Socialism Is A Mathematical Impossibility
By Anang Pal Malik
Is it that if government becomes effective, there is no corruption in PDS, etc., and governance becomes world class, and persons manning the government become totally selfless and integrity personified; Socialism will succeed?
No, it will not. Because Socialism is based on two fallacies: 1. Money exists on its own. It doesn’t. Money is just a receipt for the work done by a man. Receipt with which he buys somebody else’s that portion of work, which he needs and other has surplus of it and wants to sell. If nobody is working, there won’t be any money, even if government presses work overtime to print those currency notes. 2. The rich are just those who have gathered more money (which exists on its own and in fixed quantities), and are hoarding it. And if government takes some part of it and spends on the needy all will be well. In reality, rich have earned their money, not gathered it from the thin air, and are spending their money all the time. They are not eating currency notes. They instead buy real food with those notes. The only difference is that they spend the money on those who work for them-persons who make houses for them, who prepare food for them, who draw the paintings they buy, who make the jewellery they buy, who make the cars they buy.
When government takes away money from the rich and gives it to those who do not work, it has spread that much cancer in the society as now those who work for the rich will have that much less of their work purchased by the rich, spreading the paralysis in the body of society. And of course those who got the money without working would not do any work because the work is pain, and we all want to go through life as painlessly as possible.
I explain it with one simple example. Suppose in a society of hundred persons, twenty are below poverty line and eighty are above it. The bottom ten of the eighty who are above poverty line work for the rich. If government takes away some money from the rich and gives it to those twenty who are below poverty line for nothing, the ten who were working for the rich will be out of job and will go below poverty line, thus making the number below poverty line thirty, needing more expenditure than incurred initially. The twenty will not work because there is no need to, and even if they try to work, there would be no money with somebody else to buy it. And as I have explained above, money is work, since now only seventy people are working, there is that much less money in the society. So overall quantity of money has gone down, and the number of those needing help has increased. Taxes are raised, resulting into even less money left with the rich to spend, reducing employment further and therefore reducing the quantity of money being created in the society, and the cycle is repeated till taxes can no longer be raised. The government starts borrowing, and finally the debt comes due and the economy of the country collapses. Socialism can never succeed howsoever honest and efficient the government machinery becomes.
Corruption in fact is one of the inescapable outcomes of Socialism, not the cause of its failure.
So Socialism has to be dismantled; even if everybody were honest. Eradication of corruption as a result of dismantling of Socialism is going to be just one of the many positive developments. Therefore we must first of all completely separate economy and State. Government should only have military, police, courts, roads, irrigation, and schools for everybody and some colleges. This will drastically reduce the opportunities to be corrupt.