Geography is destiny.
My girlfriend once said that. She’s been frustrated with her Turkish passport. For the second Christmas in a row, she can’t visit my family in America.
They declined her tourist visa. We don’t know why.
And I once read in the The Sovereign Individual that the biggest predictor of your lifetime earnings in the 20th century was your zip code at birth.
While I’m not sure this will hold true in the 21st century (because of the internet) there’s another platitude I believe to be true:
Ideology is destiny
And today, I want to share with you why I believe communism is a terrible ideology and inherently evil.
This essay was inspired by a book I recently read called Atlas Shrugged:
Hands down, the best fiction book I’ve ever read in my life.
It challenged a lot of my beliefs and reinforced some more.
For context, Ayn Rand, the author, ran away from communist Russia after college. She had read about American history in her history class and decided it was the best place to pursue freedom.
To some people she’s too controversial. Her philosophical views tend to be adopted by libertarian types (small government, low taxes, high freedom).
But I once heard that only behind Bible, her book Atlas Shrugged was the most influential book in a survey of American executives.[1] So I decided to read.
Here are some conclusions I came up with:
(Mild spoiler alert)
Karl Marx Was Wrong
Late in the Novel, the hero John Galt hijacks the radio airwaves of a failing dystopian America, and shares his 3 hour long manifesto.
In it, he shares this Karl Marx quote which he believes holds the secrets to their suffering:
“From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”
The first time you read it, it sounds kinda nice. The Soviets liked it so much they put it in Article 12 of their constitution. The Americans of Atlas Shrugged like it too.
But let’s break it down:
“From each according to his ability”
If we want people to work according to their ability for the sake of the collective, why would they? A RATIONAL, self interested person (me and you), would not put up with that. They would not give their fair share only to receive less for it.
So the system would inevitably collapse because it is anti-greatness.
The best minds would leave as they did in East Germany, until the government was literally forced to wall in their remaining population to prevent a total societal collapse, or they would go on strike as happens in Atlas Shrugged, hence the title.
Or maybe you remember reading George Orwell’s Animal Farm in school.
There’s the story of Boxer, the horse, who builds the farm on the back of his strength and head down determination. Only to be sold for glue once he can no longer support manual labor.
From each according to his ability is right…
Side note on ability:
I think it’s safe to say that some people are smarter, faster, more capable, or better than other people. In fact, it’s impossible that this wouldn’t be the case unless all people were the same.
Well who decides what’s “better?”
As imperfect as it is, the market is the judge. Is that always ideal? Probably not. Is it 100x better than 5 communist pigs cosplaying God? Without a doubt.
In an ideal situation, people vote with their dollars and minds.
to each according to his need.”
This book drilled one thing into my head:
Need ≠ Right
Just because you need food to live, does not by nature give you the right to food.
We’re lucky to live at a time of unprecedented abundance. But it didn’t happen by accident. It happened by the labor and smart decision making of our ancestors from whom we inherited this modern infrastructure.
But that does not make it a human right.
Neither is health care, housing nor education no matter what any politician or international organization wants to sell you.
Now to the elephant in the room:
Who decides what is need?
Is it based on surface level characteristics like, gender, skin color, or sexual orientation?
That doesn’t seem fair to me.
And wouldn’t those most in need typically be those who are least capable? And if so, why would those who contribute the least get a free ride? Why does their “need” fall on the backs of the producers who make the whole thing possible?
The only people who would support such a system would be those who are (1) status signaling altruism, (2) been brainwashed into believing it’s their duty, or (3) believe they fall in the bottom 49% of ability.
The system would inherently lead to mooching.
If it’s easier to grab a piece of the pie, than to build your own slice, more people will elect for the free ride. And as we talked about before, those at the top will increasingly opt out of the game.
And so, communism will always fail because
It is anti greatness
It will always get high jacked by bad actors
So then why does it always pop up?
I forget who I heard this from but there’s an easy answer.
Communism/socialism is the easiest way to gain power.
Just tell the bottom 51% that the top 49% is the reason their life sucks.
Boom, turmoil, support, election.
Summary
I don’t need to write this essay to prove that communism sucks.
East Germans ran to the West. Not the opposite. The Soviet Union collapsed.
But somehow, I noticed these ideas becoming popular amongst my college aged cohort, in Germany, the US, and UK. I even lost a friend over it.
Instead, I’ve elected a different path:
Build wealth according to your ability, and keep it because you earned it.
You are not guilty for striving for more. And your achievement does not entitle anyone to take it from you.
