For my lefty friends...

I went to University in Vancouver in the late 80's/early 90's. This was when the Soviet Union was still the "Big Bad."

I met my first Communism-apologizers there. Mostly good-natured left-leaning people who truly cared about society, they nonetheless made some strange illogical justifications about the most oppressive regime the world has ever seen. And they all seemed to feed the same ideas back and forth to each other and anyone who questioned or asked them to explain what they meant was politely ridiculed as a "capitalist stooge" who wasn't smart enough to know better. After awhile, the attempted ridiculing wasn't so polite.

And like the bull, that red cape of stupid commentary fluttering in front of me drove me to charge headfirst into every discussion of the so-called merits of the Capitalism vs Communism debate. To the detriment of my social life. Because anyone who attacked communism of course was throwing in with Joe McCarthy.

As my first year room-mate would say: "It's kinda hard to pick up hot lefty chicks if you keep spouting off about the 'Evil Empire'."

"But..."

"Goals, Ray, goals. Do you want to convert them, or fuck them?"

Suffice to say, he got a lot more dates than I did in university. It's easy to get along with hot lefty chicks when you have a rather *ahem* flexible morality with regards to you true opinions (translation: he lied like a used car salesman.)

---

So little has changed since then. A good friend of my wife and I recently spouted wistful about how she thought it might be better to live in a Communist country...

"What?"

"Well, you know, it's the sense of community, everyone working together, sharing the work..." she trailed off as she saw my face.

"A system with a body count in the tens of millions does not have a 'sense of community'" I stammered.

"I don't know about that," she said.

"Maybe you should do some reading on it..."

"Know any good books on it?" she asked.

I said I didn't, but I've found out that Tacitus does.



It takes a long time to grind a country into nothing. Could've taken a lot longer than it did.



My fellow Canadians who come back from resort vacations in Cuba tell me they had a great time and thought that Cuba was a example of socialism done right. My rebuttal is then why do they want your foreign currency? To finance their crumbling regime, of course. Cubans go to jail for fraternizing with tourists. Hardly a wonderful place to live.



Why are we pouring more money down the sewer in Africa without demanding fundamental reforms? Without property rights, individual Africans can't borrow money on credit for business purposes, can't pass on the rewards of hard work to their children, can't be rewarded for doing a job better than his countrymen might...In another five to ten years there'll be yet another crisis and then another and on and on.

And we (the evil West) are keeping them down by supposedly "exploiting" them. A true capitalist nation would want strong trading nations everywhere so you could sell your products everywhere for top dollar - no one would want Africa to remain the way it is except for the dictators who currently run the show.



And yet many here in this country and in the States make excuses for them.

There's quite an interesting discussion from both left and right perspectives going on in the comments...