Socialism’s legacy is heaps of bloody corpses scattered across a landscape of hunger and despair, but the youthful neo-commie hipsters infesting our colleges and coastal cities want to give it another try here and now since they’re smart and they won’t screw it up this time. Uh huh. Because when I look at millennials, I see a generation of achievers – achieving unbroken eye contact with their iPhones, achieving hitherto unimagined heights of undeserved self-regard, and achieving convincing their parents to support them into middle age. If anyone can make socialism work – by which I mean the pipe dream of it not being a slaughterhouse of soul crushing tyranny – it’s these winners. At least that’s what Chet thinks.
Chet’s my unicorn.
Me? I think I’d prefer freedom. Yes, I definitely prefer freedom. And I think that if they want to take away my freedom, they should be ready to fight to the death. I’m not super butch warrior guy, but still I’d rather bleed out on a pile of hot brass than live as the slave of a Chardonnay-swilling socialist ruling nomenklatura based in Brooklyn.
Oh, I’m not kidding. I walked around in the ruins of socialism overseas. My wife’s family escaped it. When you talk about a socialist revolution, you better be ready to bring one because I and a couple hundred million other patriots are not having it.
Are. Not. Having. It.
Now, the cool new socialism of the hipster class glosses over the problem that we Normals and our uppitiness pose to their utopian scheme, and it’s a pretty big problem. Let’s see what some of the man-children at whatever the Chapo Traphouse podcast is say about our bright, shiny future under socialism:
“After setting everyone on equal footing (by seizing the billionaires’ money, socializing their wealth, and handing the keys of production over to workers), you’re looking at an economy that requires something like a three-hour workday, with machines taking care of most of the drudgery; and—as our public fund pays for things like health care, education, scientific research, and infrastructure—all this technology actually makes work quicker, easier, and more enjoyable.”
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That’s a lot to unpack, so let’s seize on just one aspect. “Seizing,” are we? Now, these sorry cheese weasels do look exactly like you would expect: Stupid beards, skinny jeans, soft hands, and dull eyes. But they don’t look much like dudes who are likely to seize anything besides the nearest locally-sourced muffin. Who, exactly, do they expect to do all the seizing that will facilitate “handing the keys of production over to workers?” Now, I use to specialize in commanding hundreds of guys with guns who actually could seize stuff, and I have to say that I don’t think my troopers would be down with doing the dangerous bidding of a bunch of geebos who look like they’d be blathering about their fourth-level elf warrior with a +1 sword Dungeons & Dragons character if they weren’t quoting selections from Marxism 4 Dummies.
They seem to be saying, “Don’t worry, we’re only going to mess with those Monopoly men with the monocles and top hats!” You could ask your local kulak about how that turns out for folks like you and me, but since the socialists murdered them all I’ll need to demonstrate why Normals are the real target in another way. Allow me to unleash that which leftist nincompoops fear the most, besides gainful employment and their mom walking into their room at night unannounced while they are interacting with their computer/girlfriend.
Math.
Let’s take the richest man ever was, Jeff Bezos. He’s got a net worth of at least $150 billion. It not in actual dollars, though, unless he has the world’s biggest mattress. It’s mostly in Amazon stock. We’ll just leave aside the inconvenient issue of what would happen to Amazon’s stock value if it were “seized” and nationalized and just assume he’s got a big pit full of dollar bills. We take all that and split it among the 330 million Americans and everyone gets…$454.55. Congrats. Everyone gets one payment on their 2015 Toyota Camry. That is, unless we’re decreeing that all consumer loans are forgiven, which is probably on the socialists’ to-so list and would mean many fewer consumer loans going forward, but again I digress.
Divvying up the cash seems…unhelpful. How about we put all the money toward government spending? That would never be dropping it down a rathole because the government is awesome. Let’s see, the 2019 U.S. budget is $4.407 trillion – with a “T” – so all of Bezos Bucks would be about 3.4% of that. Yes, all of Bezos’s money would run the federal government for 12.4 days.
