Capitalism is about to kill millions of people
On PEPFAR and social murder.
When arguments about socialism’s historical death toll come up, socialists usually have to explain that capitalism has its own death toll, too. This can prove surprisingly difficult to explain. One of the great advantages of socialism is that the state takes responsibility for economic outcomes, which makes it easy to blame any deaths that take place under socialist governance on the ideology. In capitalism, the situation is the exact opposite: responsibility is diffused among a million private economic actors, and the consequences of their decisions can be difficult to distinguish from nature or misfortune.
But “social murder,” as Engels called it, is real, and a recent item in the news gives us an unusually clear look at how this actually works:
The Trump administration has struck what some see as the final blow to the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which over 23 years has saved the lives of an estimated 26 million people in poor countries living with HIV. The Department of State says that as of 30 September, support for PEPFAR by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will end in most countries.
While critics have already begun blaming Trump’s government for the coming wave of death, however, Republicans are laying out the standard defense of liberal capitalism:
Even more important than what Walsh is saying here is what he is not saying. For one thing, he is deliberately not acknowledging that most of this funding will come from the top 3% of earners, with a plurality coming from the top 1%. More importantly, however, he is ignoring why taxpayers need to be forced to do anything. It’s because if a gay man from Uganda takes a dime that he sees lying on the ground, a billionaire can claim that the ground belongs to him, and then armed agents of the state will physically force the gay Ugandan to hand over the money. This isn’t even hyperbole: the Courts have consistently ruled that lost property found on private grounds belongs to whoever owns the grounds, and if you repeatedly refuse to cooperate with a small claims court, they can hold you in contempt and put you in jail.
In other words, Walsh is maintaining the standard liberal capitalist position that the state can and must coerce the population in order to advance their ideas about social justice. The government must force everyone to obey his ideological beliefs even if that means that millions must die in the process. Other politicians (like George W. Bush) set up a little exception to this rule called “PEPFAR” which allowed the government to seize a tiny fraction of the wealth of the rich in order to save all of those lives — but because the Private Property doctrine is so powerful and absolute, even that tiny exception was bound to end sooner or later.
Unfortunately, even well-meaning Democrats fail to appreciate that this is why their redistributive programs are always doomed. Democrats may ridicule capitalists like Walsh for insisting that taxation is theft, but according to the logic of private property Walsh is absolutely correct. Either individuals have a private property right that even a democratic government must not violate — or they do not. Consider these two statements:
“All [this bill] really does is help people like Donald Trump, his cabinet and wealthy Republican donors keep money in their pockets.”
“Congress must be clear: there should never be a legal question concerning the rights individuals have to their own homes and property.”
This is not a Democrat arguing with a Republican; this is Democratic Congresswoman Maxine Waters arguing with herself. One moment liberal Democrats will complain that the rich get to keep their own private property in their pockets, but the next Waters will make speeches like this:
One of the basic Constitutional functions of American government is the protection of private property rights. [The Private Property Rights Protection Act] will protect…privately-owned property from predatory takings under the guise of ‘economic development.’
This is why the private property system must end. As long as liberals like Walsh and Waters continue to defend it, its ruthless logic will destroy even the most trivial attempts to exercise democratic control over our economy. The end of PEPFAR is an unusually vivid proof of this point because it was long considered one of the “good” welfare programs: it was launched by George W. Bush, enacted with overwhelming bipartisan support, and has since been regarded as one of his most important and successful initiatives. But the rule of private property is sovereign under capitalism and will not even be violated by a single dime — even if millions around the world have to suffer and die.
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