As someone who grew up in a socialist country, I have seen and felt and lived through the devastation that inevitably comes with it.
Socialism sure sounds good on paper: Everything is owned by everyone (“the collective”) and there is a ‘social net’ in place that every person contribute to so that everyone is taken care of. There are no beggars anywhere. And so much was true, East Germany did not have beggars on the streets.
At the same time, the population grew poorer and poorer as time went on, with supplies always in short supply or nowhere to be found – unless you knew someone on the inside. The basics – bread, meat, cabbage – were still widely available in my country when the wall came down. Russia was not so lucky. When my 10th grade class visited Moscow in early 1989, the grocery store only two blocks from a glamorous tourist spot had only a few cans on its shelves and was mostly empty otherwise, with flies and birds flying around in it.
I was 17 when the wall came down – old enough to see what was going on. And I have since thought about socialism long, hard, and often. This is what I found.
Socialism does not work because people don’t own anything.
How much do you care about your neighbor’s food supply? Their car? Their washing machine? You don’t, because it is non of your business. If your neighbors car breaks, you don’t care, because it’s not your problem. However if YOUR car breaks, you will need to figure out how to get it fixed.
Now let’s put this into the context of socialism. Imagine you live and work on a farm in a socialist country. You do your chores every day to keep the farm going, but you hate it. Why? Because you might like to feed your animals different food, give them bigger cages, approach their healthcare differently, but you can’t. They are owned by “the collective”, so you don’t have a say in it. Most people will give up, do the bare minimum required of them to get their paycheck at the end of the month and go home to complain to their families. Other people will take home what they can from that farm, steal and plunder.
The German Democratic Republic just barely made it to its 30 year anniversary. It only took three decades to completely run it down. In its last years, everything worth something was being exported for money that never reached the little man. It was not hard to see by this point that I was living in a big prison. The media was spewing hollow slogans repeatedly, trying to make it true by just repeating it again and again. But people are not stupid. Everyone made fun of it.
So if I now hear slogans like ‘you will own nothing and you will be happy’ I have to scoff and think back to these last years of East Germany. Ownership – especially land – is the MOST IMPORTANT THING. Without it, a man or woman cannot live happily.
People that own their land take care of it. People that own their cars take care of them. Anyone owning a business takes care of it. If you own a piece of land, you can build on it in exactly the way you think is best. Most people want to improve their land, their soil, their home. This is not the same for renters. If you rent a house you contact your landlord if anything needs fixing. This is an entirely different relationship, and often rented houses fall apart because the renters don’t keep them up the same way an owner would.
In socialism people don’t own, and the fruits of their labor go to someone else. People living in such a situation realize pretty quickly that this setup is shortchanging them, stay there only when they are forced to, and eventually grow angry enough to change it.