Lastly, I’ll leave you with this funny Naval quote (paraphrased from Nassim Taleb):
“With my family, I’m a communist. With my close friends, I'm a socialist. At my state level politics, I'm a democrat. Higher levels, I'm a republican. And at the federal level, I'm a libertarian.”
Thanks for reading.
Go forth and be mighty.
Need != right was a really interesting insight. In all honesty, I know very little about communism, so I'll definitely need to give this another read after I read Rand.
What other beliefs of yours did this book change? I'm really interested in that.
And P.S, sorry about the girlfriend situation!
Hi Connor,
Been a while since we talked. First off, I enjoy reading your blog. I’m highly grateful that I can keep up with you as you cross intellectual, professional, and personal cornerstones. Your blog helps me reflect on where I am in my life, and your posts are always abundant with nuggets of wisdom. Thanks for keeping me and everyone else who reads this in the loop.
I wanted to say a few things to which I hope you get the chance to give some thought.
The rational individual model is the essential assumption of neoclassical economics, as everyone knows. However, it has become recently clear from literature in the past few decades, including from outside of the economics field, that there may be flaws to this assumption. Rational individualism, as theorized in concepts within rational choice theory and social choice theory, is a tool used to explain actions taken up by an individual in a circumstance where material gain or loss is forthcoming. However, it has moral underpinnings that are inherent and undeniable, with cultural roots in the West that can be empirically and historically observed, from Oscar Wilde to Robert Owen and other developments in 18th and 19th century literature and philosophy. Economists, and to some extent psychologists, are predisposed to the tendency to forget this when theoretical arguments are made about individuals, which are then used to reinforce other ideologies about human nature. The traditionally “non-economic” facets of individualism are neglected when economists conduct controlled experiments to illustrate ideas such as free riding and other game theoretic truths, which are true in a vacuum. While the mathematically-proven experimentation has contributed much to the understanding of the individual and legitimacy of the field, they hold very little merit when the area of economic interest becomes intertwined with highly complex factors such as the state, the international community, and path dependence. The study of groups, as well as ethnographies of non-Western communities (Sub-Saharan Africa, for instance), exposes different paradigms that govern individual behavior: not just the self-interested wealth-maximizing behavior we are used to bearing in mind in our ideas of the person.
The primacy of Western individualism as an explanation of human nature makes it easy to draw the line between unbridled rational individualism and the belief that we are all in a better place than we used to be and thereafter extend that to a morally virtuous idea of what capitalism is, when in reality, it aggregates the most amount of wealth to a very, very small (less than 49%) amount of people when left willfully unwatched. Global inequality can be directly attributed to the Gilded Age and Industrial Revolution, when ideas of communism were first being formulated. To morally elevate things tied to self-interest, which we now know is an incomplete explanation for the behaviors of people and relative across geographical and cultural contexts, and its related manifestations including achievement, wealth aggregation, and so forth, can be arguably seen as egregious when you profit not only from your labor but the system from which you were allowed to prosper. As you said, your geography largely determines your destiny: not just your physical locus or passport but also your geography in relation to power, culture, and predisposition to economic fortune. While these things are out of your control, you can’t call an ideological departure from capitalism evil, just as you can’t call capitalism good, and especially not just because the Soviet Union was a murderous dictatorship that failed to operate in the context of a capitalist global economy.
I too think we should be glad to live in a time of unprecedented abundance. While it happened by the “labor and smart decision making of our ancestors,” the labor which built the first modern infrastructure exploited the people who labored in the best case scenario, the worst case being that they were slaves. That’s why we got communism in the first place. We inherited that as much as we inherited anything else we can be thankful for, if not more, because we inherited first along the continuum of time.
Rights are not real facts of life, and deep down we all know this. They are created and propagated by the world’s most formidable international organizations and nation states out of necessity, because global capitalism yields no graces unto the bottom portion of benefactors from the system. Giving people rights is indeed inherently arbitrary (despite the argument of some universalists), based various degrees of necessity across multiple spectra, but calling it “mooching” is entirely misguided and ignorant of the reality of our world.
I recommend reading about Ubuntu, the relations ethical paradigm from Southern Africa, including the tribal ethnographies and ethical papers that are out there. Also, the The Great Transformation
by Karl Polanyi is, in my opinion, a fascinating read for anyone interested in economics.
Feel free to text and call if any of what I said is unclear. I want to be sure that I understand your point of view completely and that mine makes sense. Anyway, I’d like to catch up with you sometime.
Wishing you a restful and serene end of the year, and sending love from the Low Countries.
Adrian