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“Socialism Was Good in Theory” That sentence assumes the theory was never seriously challenged. It was. Long before the Soviet Union existed, before Lenin seized power, and before socialism had been tested on a national scale, major thinkers were already attacking its foundations—from very different directions. Five of them stand out. Tocqueville: Equality Can Become Servitude In 1848, Alexis de Tocqueville drew a sharp distinction between democracy and socialism. Both spoke about equality. But Tocqueville believed they pursued it in fundamentally different ways. Democracy, in his view, sought equality while preserving individual freedom. Socialism risked achieving equality by expanding the power of the state over the individual. His warning was essentially this: equality is not automatically liberty. A society can pursue equality so aggressively that it begins sacrificing the independence that makes political freedom meaningful. Bastiat: Follow Where Redistribution Leads Two years later, Frédéric Bastiat attacked socialism from a different direction. His question was deceptively simple: What happens when the state acquires the authority to take from some people and give to others in the name of justice? Bastiat called this “legal plunder.” His concern was not merely that redistribution might be expensive. It was that once government becomes the instrument through which competing groups obtain benefits from one another, politics can turn into a permanent struggle over who controls the machinery of redistribution. The problem, therefore, wasn’t simply how much the state redistributed. It was the principle that made redistribution legitimate in the first place. (bastiat.org⁠) Nietzsche: Equality Can Become Resentment Nietzsche approached socialism neither as an economist nor as a constitutional theorist. He attacked its psychology. He saw modern egalitarian movements as part of a much older moral impulse: resentment toward exceptional individuals and suspicion of strength, ambition and hierarchy. For Nietzsche, the danger was not simply that everyone might become economically equal. It was that a culture could begin treating excellence itself as something morally suspect. The goal would cease to be lifting people upward. It would become bringing the exceptional downward. Böhm-Bawerk: Challenge the Economics Then came Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk. In 1896, he turned his attention specifically toward Marx’s economic system. His criticism was not primarily moral or political. It was technical. Böhm-Bawerk argued that Marx’s theory of value did not adequately explain how the labor values developed in Capital could be reconciled with the actual prices Marx subsequently needed to explain. In other words, he attacked socialism where it claimed to possess a scientific economic foundation. The argument became one of the central criticisms of Marxian economics and helped launch a debate that would continue for generations. Mises: The Calculation Problem Then, in 1920, Ludwig von Mises attacked an even more fundamental question: Even if socialism is morally desirable, how would a socialist economy actually know what to produce? A functioning economy has millions of competing uses for scarce resources. Build a bridge or a hospital? Use steel here or there? Produce more machinery or more consumer goods? Under private ownership and markets, prices for capital goods provide information about relative scarcity and opportunity costs. Mises argued that abolishing private ownership of the means of production also removes the genuine market prices necessary for rational economic calculation. The problem wasn’t simply that socialist planners might make bad decisions. It was that the system deprived them of the very economic signals required to systematically compare those decisions. (Mises Institute⁠) And that was the sequence. Tocqueville challenged the political premise. Bastiat challenged the moral and legal mechanism of redistribution. Nietzsche challenged the psychology behind egalitarianism. Böhm-Bawerk challenged Marx’s economic theory. Mises challenged the possibility of rational central economic calculation. Five different thinkers. Five different objections. And all of them came before the Soviet Union had demonstrated what large-scale socialist government would actually look like. So “socialism was good in theory, but bad in practice” is not an argument. It is a historical claim that requires you to explain why these theoretical objections were wrong. The interesting question isn’t whether socialism had critics. It did. The interesting question is whether socialism ever adequately answered them” - ChatGPT

On this International Day, we honour the enormous contributions of people of African descent. We also recall the work still to be done towards ensuring their full enjoyment of human rights, equality & opportunity. Let’s dismantle systemic racism to achieve equality, justice & #InternationalDay #SystemicRacism #HumanRights #AF #US #BR #FR #GB

