- Dec 18, 2011
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Written by a former socialist. His early views are typical of many indoctrinated youth. So simplistic and no thought given to how politicians actually force it on the population and there is zero thought given to where the money will keep coming from. They are thinking that if everyone shares what they have, all will be golden. Of course, we quickly run out of things to share because when they kill capitalism, they kill the means by which more wealth is created.
"It seemed like a perfect solution to the world’s problems to my young, idealistic, incredibly well-intentioned but historically ignorant mind."
"As someone who felt an incredible moral high for advocating for everyone sacrificing their excess for the sake of making sure no one else ever lacked, I had no idea what an incredibly materialistic solution this was to the world’s problems.
As I grew older, I had a hard time reconciling the fact that I was a sworn pacifist, and yet the only people who seemed to have achieved socialism did so by physical force. I reasoned that it was a necessary evil for the sake of enacting true justice.
I found the revolutionaries of Cuba to be romantic, but when I traveled to Cuba when I was 17 and saw people living in equality, but equal poverty, I knew that Castro hadn’t had all the answers.
Learning about the mass murders of dissidents, artists, Christians, and homosexuals stirred my conscience too."
"The plight of well-educated (free education!) Cubans who were driving taxis rather than practicing psychotherapy because there was no market for their services seemed difficult to blame entirely on the travel embargo, as was the line fed by the Cuban government about all their economic woes.
I had always had a problem with how oppressive socialism had always ended up being in world history and believed that “no one had ever done it right.” I thought it should be gentler and nicer. More “democratic,” right? Just free tuition and healthcare, what’s wrong with that?
I honestly didn’t think much about the taxes, other than to unquestionably swallow the line that only rich people would be taxed a lot and, well, they didn’t deserve all that money, right?
Over time, particularly when I later moved out of San Francisco (after the tragic death of one of my friends at the hands of an MS-13 gang member who mistook him for a rival gang member, which played no small role in my eventual paradigm shift) and met people with different perspectives did I start to notice the flaws in the socialist logic.
The proverbial ton of bricks that hit me was the realization that nothing I believed in could be enforced without physical force, and that it was, in fact, theft to force private citizens to give up so much of their own money. Suddenly it made sense to me that so many of the Miami Cubans were Republicans, a fact that had always puzzled me in the past."
Dr. Michael Brown Asks Why Are So Many Millennial's Drawn to Socialism?
"It seemed like a perfect solution to the world’s problems to my young, idealistic, incredibly well-intentioned but historically ignorant mind."
"As someone who felt an incredible moral high for advocating for everyone sacrificing their excess for the sake of making sure no one else ever lacked, I had no idea what an incredibly materialistic solution this was to the world’s problems.
As I grew older, I had a hard time reconciling the fact that I was a sworn pacifist, and yet the only people who seemed to have achieved socialism did so by physical force. I reasoned that it was a necessary evil for the sake of enacting true justice.
I found the revolutionaries of Cuba to be romantic, but when I traveled to Cuba when I was 17 and saw people living in equality, but equal poverty, I knew that Castro hadn’t had all the answers.
Learning about the mass murders of dissidents, artists, Christians, and homosexuals stirred my conscience too."
"The plight of well-educated (free education!) Cubans who were driving taxis rather than practicing psychotherapy because there was no market for their services seemed difficult to blame entirely on the travel embargo, as was the line fed by the Cuban government about all their economic woes.
I had always had a problem with how oppressive socialism had always ended up being in world history and believed that “no one had ever done it right.” I thought it should be gentler and nicer. More “democratic,” right? Just free tuition and healthcare, what’s wrong with that?
I honestly didn’t think much about the taxes, other than to unquestionably swallow the line that only rich people would be taxed a lot and, well, they didn’t deserve all that money, right?
Over time, particularly when I later moved out of San Francisco (after the tragic death of one of my friends at the hands of an MS-13 gang member who mistook him for a rival gang member, which played no small role in my eventual paradigm shift) and met people with different perspectives did I start to notice the flaws in the socialist logic.
The proverbial ton of bricks that hit me was the realization that nothing I believed in could be enforced without physical force, and that it was, in fact, theft to force private citizens to give up so much of their own money. Suddenly it made sense to me that so many of the Miami Cubans were Republicans, a fact that had always puzzled me in the past."
Dr. Michael Brown Asks Why Are So Many Millennial's Drawn to Socialism?
