The Socialist Road to Destruction amid So-Called Good Intentions
By Wanjiru Njoya
> Socialists pride themselves on their supposed good intentions even as they fashion policies that create havoc and harm the people socialists claim to be helping. Ludwig von Mises called it destructionism.
## Excerpted quotes
Mises:
> In fact Socialism is not in the least what it pretends to be. It is not the pioneer of a better and finer world, but the spoiler of what thousands of years of civilization have created. It does not build; it destroys. For destruction is the essence of it. . . . [It] raises the consumption of the masses at the cost of existing capital wealth, and thus sacrifices the future to the present. . . . The increasing difficulties of maintaining the higher standard of living are ascribed to various causes, but never to the fact that a policy of capital consumption is being followed.
Tom DiLorenzo:
> One of my first observances of such idiocy was in the mid-1980s when that great intellectual giant Jesse Jackson led mob of Stanford University students chanting “Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho, Western Civ Has Got to Go.” They wanted the university to drop its courses on Western Civilization and replace them with courses on “race, class, and gender studies.” The Stanford administration dutifully complied.
Ross Douthat:
> A key project of the 21st-century left has been to revive and mainstream language associated with violent revolutionary struggle by turning it to mostly therapeutic uses. . . .
. . . insisting, as in the work of Frantz Fanon, that revolutionary violence itself was therapeutic, a means by which the colonized can achieve self-assertion, dignity and wholeness. . . .
. . . a promise that all the rhetoric is therapeutic and psychological, that when we talk about stolen land and ending “whiteness” and decolonizing everything, we are, of course, merely speaking culturally, symbolically, metaphorically.
Mises:
> To see the weakness of a policy which raises the consumption of the masses at the cost of existing capital wealth, and thus sacrifices the future to the present, and to recognize the nature of this policy, requires deeper insight than that vouchsafed to statesmen and politicians or to the masses who have put them into power. As long as the walls of the factory buildings stand, and the trains continue to run, it is supposed that all is well with the world. The increasing difficulties of maintaining the higher standard of living are ascribed to various causes, but never to the fact that a policy of capital consumption is being followed.
> Facts per se can neither prove nor refute anything. . . . From the socialist point of view, Capitalism alone is responsible for all the misery the world has had to endure in recent years. Socialists see only what they want to see and are blind to anything that might contradict their theory.