Why billionaires favor socialism?

If all means of production were "nationalized" (meaning confiscated by the government), there would be no market. Without market, we would not have prices. Without prices, there is no calculation of costs. Without calculation of costs, there is no economic planning. Without planning, there is no state planned economy.

Thus, "Communism" is only a hypothetical construction devoid of materiality, a name without anything inside, an universal abstract formalism that does not escape unharmed from Occam's razor. There never was a communist economy, only camouflaged or perverted capitalist economies, barely enough to sustain a gang of political leeches.

Since Ludwig von Mises explained this obviousness in 1922, many consequences have followed.

The communist leaders, however stupid they were, understood immediately that the Austrian scholar was right, but could not concede it in public. Tolerating increasing doses of capitalism - legal or illegal - in the territories they dominated, they continued to insist on any arrangement that disguised the inevitable.
Eduard Kardelij, Minister of Economy of Yugoslavia, has even imagined that there could be a committee of planners to determine one by one, by decree, the prices of millions of articles, from supersonic aircraft to sewing needles. The idea was never put into practice, because it was too reminiscent of the dumb method of killing cockroaches by trying to hit them with naphthalene balls.

The Soviets allowed the officially banned capitalism to continue prospering in the shadow and to answer for almost fifty percent of the economy of the USSR. Hence the swarm of millionaires who emerged from their hiding places, suddenly after the fall of the Soviet state: they would never have been able to exist in a system of effective prohibition of private property.

Some major Western capitalists took from Mises' demonstration some more pleasant conclusions (for themselves). If the communist economy was impossible, all efforts designed to create it nominally would generate into something else. That something else could only be a hidden capitalism, as in the USSR, a half-bred socialism, a symbiosis between the power of state and the most powerful economic groups, an oligopoly, in short.

The two hypotheses promised formidable profits - first, from the absolute absence of taxes, secondly, from the State guarantees granted to the friends of the government against any competitors. If the first feature still involved some minor risks (extortion, personal vendettas of public officials unsatisfied with the low amount of their bribe), the second was absolutely safe.

It was then that a group of billionaires created the most Machiavellian strategic plan in the world's economic history - the formula was so ironically summarized by columnist Edith Kermit Roosevelt (granddaughter of Theodore Roosevelt): "The best way to fight Communism would be a socialist New Order governed by 'experts' such as themselves."

This idea spread like fire among the members of the CFR, Council on Foreign Relations, the powerful NY-based think tank. This policy has been adopted by all U.S. governments (except Reagan) in regards to the Third World: combat the "extreme left" by giving support to the "moderate left".

The scheme is supposedly infallible: if the "moderates" won, there would be monopoly, and if the Communists rose to power, the Plan B would automatically be put into action - the black market capitalism. The "extreme left", presented as "the" enemy was not the actual target, it was only the lefthand half of the plan.

The real target was the free market, which should perish under the dual attack of its enemies and their "defenders" who would use the communist revolution as a scarecrow and make increasing concessions to the "prophylactic" type of socialism of the "nice" Left.

For half a century, the permanent goal of the billionaire inventors of the New World Order has been to reduce the range of political options to a dispute between Communists and Social Democrats. Brazil today is the laboratory of their dreams.

Excerpt of "Who invented Brazil?", by Olavo de Carvalho
This translation was not reviewed by the author.
Zero Hora , 11 de junho de 2006