How Can We Defeat Socialism? With One Word...

Victor Davis Hanson boils the tragicomic socioeconomic system down to one human frailty: Ego gratification.

So what is socialism? It is a sort of modern version of Louis XV’s “Après moi, le déluge” – an unsustainable Ponzi scheme in which elite overseers, for the duration of their own lives, enjoy power, influence, and gratuities by implementing a system that destroys the sort of wealth for others that they depend upon for themselves....

Who are socialists?

There are none. Only technocratic overseers who wish to give someone else’s money to others as a means of winning capitalist-style lifestyles and power for themselves — in a penultimate cycle of unsustainable spending.

But how do the unrestrained egotists that represent the "socialist class" manage to convince the rest of us to go along with a system that will eventually destroy everybody?  Is it...guilt?

...expectations for far more always keep rising, with a commensurate plethora of new justifications, usually in the realm of someone else having more than the recipient, always unjustly so. The endangered aid recipient is always seen as being pushed off a cliff in a wheel chair — therefore, “they” can afford to give “me” more; things are not “fair”; there is no “equality.”

What did Ayn Rand say about this?  Oh, a lot, actually, as the quote below from Rand is essentially the basis of Atlas Shrugged, and is given as the reason for the Fall of Man:

The worst guilt is to accept an unearned guilt

There is more along the same vein from Atlas Shrugged:

Evil requires the sanction of the victim.

I refuse to accept as guilt the fact of my own existence.

And Mr. Galt himself:

"We are on strike against the creed of unearned rewards and unrewarded duties. We are on strike against the dogma that the pursuit of one's happiness is evil. We are on strike against the doctrine that life is guilt."

 And this final one, of course, which strikes fear in the heart of techno-socialists everywhere - should it be realized, the Ponzi scheme is over. Which is why the Democrats, incidentally, have nothing left but baseless accusations of racism and shriller and shriller attempts at fear-mongering, mixed with a dash of fear tactics instilled from their enforcers in the unions:

…guilt is a rope that wears thin...

And the Socialists know it. They are already fighting against it, but - to quote a certain orator - we are the ones we have been waiting for. Only we can cut the ropes the Left have bound us with, and free ourselves from our self-imposed slavery to them.  And all we have to do is stand up an declare "We are not guilty..."