor. But without the use of reason, even this is severely limited in its scope.

Since the population gets an equal share of the wealth produced, there is virtually no incentive to produce, since one's effort is of negligible benefit. To compensate for this, the government must intimidate and force the people into working hard. Since self-interest is eliminated as a motivation for production, it is replaced by its cruder sort of self-interest in the form of fear of death. The government slaughters citizens to keep the rest in line.

This is encouraged because the government policies are failures. Communism is supposed to produce limitless wealth, making all of its citizens happy and rich. But with the ability to produce impaired, the success never happens. To distract the population from its failure, the government must blame it on others. And anyone guilty enough of harming everyone in society should be killed of course. Communism lives on scapegoats.

Communism is a brutal system of government. It does not just fail to protect individual rights, it establishes a system of violence force. The results have been exactly what one would predict: starvation, poverty, and the slaughter of millions.


Copyright © 2001 by Jeff Landauer and Joseph Rowlands