Friday, July 31, 2026
Leftists Really Love Forced Labor
This claim, though, is based on a fundamentally broken understanding of how those "basics" come to be. None of them merely exist in nature; each of them is the product of somebody's labor, and when you make the claim that everybody has a "right" to them, it is equivalent to saying that they have the right to others' labor.
Food doesn't just appear. Houses and apartments don't just grow out of the ground. Medical care is not magically produced in the air. All these things are produced, and one reason they are unevenly distributed is that some people and some systems are far better at producing them than others.
Industrial capitalism is extraordinarily good at producing them—so good, in fact, that the burden for giving them away is relatively small and people are willing to give them away without thinking that much about them. Some of that is out of the goodness of their hearts, and some is just a practical decision based on the fact that we don't want to be stepping over drug addicts who poop in the streets.
Whatever the reason, it's not that the recipients of others' largesse have a "right" to the labor and efforts of others. And if we rearrange our societies based on the mistaken notion that they do, it turns out the very system that produces all that extra wealth we are generally happy to share collapses.
It's not theoretical that this is the case. Socialism has been tried in many forms and many places. The Nordic countries, which many socialists wrongly believe are socialist, gave up on the idea back in the 80s and 90s and are now free-market systems (in many cases freer than our own, which has become bogged down with excessive government regulations) with a high level of social insurance.
One of the reasons why all these countries are working mightily to kick migrants out is that they treat that social insurance as a "right" to state support and thus abuse the system, which is supposed to be for the aged, infirm, and those in temporary distress. When people demand something for free, they are really demanding that others do all the work while they get to consume the product of others' labor.
