When you don’t know when you’re next meal will be, you can’t buy toilet paper, and some government thug can take everything you own one would tend to be selfish.
Always makes me think of Soviet leader Brezhnev’s car collection (and they certainly were not Ladas).
Socialism also makes people lazy. That is how the system ultimately fails.
It tries to occupy the post of God without being able to furnish any grace.
God isn’t stingy. God is extremely generous to everyone who gives Him a chance. But there’s a proviso. Whoever would want God to be generous should be generous too.
The socialist government doesn’t act that way. If you give then you’re just out of what you gave; nobody cares.
It’s how Europe got into the mess that it’s in.
When people went to the polls they had one and only one issue in mind.
“How do I maintain or increase my social benefits?”
Nothing else mattered. Fiscal issues, cultural issues, national defense....all took a back seat to getting my place at the trough.
The former Mrs. lafroste was born and raised in a communist country, and believe me the milk of human kindness did not flow through her veins. Her ingrained opinion was that a poor person’s problem was the government’s not hers. Actually a reasonable assumption for a communist. (which she wasn’t).
Imagine there are 10 income classes in AndyTheBear's Utopia:
A) 0-1000 dollars per year
B) 1001-5000 dollars per year
.....
J) 10,000,000,001+ dollars per year
Let us imagine groups A through I petition the government and make the point that nobody needs as much as group J. So laws are made and the excess money of group J is distributed among the other classes. Eventually there is no group J, just groups A through I.
After a while it is decided that nobody needs as much as group I, and so they take the excess that group I has and share it. Now we have group A through H....
After a while there is only group A...
But then there is also a special class of people...those that have been empowered to strip away the wealth of the various classes above A and reduce everyone else to poverty. They will of course need to be well armed and capable of forcing the issue and keeping group A poor.
Of course nobody will be producing much, so there will be little wealth to go around. And eventually not enough food. The the violence begins. AndyTheBear Utopia becomes another North Korea.
Socialism starts with selfishness. But that is not what it ultimately produces. What it produces is death.
The most important element of socialism is *vanity*, in the old, Luciferian sense. Socialists are atheists, even if they pretend otherwise. They reject the very idea of God, because they see themselves as the center of the universe.
From this comes not only a rejection of morality, but the affirmative embrace of the Seven Deadly Sins. Not just because they feel they can, but because they see them as the *sacraments* of their atheism. To prove to themselves that they are gods, so the rules do not apply to them.
So it is pretty easy to see why they are such miserable people.
When need is the deciding factor of how to divide the spoils, the neediest get the lion’s share. not the ones who have worked the hardest. This breeds contempt and leads to laziness. Why should a single man or woman with no dependents work hard when the fruits of their labor go to some schmuck who shows up late for work and/or drunk and has 9 kids by 9 different women?
Aristotle pointed this out in Nichomachean Ethics. If one pays taxes under duress via so called voluntary tax contributions, this is not charity. If one must perform charitable acts to graduate high school or college, IT IS NOT A CHARITABLE ACT. It is a forced socialism.