This is what happens when socialists take over Christmas, gift-giving, and
altruism: poverty and mass slaughter.
Dan Wasserman's cartoon today depicts countless gloomy Santa Clauses queued
up before a "Unemployment Benefits" office. 2008 will indeed be a bad
year for shopping-mall Santas, but other Santas are quite jolly.
I speak of politicians. Like shopping-mall Santas, their job is to
entertain requests from strangers for goodies. These strangers (like
those on the laps of shopping-mall Santas) give no thought to who pays for
the requested goodies - so their requests are childish and ample. Politician
Santas are naively taken at their word that they can create wondrous things
for all good boys and girls. Assisted in the magical Capital City by
self-abnegating elves, who need only avoid giving gifts to the naughty, Politician
Santas promise the nice a wonderful bounty.
Alas, one important difference between a shopping-mall Santa and a Politician
Santa is that the former immediately forgets each child's request the moment
that child pops off of his knee. The Politician Santa, in contrast,
works hard at the impossible task of making the magic come true.
Donald J. Boudreaux, Chairman, Department of Economics, Enterprise Hall,
George Mason University, Fairfax, VA 22030
Parliament of Ho, Ho, Hos. 21 November 2008 The
Boston Globe
CHRISTMAS & Santa Claus - http://rexcurry.net/christmas-santa-claus-socialism.html
Chanukah: Hanukkah -lit. "a dedication." Also called the festival of lights,
due to the origin in an oil lamp burning for 8 days. Objectivists call
this Light Bulb Day in celebration of increased productivity and leisure
(and overcoming oil lamps for perpetual daylight on demand) through man's
invention of the light bulb. HAPPY LIGHT BULB DAY, EVERYONE!
The traditional candles (another innovation) replaced the earlier oil.
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CHRISTMAS IN THE YEAR 2000
More evidence of the "Jesus the Socialist" demagoguery of the Bellamys
is below in excerpts from an article by Edward Bellamy. "Christmas in the
Year 2000" was published during the Holiday season in 1894 in the popular
magazine Ladies Home Journal (Jan. 1895, Vol. 12, No. 2):
During the present bi-millennial year 2000, now so near its end, let
us imagine, if we can, an American of today caught up by some miracle of
translation and set down on Christmas Day among our forefathers a hundred
years ago, say in the last quarter of the 19th century. Our contemporary
would be astonished to discover that in America a hundred years ago Christmas
was remembered.
And this astonishment would certainly be a most rational feeling.
To anyone previously ignorant of the real facts, no suggestion would seem
more absurd on the face of it than that a society illustrating in all its
forms and methods a systematic disregard of the Golden Rule, would permit
any notice, much less any open celebration of Christ's birthday.
One would have taken for granted that as December 25th drew near the
police would be doubled and detectives in citizens' clothes stationed on
every corner to arrest any who should so much as whisper that tremendous
name of Jesus. For what treason so black could there be to the social state
of that day as any act in honor of the mighty leveler who laid the axe at
the root of all forms of inequality by declaring that no one should think
anything good enough for another which he did not think good enough for himself,
and who struck at the heart of the lust of mastery when He said that our
strength measured our duties to others, not our claims on them, and that
there was no field for greatness but in serving? It would plainly be the
only reasonable supposition that if there were any who loved this revolutionary
doctrine, so irreconcilable with the existing order, they must live in hiding.
How, then, shall we imagine the stupefaction of our contemporary,
who, thus expectant, should awaken on Christmas morning to hear the day
ushered in by a chorus of jubilant bells and popular rejoicing? How shall
we measure his mounting amazement on going forth to find the disciples
of the Golden Rule celebrating the praises of its author, not in caves
or forest depths, but in lordly temples in the high places of the city,
and what, above all, shall he say when he observes that the rich and the
rulers not only permit, but encourage, the toiling masses who serve them
to render homage to the memory of Him who came expressly to preach deliverance
to the captive, to set at liberty them that are bruised, and to break every
yoke save that of love?
But no. In that day of which I write, one had but to pause a moment
and listen to catch the deep voice of perpetual lamentation, the cry of
the blood of Abel against his brother, which ceasing not from the beginning,
has only in these last days been hushed in blessed silence. And if our
contemporary, for this reason, did not recognize the dolorous sound, yet
he would need but to look about him to see that this generation which so
loudly cried, 'Lord, Lord!' had yet no more mind to do the things Christ
said than the generation He addressed. On every hand the contrast of pomp
and poverty, the full and the hungry, the clothed and the naked -the picture
that broke Christ's heart- remained.
Our whole order is but an application of that rule so simple that
a child could not fail to deduce the result from the terms. What is the
rule? Simply that if people would live well together every one should
see that every other fares as well as he. Individual efforts are inadequate
to secure this end. If the Golden Rule is to be realized in society the
only method is a collective guarantee from all to each of what each owed
individually to every other, namely, as good treatment as he himself had,
which means as applied practically, the guarantee by all to all of equality
in everything that touches material and moral conditions. So our state
is founded, and ingrates, indeed, should we be found if we did not celebrate
Christmas as founder's day in honor of Him who gave us in a phrase the
master-key of the political, the humane and the economic problems.
In a society such as that of the 19th century, based upon inequalities
and existing for the benefit of the few at the cost of the many, it was,
of course, out of the question to celebrate Christmas in the way we do,
as the world's great emancipation day and feast of all the liberties.
The Religion of Solidarity
By Edward Bellamy
The Religion of Solidarity was Edward Bellamy's last book (Antioch Bookplate Company, 1940).
It contains fourteen essays by Edward Bellamy, the nineteenth century
National Socialist writer of Looking Backward. The title essay,
The Religion of Solidarity, written when Bellamy was
twenty-four, is a statement of what Bellamy calls "the human need for
self-transcendence." The Blind Man's World is a ditzy
flight of imagination in which an astronomer learns from Martians
the consequences of lack of foresight, a severe handicap which intensifies
the fear of death and change. To Whom This May Come examines
friendship and intimacy amongst mind-readers. A Republic of
the Golden Rule, from Looking Backward, extolls the
assumption of control of economic development through totalitarian
socialism (a "Great Trust"). Lifelong Education from Equality,
considers the use of leisure in under Bellamy's totalitarian plans.
Bellamy calls for a socialist system that he calls "fraternal cooperation"
in Why a New Nation? He sets forth the "basis for brotherhood"
in Declaration of Principles. which is the complete opposite
of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights.
In Nationalism - Principles and
Purposes he please for the socialist cliche
of "social and economic reform" based upon a programme
of nationalization, and he refines his recommendation in Some Misconceptions
of Nationalism. Why Every Working Man Should Be a Nationalist
touts government ownership of everything (Bellamy, of course, calls
it "public ownership"). The Programme of the Nationalists
shows other terrifying points to his radical economic revolution. Bellamy
looks forward to a Second American Revolution in Fourth of
July, 1992 which will reverse the First American Revolution. He indicates
the line of thinking that led him to write his infamous novel
in How I wrote 'Looking Backward'. The book concludes
with his Introduction to 'The Fabian Essays', in which
he considers Fabian socialism from his standpoint (he calls his
standpoint an "American standpoint").
The principle of
the Brotherhood of Humanity is one of the eternal truths that govern
the world's progress on lines which distinguish human nature from
brute nature. The principle of competition is simply the application
of the brutal law of the survival of the strongest and most cunning.
—Edward
Bellamy