Statism is the political belief that the state (government) should have substantial authority over society, the economy, and the lives of individuals.
Socialism is an economic and political system in which the means of production, distribution, and exchange are owned or controlled collectively, socially, or by the state, rather than privately.
If they don’t sound very different, it’s because they aren’t.
The so-called right wing loves to mock ignorant socialists who defend the failures of socialism and communism by saying it hasn’t been tried or it would work if we just did it right.
Then they go and make the exact same claims about statism, without even knowing they’re defending statism.
They wax poetic about being a republic as opposed to a democracy, even though the republic they fantasize about died in 1865, and the system that exists today relies extensively on democracy.
When a person like me advocates a voluntary society, not participating in their elections, and creating counter economies, they lose their minds.
“You just want to destroy the system.”
I mean, don’t you? I thought you were opposed to socialism and statism.
You want to hold up a system that steals from poor people in this country and gives to rich people in foreign countries by calling it foreign aid? That’s socialism, isn’t it?
You want to continue a system that gives monopoly power to corporations who provide essential services like electricity and water?
Isn’t that statism?
You want to protect a system that gives itself monopoly power on infrastructure and runs a protection racket? What’s that called?
I think a lot of people aren’t as opposed to statism or socialism as they pretend. I think they more or less just want to defend the team they’ve been brainwashed to believe represents them, or at the very least, “the lesser evil.”
The problem is when the lesser evil is, they continue the practices of the greater evil they just defeated. Suddenly, that evil becomes precedent, and it just becomes the system you’re mad that I want to change
Read the collections: Liberty & Anti-State · Don’t Vote.
Read next: Voting Is Stockholm Syndrome · Government Is A Mafia · Yes, You Can Have Your Roads and Your Tax Money, Too.
