The Most Idiotic Things Ever Uttered by Socialists About the Collectivism They Impose

The Most Idiotic Things Ever Uttered By Socialists

About the Collectivism They Impose 

By Lawrence W. Reed

Socialists and good sense are rarely seen in the same room together. That’s no accident. The people who concentrate power so they can push others around, take their stuff, and then bribe favored groups with the loot, have a lot of covering up to do.

Their track record is horrific. The democracy they often claim to support is usually one of the earliest casualties of their rule. They treat wealth as fruit to be picked and passed around, so the fruit growers naturally shut down or flee. When their meddlesome handiwork yields mass poverty or tyranny or both, the socialists blame everybody but themselves. Because socialism seeks to undermine individuals by homogenizing them in a communal blender, it is fundamentally at war with human nature itself.

Jesus warned us in Matthew 7:16 that the true character of a person and his agenda are discerned not by cheap, beguiling promises but by actions and outcomes: “By their fruits ye shall know them.”

So, we should not be surprised that socialists are not truth-tellers. Power, not truth, is their highest priority. Their collectivist project drags a lot of well-meaning people into its orbit initially and sets them up for ultimate disillusionment. That’s what deception does.

Actions and outcomes matter. The pretense of good intentions is a smokescreen. Remember that. Nonetheless, I’m the last person to argue that we shouldn’t listen to what socialists say. Even when their words are calculated to deceive, they can be both instructive and entertaining. What follows is a short list of some of the most idiotic things some of them have ever uttered.

Let’s start with Nicolas Maduro, the deposed Venezuelan dictator now on his way to a New York courtroom. A former bus driver, he came to power when the late and unlamented socialist Hugo Chavez plucked him from obscurity to become vice president. Together, Chavez and Maduro promised “democratic socialism” before proving that the socialism part is, of necessity, always at war with the democratic part. They are experts at stealing elections and muzzling the media.

Maduro’s September 26, 2018, Address to the UN General Assembly as Venezuela’s President (Chavez died a few years before) included these lines:

We bring good news from a country that has not given up and shall not do so. Good news from a nation that is consolidating its democracy...a country that is building its own social model, its own welfare state by means of new formulas to protect its elders, its pensioners, its children, its young people, its women, the neediest sectors, its working class.

Of course, Maduro and his predecessor were not “protecting” those groups at all. Those people were the hapless suckers who suffered the most from the economic and moral destruction socialism delivered. Something between a quarter and a third of Venezuela’s population voted with their feet since 2000, the rough equivalent of a hundred million Americans fleeing the U.S.

Hugo Chavez was a bulb just as dim as Maduro. In a speech at the World Social Forum in Brazil in 2005, he said:

We have to re-invent socialism. It can’t be the kind of socialism that we saw in the Soviet Union, but it will emerge as we develop new systems that are built on cooperation, not competition.

Of course, that’s what they all say, and gullible leftists the world over (especially in American academia) believe it. “We’ll make it work the next time!” they declare. Sorry, a hundred million dead in the last century in the name of socialism is not exactly “hope and change.”

How many times have we heard that some new dreamer seeking power will figure out a way to deliver “socialism with a human face.” The Russian chess champion and pro-freedom dissident Garry Kasparov dismissed that farcical claim with the pithy reply, “Frankenstein also had a human face.” He reminded us that the alleged failure of capitalism “is still much better than the success of socialism.”

The last leader of the old Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, told The London Daily Telegraph in 1992 something at least as idiotic as anything Chavez and Maduro ever said:

Jesus was the first socialist, the first to seek a better life for mankind.

That one is so ridiculous that, like a mosquito in a nudist camp, I hardly know where to begin. Jesus never advocated anything resembling the ethics or the economics of socialism. He never suggested the forcible redistribution of wealth (robbing Peter to pay Paul), the concentration of power in the State, the abolition of private property, the central planning of the economy, or government ownership of the means of production. He would never vilify a productive person who earns his income—big or small—peacefully and honestly. I explained all that and much more in my book, Was Jesus a Socialist?

The architect of Italian fascism, Benito Mussolini, encapsulated the essence of his variety of socialism in a 1925 speech to Italy’s Chamber of Deputies. He declared,

All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.

