Communism == Jealousy

If you are reading this, you are part of the 1% richest people in the world.

I can confidently say that because there are so many people living in object poverty. Not poverty as defined by the government, but actual poverty.

The government likes to define poverty in relative terms. This means that when you are part of a rich society, you can be “below the poverty line” and still be richer than most of the world’s population could ever dream of becoming.

If you are reading this, you have a device capable of connecting to the Internet, that makes you wealthy.

But wealth is not just money, it is also goods. I do not consider myself or my family to be well-off. We struggle to pay our monthly bills, we struggle to support our children’s quest for a collage education. It feels like we are always just one paycheck from disaster.

Down the hill from us are people living in mobile homes. When they drive past our home, they see more wealth than they have. There is a big John Deere backhoe in the front yard. There are four cars in the driveway, one for each kid and parent. Our house is much larger than theirs, and we have plenty of trees and a bit of a yard.

There is a garden that is huge compared to what they have available to them.

A less than a mile from here is the low-income housing. These are people that struggle to get jobs because there is no public transport, so they have to work within walking distance. There aren’t many businesses within walking distance.

When they see the wealth of those people living in the trailer park, they see a vast gulf, almost impossible to bridge.

Years ago, I owned and ran an Internet Service Provider. Think dial-up. One day, I did a tech call for a customer. When I arrived, it was Section 8 housing in a bad part of town.

She had a nice car. When I entered the apartment, it was cluttered beyond imagination. Yet, there was a huge flat screen TV on the wall, there was a new computer in the bedroom, and another large flat screen in the bedroom.

She looked at me, as the owner of a business, as wealthy. I looked at her home and the things she had and knew there was no way I could afford those things she had.

A few years ago, I took a job with a local farmer. He had an idea for a web portal. I was hired to make it a reality. We were well financed. We soon had a team working to build the site.

I was being paid what I asked for. I was happy. I was making good money. That money went to buy my machine shop.

One of the other employees was doing graphics design, and he was making good money. We all were.

The company wasn’t making money because we were still in development.

When this graphics designer learned who our boss was, he got jealous. Very jealous.

Our boss, who was a farmer, was also a big name in certain types of financial transactions. He was wealthy.

The farm was a hobby. The company was a hobby. His financial transaction business was work.

To put this in perspective, I overheard him on the phone to France, talking to the people he was buying his new plane from. His message to them was something like, “If my plane isn’t at my home airport by the end of the week, the deal is off. I don’t care about the $200,000 deposit. That’s for the lawyers.”

It wasn’t a bluff.

Well, this graphics designer was of that communist bend, when he learned that our boss was wealthy, he felt he deserved to be paid more. Obviously, the boss could afford it.

Was he adding any more value to the company? No. Had he gotten any better at his job? No. Had he done anything to justify an increase in pay? No.

He just knew he deserved more because his boss had more.

Communism feeds off jealousy.

There is always somebody better off than you. There is always somebody who has more than you. There is always somebody or something to be jealous of.

“It isn’t fair!” the jealous person screams.

That boss? He didn’t start wealthy. He started broke. The first few years of his marriage were extremely difficult. His wife worked, he worked a job. And in the evenings, he learned, he got better, and he risked what little money they had.

He earned a return on that investment.

For the communist, that isn’t earning anything. There was no physical labor. It doesn’t count.

The boss didn’t take that money out to buy fun things. Most of it got reinvested.

After 5 plus years of living hand to mouth, his risks, and investments, paid off.

Was he wealthy? You bet. He also employed over 100 people. He provided all of those people good jobs that paid well.

I can hear the jealous person in the back claiming that it doesn’t really count that he gave jobs to people. He should have given money to people.

He did. I know just how extensive his charity was, or at least part of it. There were businesses in town that got anonymous donations that were just what they needed to continue business.

When the Revolution took Russia, the landowners suffered. If you owned land, it was only because you were trampling on others, keeping them down.

The land was taken from the landowners and given to the “farmers”. Every farmer started with equal amounts of just about everything.