So, after about two weeks we’re going to need some more cash. There appear to be about 560 billionaires in the U.S. They all have less than Jolly Jeff – everyone has less than him – but let’s count each one as having $5 billion to simplify things. That’s $2.8 trillion. A lot of dough. But even assuming the entirety of their assets could be converted to cash, you could fund the government at present levels for … 232 days. That’s at present spending levels, without all the bells and whistles and free college and doctors and kale smoothie-makers everyone will get from Uncle Santa.
Remember, under socialism we aren’t minting any new billionaires, so where do we go for the money once the low-hanging billionaire fruit is picked clean? Millionaires!
A 2017 report says there are probably 10.8 millionaires in what would be the People’s Republic of America: “In 2016, there were 9.4 million individuals with net worth between $1 million and $5 million, 1.3 million individuals with net worth between $5 million and $25 million, and 156,000 households with more than $25 million in net worth, the report says.”
Now we’re hitting regular folks. If you have a house in Los Angeles or Washington, welcome to millionairehood! Or a small business – lots of us are rich on paper. Well, what’s ours is…theirs. The fact is our socialist pals are going to have to reach way down below the 1% to find enough stuff to redistribute so that everyone can have everything they want (but not enough to work for) while robots mop out the toilets.
They want your stuff. The stuff you spent years working for, saving for, sacrificing for. All gone, to someone else, because some neck-bearded Gender Studies grad decided he and not you should choose what happens to your property. All that effort, all those years you spent gainfully employed, being responsible, working while other folks played?
Too bad.
Everything you worked for is gone, because they want it and you have it and, well, they and their buddies got together and voted to make what’s yours theirs. You should have thought of doing that yourself before you put in all those years working to achieve your dreams. You should have just gotten the government to make your dreams come true by stealing stuff from the guys who were dumb enough to work for theirs.
The socialists seem to assume that there’s not going to be any pushback from all these millions of Normal Americans who are going to fund this latest socialist experiment (Remember, this time, under these geniuses, socialism will totally work – it’s due for a win!). We’ll sort of shrug and just give up our stuff, and our freedom, to a bunch of 20-something adolescents because…the 20-something adolescents really want us to.
Nah.
I’d rather fight, if they make me. And I bet you would too. As my upcoming book Militant Normals: How Regular Americans Are Rebelling Against the Elite to Reclaim Our Democracyexplains, we’re done with the endless cycle of leftists failing, blaming us for their failures, taking our money and liberty, failing again, then announcing that it’s our fault they failed again, and that the solution is another round of taking our money and liberty.
I’m just not convinced that we should give up the fruits of our decades of labor and our individual freedom to these doofuses because they really want us to. Instead, they’ll have to impose it on us by force, if they can. That whole thing about 300 million guns in the hands of free Americans makes it tricky. Now do you get why they are so intent on stripping guns from law-abiding patriots like you instead of scummy thugs in Democrat blue cities who are actually murdering people?
You’ll be a lot easier to rule if you’re disarmed. I wrote about what armed Americans can do to radicals who want to crush them under the Birkenstock heel of leftist tyranny in my novel Indian Country. Spoiler: A nation full of armed American citizens conducting a decentralized insurgency resisting a centralized leftist force attempting to oppress them has the advantage.
But it’s unlikely to come to that. Since killing me and probably you and probably a couple hundred million other armed and militant Normal Americans would be a lot of hard work, I think we’re pretty safe. These people aren’t much on actual effort; they prefer to pose and whine. If they’re going to kill us and seize our stuff, they’ll have to get off their mom’s couch and go farther than the kitchen, and that’s a fridge too far.
But you never know, so keep in mind, when choosing how to spend some of that money you earned working, that no one in history who has ever faced a foe that wants him dead or enslaved has ever had too many guns or too much ammunition.
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