Why is that an idiotic statement? Because even a feeble attempt to achieve it is a prescription for catastrophe. It leaves no room for civil society, for free people to nurture their own private and voluntary institutions. It declares that the one entity in society that holds a monopoly of legalized force should be everything in our lives. It is entitled to whatever it wants and should not tolerate any dissent. Why? Because one power lusting nutjob says so. This is precisely the opposite of a cultured civilization.

Mussolini, like Hitler, was a socialist and said so many times. Hitler’s party was called the National Socialist German Workers Party. As I wrote in The Only Spectrum that Makes Sense, Mussolini and Hitler along with their kissing cousins Lenin, Mao, Pol Pot, and Castro, were all anti-capitalist peas in the same socialist, collectivist pod:

They all claimed to be socialists. They all sought to concentrate power in the State and to glorify the State. They all stomped on individuals who wanted nothing more than to pursue their own ambitions in peaceful commerce. They all denigrated private property, either by outright seizure or regulating it to serve the purposes of the State.

What might well prove to be the most chilling as well as most idiotic statement of 2026 came this week from New York City’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani. In his inaugural address he shamelessly declared,

We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism. 

What is it about “rugged individualism” that is “frigid”? Tens of millions of Americans have employed this admirable trait to develop their talents, build great enterprises, invent remarkable technologies, and explore new worlds while burdening no one else. To be “frigid” is the opposite of “dynamic.” It means standing still while others bear the burdens and create the wealth. Frigid individuals who blend in with the hive mind Mamdani champions might make obedient serfs, but they don’t build economies and nations.

The “warmth of collectivism” is sheer lunacy if Mamdani really believes it and a bald-faced lie if he doesn’t. A Wall Street Journal editorial on January 3 summed it up well:

That line could only be uttered by someone who overlooks the human misery that has been visited in the name of “collectivism.” The greatest killers of the 20th century put the virtues of the collective above individual rights and liberty. For the cold reality of collective warmth, we recommend “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. It was a very cold day in Siberia.

Finally, we must not let Karl Marx off the hook. As the intellectual godfather of the criminal enterprise called socialism, he was a fount of absurdities. A particular one remains to this day his most quoted maxim. It was to be the governing principle of his utopian dreamland. He expressed it in an 1875 tract, though he ripped it off from earlier writers:

From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.

At first blush, it sounds appealing, just, generous and eminently reasonable—until you realize it’s little more than a slogan. It’s a bumper sticker or a refrigerator magnet, not an instruction manual for good governance or a functioning economy.

Imagine running a business with Marx’s maxim as your mission statement. You would expect no more from an employee than his abilities would allow, as defined by whom? You would pay him based on what his needs are, not according to the value of his work. Who decides what those needs are and who settles the matter when the employee’s perception of them differs from yours? You would also advise customers to pay whatever they want for the product and if they really “need” it, you would give it away. You’d be out of business in no time, a calamity that helps nobody.

To one degree or another, more than a hundred utopian socialist communities pursued this illusion in the 19th century. They all flopped. You can read about that here.

Marx wrote that a socialist “dictatorship of the proletariat” would commence the work of implementing his egalitarian utopia. It would pave the way for communism, when the state would mysteriously “wither away.” Economist David Friedman, in his 1973 book The Machinery of Freedom, poked fun at such childish, magical thinking:

In the ideal socialist state, power will not attract power freaks. People who make decisions will show no slightest bias towards their own interests. There will be no way for a clever man to bend the institutions to serve his own ends. And the rivers will run uphill.

This is by no means the last word on the absurdities that socialists promote. Be assured that so long as they refuse to learn from history and economics, they will give us many more to write about.

For more information, see these additional works of the author:

Are You For the Rich or the Poor?

The Velvet Glove and the Iron Fist

Socialism: Force or Fantasy?

The Good Counsel of Mrs. Marx

Six Ways Socialism is Anti-Social

Socialism: Science or Cyanide?

The Big Problem with the Traditional Political Spectrum

What the Nazis Had in Common with Other Collectivist Regimes

The Marxist Before Marx

How Venezuelans Can Recover from the Sickness of Socialism

On the Socialist Muckraker Lincoln Steffens

On Another Socialist Muckraker Upton Sinclair

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(Lawrence W. Reed is President Emeritus, Humphreys Family Senior Fellow, and Ron Manners Global Ambassador for Liberty at the Foundation for Economic Education in Atlanta, Georgia. His website is www.lawrencewreed.com.)