The Politics of Pity For a decade, the West has argued whether empathy should be its highest value. Some praise it as a superpower; others call it harmful. Gad Saad’s “Suicidal Empathy” topped the New York Times list. Elon Musk called empathy a weakness; John C. Reilly called it a superpower. Ideas should be judged by consequences. Compassion-justified policies have coincided with worse addiction and homelessness, rising crime, mass migration, social fragmentation, higher living costs, and controversial medical interventions for gender-dysphoric minors. When these fail, advocates often claim it was not implemented “strongly enough.” ## An Inversion of Truth A quote often attributed to Hannah Arendt claims “the death of human empathy” precedes barbarism, but no source supports it, and her writings argued almost the opposite. Arendt contrasted the American Revolution’s institutions and law with the French revolutionaries’ “politics of pity.” Pity is not compassion: it ranks “fortunate” and “unfortunate,” grants the pitier moral authority, and overrides rights. Arendt argued this enabled Robespierre’s Terror. ## The Trojan Horse Empathy can become projection—imposing your values as if they were others’ needs. Adam Smith warned about the “man of system.” Nietzsche described societies so “soft and tender” they side with those who harm them. Orwell noted equality preaching alongside elite privilege. Rob Henderson calls these “luxury beliefs.” I call it suicidal narcissism: acquiring moral status by appearing compassionate while policies erode the foundations others rely on. The reward is immediate; the damage comes later.

When Morality Becomes a Weapon Having the “correct” opinion doesn’t make you a good person. Our age is increasingly ruled by those who believe it does. In *The Brothers Karamazov*, Dostoevsky shows this through the Grand Inquisitor, who imagines Christ returning during the Spanish Inquisition. He arrests Him for threatening an institution that claims to represent Him. The Inquisitor argues people don’t truly want Christ’s freedom; they want bread, certainty, and someone to carry the burden of choice. He eventually admits they don’t need Christ’s teachings—only His moral authority. Dostoevsky reveals how power works: dominators can hide behind morality, while the dominated may trade freedom for the comfort of having others decide. Later, Polish psychiatrist Andrew Lobaczewski observed communism invoking “the people” to justify terror and execution. He argued that a small minority without conscience can rise during revolutionary upheavals, with ideology serving as moral camouflage. The lesson: moral language can be weaponized by those lacking moral character. Words like justice, equality, safety, harm, care, and compassion can become tools of control. Return to Aristotle’s view of virtue: virtue isn’t a belief you hold but a habit you practice. We become just by repeatedly doing just things; bravery comes from doing brave things. No slogan can replace character.

The Deadly Seduction of Democratic Socialism Young people are being urged to support “democratic” socialism—ideas blamed for tens of millions of deaths in the last century—promising that consent will make it work this time. But consent cannot make an economic system wise. A ballot cannot set the right prices for wages, goods, or services, nor prevent shortages, repression, or famine. This isn’t fringe. New York elected Zohran Mamdani, who says there should be no billionaires and backs rent freezes, state-run grocery stores, free CUNY, and higher taxes. Polling shows strong support for socialism and communism among Americans under 30. The core error is believing resources can be taken from creators and transferred without losing the knowledge that made them productive. Mao’s China illustrates the outcome: land reform dispossessed and killed landowners, production collapsed as local expertise was treated as an enemy, and grain seizures during the Great Leap Forward worsened a catastrophic famine. The lesson: destroying incentives, property rights, and local knowledge destroys production itself. Envy is often disguised as justice. Communist regimes cultivated resentment and turned grievance into political energy, making societies less focused on creating wealth and more focused on making others lose it. Even when central planners tried to subordinate families to the state, people preserved knowledge through markets, private plots, and community practice. Civilization isn’t a machine bureaucrats can redesign. Take away property and you don’t automatically transfer knowledge—abundance can vanish with it. Redistribution may promise equality, but if it destroys the people, incentives, and knowledge that produce abundance, the result is a hungry one.

