The true genius of the modern Marxists is that they have managed to convince a majority of middle-classers that Marx's ideas really can help the bourgeoisie. And it's hard to distinguish between those who actually believe that Socialism is a viable system and those opportunists who are simply planning to use such a system to their own ends.

Marx was right when he decried the parasitic relationship between government bosses and industrial bosses but he was wrong when he declared class war of worker against boss.

What Marx called "capitalism" libertarians call "corporatism" and rightly declare a war of all free productive people against the true enemy of both: Coercive government.

All that was true — Pareto’s rotation of elites, Michels’ Iron Law of Oligarchy — so long as hierarchical institutions were universally accepted as the sole means of organizing large-scale cooperative effort. So long as that was true — because large institutions are simply not amenable to direct control by the many — every new revolution was a case of “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

But now that hierarchies are becoming superfluous to organizing cooperative effort, and their attempts at doing so are nothing but an embarrassment, we can throw that 5000-year-old rule book in the garbage where it belongs. This is a revolution that can’t be coopted by the old hierarchies, because the material basis of their power is being destroyed.

The issues that Americans should be discussing and debating are: What is the role of government in a free society? Should it be the role of government to forcibly take money from a person to whom it belongs in order to give it to another person? Is that role consistent with Christian principles? Is it consistent with moral principles? Is it consistent with freedom principles?

Once people arrive at the right answers to those questions, the direction our society should take becomes clear.

Ultimately I disagree with a philosophy of electoral politics that is about each individual deriving the maximum value possible from their vote. In fact, electoral politics makes very little sense at all if you consider it from the viewpoint of an individual, whose vote is unlikely to make any difference in determining the outcome.

Now if, as I said, we just presume for argument’s sake that they’re really after the economy, and can’t attack it directly because Communism is discredited, it is hard to think of a better indirect approach than via moralism. If they try to communise the economy directly, there is an enormous body of “right wing” economic theory that can knock down their plans. So instead, they go for a two stage process. First of all, they persuade people that some Damned Thing is immoral. Then they show that the free market allows or encourages that immoral thing. Then they can say, “well, we wish we didn’t have to do this, but I’m afraid we’re going to have to intervene in that part of the economy, to stop the Damned Thing, sorry”. This leaves the free marketeer floundering around having to try to justify the continuance of the Damned Thing in the name of some nebulous “liberty”. And then they say, “so your selfish desire for “liberty” means this Damned Thing must go on?” and you lose the argument in public, because most of the audience have been persuaded that there is a moral crisis that must be addressed, and you are a heartless asshole who just doesn’t care.

But socialist states collapse. With them the entire health system collapses, the education system falls apart, housing falls apart (literally), jobs disappear and the tiny pensions that many elder have come to depend upon completely disappears leaving them in the streets to beg. Yet people justify socialism on the basis that it prevents the very thing I saw in the former socialist republics.

There's always a war on, at least one, on the average, for every generation of Americans ever born. When it isn't a war against "huns" or "nips" or "gooks" it's a war against the right of the individual to medicate himself with anything he wishes in any way he wishes, or it's a war to impose "decency"—as determined by a collection of drunken, crooked, child-buggering old men—on everybody else. Because the important thing, you understand, for the health of the state and the subjugation of everybody else, is to have a war, no matter what it's about.

The clearest indication of what right-wing and left-wing socialism are really all about is the fact that, in the 20th century alone, over a hundred million people were murdered by their own governments, and another hundred million were killed in conflicts between differing brands of socialism. World War II need never have happened (and in any case, America needn't have participated) had the winners of the previous war—fought for no discernable reason—not bungled the peace.

Individualism is a pretty straightforward proposition, although it's a choice that hasn't been particularly popular over the last ten thousand years or so. It's the choice that's closest to the truth, as far as physics and biology go. Not to reiterate the idea's greatest advocate unduly, individualism holds that the individual is the only real component of any given group—that, in a moral sense, there is no such thing as a group, but only an aggregation of individuals—and that no individual is under any obligation to recognize the existence of any group or to inconvenience himself in any way for its sake.

Unless, of course, they make it worth his while—which is the bargain upon which all civilization rests. Break that bargain—cheat the individual of what he is due—and whatever is left that falsely calls itself civilization deserves nothing except ignominy and destruction. Hobbes had it exactly the wrong way around. Leviathan—the so-called Sovereign—desperately needs the individual for its survival.

It is thus interesting that those today who would call themselves “Marxists” support the very oppressive governments that Marx himself derided, while attacking the classical liberal underpinnings of Adam Smith and the classical liberals, who were likely very influential to Marx’s own thought.