Why Communism Doesn’t Work

Saying that communism doesn’t work is kind of like saying that water is wet. It seems so obvious that you’d think that everybody, from the smartest to the dumbest people, would already understand it. Even if you’re so dumb it takes you two hours to watch Sixty Minutes, you can look at these memes and get the general idea:

Still, a lot of people claim not to understand why communism doesn’t work, so let’s start at the very beginning.

What is communism? Here’s a very good definition from Britannica:

Communism: Political and economic doctrine that aims to replace private property and a profit-based economy with public ownership and communal control of at least the major means of production (e.g., mines, mills, and factories) and the natural resources of a society. Communism is thus a form of socialism—a higher and more advanced form, according to its advocates. Exactly how communism differs from socialism has long been a matter of debate, but the distinction rests largely on the communists’ adherence to the revolutionary socialism of Karl Marx.

Like most writers of the 19th century, Marx tended to use the terms communism and socialism interchangeably. In his Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875), however, Marx identified two phases of communism that would follow the predicted overthrow of capitalism: the first would be a transitional system in which the working class would control the government and economy yet still find it necessary to pay people according to how long, hard, or well they worked, and the second would be fully realized communism—a society without class divisions or government, in which the production and distribution of goods would be based upon the principle “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” Marx’s followers, especially the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Ilich Lenin, took up this distinction.

Now, you might be thinking, “So communism and socialism are pretty close to the same thing?” Yes, they are. I’d also add that modern American liberalism/progressivism, fascism, and Nazism are all branches of that same tree, although you’ll never get liberals to admit it. However, we’re going to save the litigation of that issue for another column and get on with the topic at hand.

Let’s start by talking about the two most important features of communism: The idea that we’re all going to share the fruits of our labor and the overwhelming power of government that has to go along with it to make that happen:

First of all, there is at least one place in our society where this type of thinking ACTUALLY WORKS most of the time. It’s the family unit. Maybe dad’s working sixty hours per week, mom’s taking care of the house and the kids, big sis watches her little brother sometimes, and he… well, he’s three, so he’s mostly dead weight.

Still, everybody gets fed, and it all works out. But why? Because these are people who are committed to each other. They’re bound by blood, and parents and children naturally care deeply about one another.

When you try to take that philosophy outside of the family unit, it immediately falls apart because the rest of the world isn’t your family. You don’t have the same level of concern and willingness to sacrifice for everyone else as you do for your spouse or your kids. Sure, charity exists, but very few human beings take charity as far as the dad in our example, who’s working far harder for his family than he would probably work for himself.

In fact, not only do people not want to provide for each other’s needs, THEY OFTEN DEEPLY RESENT being asked to do so. If I were allowed to opt out of having my taxes go to welfare, food stamps, and public housing, I would do it in a heartbeat. A large percentage of the population feels the same way about these heavily abused programs.

Since that’s the case, communism destroys the incentive for people to work hard. If a highly skilled, genius engineer who is putting eighty-hour weeks in at SpaceX for a quarter of a million per year can’t make more than a fast-food worker, why would he put himself through that? What’s the point of putting your money on the line, taking a huge risk, and working yourself to death for years starting a business if you’re not allowed to benefit from it? Communists love the idea that people like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Jensen Huang wouldn’t exist under communism, but they don’t understand that their companies wouldn’t exist either. Those companies never would have been started under communism, and the companies that already existed after a communist takeover would fall to pieces because there’s no incentive for highly skilled workers to push themselves to make it work.

In other words, under communism, there’s no real incentive to work hard, produce, or create anything new. Sure, a bunch of lazy bums and resentful people being forced to work at jobs they neither want nor care about will still produce SOMETHING, but it’s going to be a fraction of what they would have produced under a capitalist system. This is why the more communism, socialism, or progressivism you have, the more poverty you’ll have that inevitably goes along with it.

This brings us to the second problem with communism, which is that it makes the government into the nexus of all activity. All the money, power, and important decisions in society end up involving the government.

When you start asking people like Zohan Mamdani, who was a subway rapper in NYC, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who was a bartender, to decide where the capital for the whole country should go, it’s going to be an economic disaster equivalent to setting off nuclear bombs in a dozen American cities. Under communism, you end up with people who aren’t smart or experienced enough to know what they’re doing in ANY FIELD, making decisions about EVERY FIELD instead of letting the market decide where to allocate capital. If you want to know why 30-40 million people starved to death under Mao in China, it was because he was making critical decisions about farming that impacted the whole nation when he had no idea what he was doing.

On top of this, communists also have to keep a lid on the people who are angry about the corruption that inevitably goes along with it. If the government gets to choose where to distribute everything, the one thing you can be sure of is that the government and its loyalists will get a much better deal than everyone else:

Furthermore, a large portion of the population simply won’t voluntarily live under a communist system, so those people have to be forced to comply with things like gulags, secret police, social credit systems, and the Tiananmen Square massacre. Given time, ALL COMMUNIST GOVERNMENTS turn into authoritarian governments that heavily oppress their citizens because free people won’t willingly choose to live under communism long-term.

If you’re a normal person, you’ll probably read this and think, “Why would anyone want to do this?” Well, there are two groups of people who at least believe they will benefit tremendously under communism.

The laziest, most unskilled, most envious people like the idea of coasting through life, being guaranteed a bare minimum, and having the people who are better than them knocked down a few pegs.

The other group of people who love the idea of communism are the ones who imagine themselves being in charge. Then, forget about the athletes, movie stars and billionaires, they’d be the ones getting the special privileges, telling everyone else what to do, and being the most important people in society.

What it all comes down to is that communism destroys freedom, impoverishes nations, and turns the people into slaves of the state. No one who loves this country would want that kind of future for it.

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