When Culture Collapses, the State Takes Over On June 18, the Combatting Hate Act received royal assent in Ottawa; in July it becomes law. Among its provisions, Canada’s Criminal Code will define hatred as an intense and extreme emotion tied to vilification and detestation. Feeling is moving into criminal law. The state has taken on the job of policing it. Supporters cite a reported 169% rise in hate crimes from 2018 to 2024. But such spikes are not random: they follow predictable outcomes of placing groups with long histories of cultural and political conflict together in large numbers while assuming grievances will vanish. “Diversity is our strength” can’t replace shared culture. Shared culture enables voluntary social interaction; without it, cohesion is not automatic—it must be built, and conflict is often the norm. When rapid, large-scale difference is combined with demands for perpetual tolerance, social order weakens. The law then steps in to do what culture once did. This is how multiculturalism can drift toward authoritarianism: institutions empowered to manage social conflict gain authority by promising to solve problems their policies help create. Enforcement is rarely neutral. The same legal mechanisms that target “offensive” speech can also punish individuals harshly, while authorities can remain slow to confront serious harms—raising the question: who decides whose equality matters?

Why Leftist Activists and Revolutionaries Can Never Declare Victory Leftist movements face a paradox: they use oppression narratives to gain institutional power, then keep claiming victimhood as that power grows. Instead of disappearing, activism “shapeshifts” inside bureaucracy, media, academia, corporations, and the arts. Even when DEI is challenged, its structures often remain under new names—diversity becomes “belonging” or “inclusive culture.” The logic is permanent revolution: influence depends on the struggle never ending. Goals shift, new categories of oppression are defined, and intersectionality divides people into ever finer oppressor/oppressed groups, creating an endless hierarchy of grievances. If activists declared victory, the justification for ongoing mobilization would collapse. The risk is social atomization: identities replace shared citizenship, and the state shifts from neutral protector to an instrument for redistributing power between designated victims and oppressors. Bureaucracy and propaganda can replace community and argument. History shows recurring purges—once the revolution’s machinery turns inward, yesterday’s enforcers become today’s targets. The result is also a ressentiment psychology: identity forms around an “enemy,” not one’s own strength. This dynamic helps sustain the consultancy model—identify the guilty, define the aggrieved, and perpetuate conflict. Equality with a finish line is manageable; equality of outcomes is not, so there is always another disparity, injustice, or enemy. The movement fears completion less than failure, because ending would make its power machinery unnecessary.

The Psychology of the Modern Leftist Once you understand the psychology of the modern leftist, the last decade of the woke revolution makes more sense. The endless outrage, hypersensitivity, and rejection of rational debate may reflect something deeper than ideology: a crisis of self-worth expressed as a moral crusade. “Leftist” is a broad term, but here it refers to socialists, collectivists, LGBTQ activists, and similar movements. What unites them may be more than politics; it may also be a psychological orientation. Modern leftism can be associated with feelings of inferiority, low self-esteem, powerlessness, guilt, self-hatred, and resentment. These feelings may be repressed while still influencing behavior. The hypersensitivity to language illustrates this. Words once used without negative intent can become symbols of oppression through activist campaigns. Ironically, those most offended are sometimes privileged academics rather than the minorities they claim to defend. Many leftists identify with groups perceived as weak or disadvantaged. This may reflect genuine compassion, but it can also involve projecting personal feelings of weakness onto others. Strength, success, competition, and rationality can consequently become objects of suspicion. Western civilization, America, and other symbols of power may be treated similarly. The criticism can also be inconsistent. Flaws condemned in Western societies may be excused when found in socialist regimes or traditional cultures. This suggests that resentment may sometimes play a role alongside genuine moral concerns. Self-reliance, personal responsibility, and merit are often viewed skeptically, while collectivism is favored. Objective truth can also become threatening because it creates distinctions: some arguments are better than others, and some people succeed while others fail. When equality of outcome becomes the moral standard, truth, merit, and individualism may be attacked—not necessarily to uplift the oppressed, but to reduce psychological discomfort. When victimhood becomes central to identity, problems may no longer simply be discovered; they can become necessary to sustain that identity.

