From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. That’s what the communists claim, is it not? My question has always been- “How do you determine ability and need?” Well, Ayn Rand already answered that question:
Whose ability and which of whose needs comes first? When it’s all one pot, you can’t let any man decide what his own needs are, can you? If you did, he might claim that he needs a yacht — and if his feelings is all you have to go by, he might prove it, too. Why not?
If it’s not right for me to own a car until I’ve worked myself into a hospital ward, earning a car for every loafer and every naked savage on earth — why can’t he demand a yacht from me, too, if I still have the ability not to have collapsed? No? He can’t?
Then why can he demand that I go without cream for my coffee until he’s replastered his living room? Well, anyway, it was decided that nobody had the right to judge his own need or ability. We voted on it. Yes, ma’am, we voted on it in a public meeting twice a year. How else could it be done? Do you care to think what would happen at such a meeting? It took us just one meeting to discover that we had become beggars — rotten, whining, sniveling beggars, all of us, because no man could claim his pay as his rightful earning, he had no rights and no earnings, his work didn’t belong to him, it belonged to ‘the family’ — and they owed him nothing in return, and the only claim he had on them was his ‘need’ — so he had to beg in public for his relief from his needs, like any lousy moocher, listing all his troubles and miseries, down to his patched drawers and his wife’s head colds, hoping that ‘the family’ would throw him the alms. He had to claim miseries, because it’s miseries, not work, that had become the coin of the realm
The key to getting treasure in a communist system is to be needy. To prove need, one needs to have a tragic story, one must claim your victimhood. The contest, then is to be a victim. That’s why social media has become what it has. In this world, the crowd has decided that a black man who has been accused of being a domestic abuser is less of a victim than the mother who has to live with poor mental health and three dead children, even if she is the one who killed them.
The landlord isn’t a victim. The corporation isn’t a victim, and neither is it’s billionaire founder. The victim is the looter, the thief, the person who doesn’t produce anything. Why is this? Because it must be in order for the communist system to work.
Again to Ayn Rand in the morality of the kidnapper. The kidnapper holds a physical captive for ransom. Those who would take from society are holding those who producers captive using the producer’s own morality as a weapon. The “morality of altruism” holds a good person’s conscience, empathy, and sense of duty as a ransom.
theirs is the morality of kidnappers. They use your love of virtue as a hostage. They know that you’ll bear anything in order to work and produce, because you know that achievement is man’s highest moral purpose, that he can’t exist without it, and your love of virtue is your love of life. They count on you to assume any burden. They count on you to feel that no effort is too great in the service of your love.
your enemies are destroying you by means of your own power. Your generosity and your endurance are their only tools. Your unrequited rectitude is the only hold they have upon you. They know it. You don’t. The day when you’ll discover it is the only thing they dread.
learn to understand the nature of your own power and you’ll understand the paradox you now see around you. You do not have to depend on any material possessions, they depend on you, you create them, you own the one and only tool of production. Wherever you are, you will always be able to produce.
You have a desire to succeed, to build things, to accomplish things. My entire life, I have always worked, and built, and struggled to accomplish things. Those who would take advantage of me know this, and so they take advantage of my desire to do things, to work, to be useful. They take from me in the form of taxes, of asking that I do the right thing. They take small pieces of my time, my effort, my production for themselves, secure in the knowledge that I will continue to do so. They do the same to you.
As long as we continue to provide, they will continue to take. Like the old plow horse, the useless breeders in our society will continue to take our labor until we collapse under the whip. Not just us as individuals, us as a society. They will continue to take until the entire system comes crashing down.
It’s always been so, and will be until we have decided that we’ve had enough.
