Position Paper On Whether Capitalists Or Socialists Are Vampires

Remember that all work must be entirely your own, including proofreading and editing. You are free to use electronic spelling and grammar checkers.

Read the following two (lightly edited) article excerpts. Then, using major course concepts and points made in the articles, answer the final essay question in at most 500 words.

SOCIALISM, LIKE DRACULA, RISES AGAIN FROM THE GRAVE – R. Ebeling, 2018

Welcome to the seemingly unending cycle of resurrections of the socialist idea in renewed appealing forms. Many of us grew up watching movies about Dracula — Nosferatu, the Undead. To continue his unnatural existence, this human-like vampire had to kill his victims by draining them of their own blood, in the process turning them into creatures of the night, like himself. Almost every Dracula movie ended with his nemesis, usually Dr. Van Helsing, the determined vampire hunter, driving a stake through the vampire’s heart. The undead had now died, and the world was freed from this unholy aberration. But, invariably, in the next film the life-destroying monster, in fact, turned out to have not been truly killed.

Welcome to the seemingly unending cycle of resurrections of the socialist idea in renewed appealing forms. How very appealing was the socialist idea in the late 19th and early (pre-WWI) 20th centuries! All the burdens of life and everyday work, all the seemingly unjust inequalities of material wealth observable in society, and all the uncertainties of health care and old age would be lifted from the weary shoulders of the common man with the arrival of socialism. Humanity would be freed from the shackles of capitalist “wage slavery” and everyone would be provided with all the necessities and amenities of material existence, and oppression and tyranny abolished around the world.

What a life-draining nightmare was set loose on mankind! From the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917 through all the other communist “victories,” either through Soviet conquest or domestic revolutions and civil wars like in China or Cuba, the harshest and most terrible tyrannies fell upon all the luckless peoples given a socialist paradise to live within. Civil liberties were abolished, with no speaking or writing permitted other than the official line of the ruling Communist Party. Central planning meant that the government determined what was produced, where, by whom, and in what quantities. Every person’s educational opportunities, living quarters, and employment were assigned and commanded by the state in the name of the collective good. Dissent, disagreement, or even suspected lack of enthusiasm for the advancement of the bright, beautiful socialist future (as defined and dictated by those at the helm of the “people’s state”) was met with arrest, imprisonment, banishment to slave-labor camps, or death by torture, starvation, or execution.

Vampire-like, socialist regimes drained the life force out of the societies they ruled. No ambition, no drive, no prospects for a better and happier life was the material and psychological state to which socialism reduced humanity in those parts of the world in which communism had triumphed. The only opportunities for a better life came from being one of the Communist Party bloodsuckers of the ruling elite. They had special stores, special medical clinics, special holiday resorts, special living accommodations, special opportunities to travel abroad to other socialist countries or even “the enemy” West from which forbidden goodies could be brought back home. The rest of the society was truly the exploited masses from whose meager and government-misdirected labor those limited privileges and prosperity came for the ruling Red Draculas of the communist state.