The Never-Ending Movement One of the deepest paradoxes of the social justice movement is that it uses narratives of oppression to gain institutional power, then claims victimhood as that power grows. It is no longer at the gates. It is inside the bureaucracy, media, academia, arts, and corporations it once opposed. Many think “woke” has run out of steam. I think it has solidified. DEI has not disappeared; it has often been renamed. “Diversity and inclusion” becomes “belonging,” while the offices, staff, and mandates remain. The letterhead changes; the apparatus survives. The movement cannot declare victory because victory would mean surrendering its institutional power. A political party wants to govern; a movement must keep moving. Once it stops, it loses its purpose. Intersectionality makes perpetual subdivision possible. People are classified into ever-smaller groups of oppressors and oppressed. Equality before the law has a measurable endpoint. Equality of outcome does not. Every remaining disparity can therefore become evidence that more intervention is needed. Revolutions also tend to consume their own. The Jacobins eventually turned on their fellow revolutionaries. The Bolsheviks purged their own. Mao mobilized the Red Guards before suppressing them. The pattern is simple: stop, and you are a traitor; continue, and eventually you become the target. Nietzsche identified a psychological engine beneath this dynamic: ressentiment. Goodness is defined through opposition to an alleged oppressor, making the enemy a source of moral identity. Remove the enemy and the movement loses its purpose. That is why new grievances and villains must continually be produced. A conventional reform program can declare victory and disappear. Ressentiment cannot, because victory removes the enemy that gives it meaning. The movement therefore may fear completion more than failure. They do not fear that they will fail. They fear that they might finish.

The Evolution of Modern Leftism Left-wing and woke ideology often presents itself through noble ideas: compassion, justice, equality, and progress. But progress toward what? That question is rarely asked. To understand modern leftism, we must look back nearly 200 years. Ideas evolve like viruses: when society develops resistance to one form, academics modify it until it becomes more contagious, destructive, and difficult to recognize. Hegel proposed the dialectic: opposing ideas—a thesis and antithesis—collide to produce a synthesis. Marx applied this framework to economics through dialectical materialism. He viewed history as a struggle between the “haves” and “have-nots” and predicted that workers would overthrow capitalism and create a communist utopia. When Marx’s vision failed, Lenin reworked it. He argued that workers needed to be led by an elite revolutionary class. This produced the idea of perpetual revolution: after one oppressor is defeated, the next ruling class becomes the new enemy. The struggle never ends. The Frankfurt School later adapted Marxism for the West. It argued that capitalism’s material success had made workers less receptive to revolution, so the focus shifted to culture, education, media, religion, and the arts. The goal became a gradual “long march through the institutions.” Postmodernists expanded the theory further, arguing that power exists everywhere—not only between rich and poor, but also between men and women, racial groups, heterosexual and homosexual people, and colonizers and the colonized. The personal became political. Intersectionality then presented oppression as a matrix in which every identity adds another layer of victimhood and moral authority. At one extreme is the idealized figure of a poor, disabled, rural, transgender lesbian woman from a developing country. At the other is the supposed ultimate oppressor: a wealthy, educated, able-bodied, straight, white, cisgender, Christian, Western man living in a city. Modern progressivism, in this view, is essentially neo-Marxism in drag.

It is very unfortunate and completely condemnable that people in Finland are still bullied for being part of a minority. This cannot be accepted. However, I would also hope that no one would judge others as being against minorities on the basis that they do not want to. (translated)

Tres mujeres entre los nueve magistrados de CNE. Dos de ellas del Pacto Histórico. Solo nuestro partido entiende la lucha de las mujeres por la igualdad. Tambien tenemos la bancada femenina más grande del Congreso. Felicitaciones a @cielo_rusinque @anajimenabr A desnudar el fraudulento sistema electoral. #womenempowerment #equality #politics

Viviamo in un mondo distopico Petra De Sutter, rettore dell’Università di Gand, primo ministro trans nominato in Europa, esponente dei Verdi e medico ginecologo, ha deciso di sospendere il professor Nathan Cofnas, colui che aveva denunciato per plagio Jason Arday, il più giovane professore nero di Cambridge. #Diversity #Equality #Academia

Human rights are not West or East, North or South. They are not a luxury – they are not negotiable. They are the foundation of a more peaceful and secure world. #HumanRights #Peace #Equality #Nospecificcountrycodesarementionedinthetweet.

For the first time, Amsterdam welcomes WorldPride! This year also marks 25 years since the Netherlands became the first country to legalise marriage equality. A milestone that changed lives and inspired the world. Proud to be European 🌈🇳🇱🇪🇺 #WorldPride #MarriageEquality #PrideAmsterdam #NL #EU