O O Ø O O O O
An Introduction to Communism
When I was in Grade Four, I learned about communism. My teacher was Mrs. Jones, a renowned disciplinarian and by all accounts a great educator.
Mrs. Jones described to us, through short story, what it meant to live in a free country. Free meant freedom to choose cities, careers, homes and the like, not necessarily freedom to act out, or to become outlaw. A Rousseau primer, if you will allow such a conceit in describing a grade school curriculum.
Mrs. Jones then described what it meant to live on the other side of the nebulous-to-a-nine-year-old concept of the Iron Curtain. Primarily, the government did all the deciding for us: where to live, what to do, how to do it. The critical omission made by Mrs. Jones however, was the necessary editorial. In describing that, when a notional young Russian showed an aptitude for figure skating (her example), the authorities would recruit him as a state-sponsored figure skater, she left the impression with her class of fourth graders that this was an efficient and desirable method of allocating resources and talent. “If you’re good at a thing, you get to do it.”
I truly have no idea what Mrs. Jones’ political views might be or might have been. Her description however of two different economic systems omitted the very basic truth that government doesn’t work. It can’t be an efficient allocator of resources. For every successful state-backed figure skater raised in a government crèche, there are millions of citizens limited in their choices and actions by the cold, blind hand of interventionist government planning.
Allocating resources according to the desires of politicians, dictators and state planners means fewer of those resources remain in the private hands of those who make them possible: the living, breathing, decisive population at large. To support the subsidized career—successful or otherwise—of our imaginary figure skater, citizens have funds confiscated that they could have invested in themselves, their homes, their childrens’ braces. For the benefit of whom? These decisions are made by the statists, and they always amount to relative value judgments.
I want no part in supporting any economic system that requires a bureaucrat, a politician, or a dictatorial leader to make judgment calls on behalf of anyone. I know what’s best for me, you know what’s best for you. To believe otherwise is the height of conceit.
With regard to Mrs. Jones lesson, the damage was luckily mitigated by my reading of 1984 less than two years later in Mrs. Horn’s class. Otherwise, you may not have been reading this web page, you’d be reading something resembling Senator Catalyst’s Catalytic Corral.
Evan Spence
July 17, 2007
OOØOOOODCCCXXX
August 20th, 2007 at 6:19 pm
Re Miss Jones!
The school board sent her to Caley Colony to teach. Is that because of her teaching beliefs/