The problem was that some people were just better farmers. They were better, or they worked harder, or in some way succeeded.

10 years after the land redistribution, some landowners were “wealthy” and some were dirt scratching poor.

This was blamed on the successful farmers. They had taken that wealth from their poorer neighbors.

That is pure jealousy.

When I moved from Michigan to Maryland, it was like moving from a dark place to a bright place. One of the big things that made that difference was trees.

I could drive from Baltimore to Delaware up I95 and there were trees on both sides of the expressway. This was such an improvement over living in Michigan, where it was always dreary and trees were few and far between. This was in the southern part. I’ve been to the UP, it is beautiful.

Once I drove down to Detroit to do an interview. I stayed with a friend. He lived in a place called something like “Twin Oaks”.

With a name like that, you would expect there to be oak trees. There wasn’t. The trees had been cut down a decade before, all that remained were two massive stumps in the front of the apartment building.

I didn’t want that in my new home of Maryland.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t to be. Developers would buy a plot of land. They would develop part of the plot, sell the houses to whomever would buy.

Once they had sold all those houses, they would move on and develop the next part. People who purchased homes with large, untamed woods, abutting their backyard, suddenly found that their backyard was now facing a new development. By the end of the year, their backyard had no trees.

If you wanted wood/forest behind your home, you had two choices, have those woods/forest belong to the state, or you had to buy it yourself.

Here in New Hampshire, housing is at a premium. Rental costs are very high. Part of that is because of our tax structure. There is no state income tax. Instead, everything is paid by property taxes and business taxes.

Landlords pay those property taxes. They pass on the cost of property taxes to the renters. This drives the cost of housing up.

We pay more in taxes every month, than we do on interest and principal.

When you can’t afford to buy a home, when you can afford to rent a house, it is easy to become jealous of those that already have houses.

Worse, it is easier still to become jealous of those that own multiple houses for rental purposes.

Why does he have three houses and I can’t even find one!

This is what jealous grows. The jealous transforms into anger.

Pretty soon, the raging jealousy drives a hate into your soul, a hate for all those that have what you want and can’t get.

Unfortunately, it is so easy to fall into the trap. It is so seductive.

You might claim that you aren’t a communist because you aren’t jealous of “their” money. But you still envy what they have.

The farmers back in Russia weren’t jealous of the money their neighbors had, they were jealous of the success, they were jealous of the things, they were jealous of what somebody else had that they wanted.

When you add to the entire process a once removed, you end up with pure evil.

Communism and Socialism are evil.

What does it mean to be “once removed?” You might not be willing to walk into your neighbors’ house and under threat of violence take their food.

If you vote to have the state do it for you, to have the state actors show up and take your neighbors’ goods, their food, their wealth, you are still evil.

To each according to their needs? Who decides? Who enforces? Who dies?

From each according to their abilities? Who decides? Who enforces? Who dies?

A while ago, I was helping a friend with game design. She had drunk fully and deeply of the socialist Kool-Aid. She didn’t see herself as a socialist, but she thought like one.

This played out in her game mechanics.

She knew what things should cost, so they had to be forced to cost that much.

But skill was not valuable. Labor was not valuable. The only thing that had value was materials.

What this meant was that a sword made by a character never gave the character a profit. Even if the character had to “invest” in skills to be able to successfully create an item, those skills never increased the value of the final result.

In the same way, there are skills and abilities that exist in our world that are extremely valuable. But they might not require “labor”, in the communist mindset, those skills have no value.

What is the value of a manager? Their job could be done by any of the workers, right?

No, there is skill in managing people and processes.

If a process requires a certain sequence of operations, that sequence is likely created by skilled, subject-matter experts. Once that is done, monkeys can follow the sequence.

Those monkeys might be good at performing the sequence. Their skills have value. But so does the expert. And while he might not be able to do the monkey’s job as well as the monkey, it is highly unlikely that the monkey would be able to do the expert’s job at all.

If you are blaming “them” for where you are today, take a step back, is it jealousy? If you believe they are stopping you, look for your jealousy.

In the mean time, I leave you with a picture of a communist that made good: