The promise of socialism is "income equality," but the reality is greater INEQUALITY, with a smaller group of powerful individuals getting vastly richer as the populace sinks into poverty. That's because socialism substitutes coercion for commerce. Coercion is inherently unequal.
Say what you will about the wealth of someone like Bill Gates, how he chooses to spend and invest it, and the business practices he employed to acquire it, but he didn't get rich by looting his nation's resources like Nicolas Maduro, Fidel Castro, and other socialist tyrants.
At the heart of capitalism lies wealth created through VOLUNTARY exchange. Money is exchanged for something the buyer wants more than the money. Capital is voluntarily invested in the pursuit of wealth. The use of force is treated as a crime - from theft to fraud to monopoly.
Socialism, like all forms of collectivism, replaces voluntary commerce with the use of force. No matter how much those wielding the whips bleat about their devotion to "fairness" and "equality," compulsive force is inherently unequal. Force only works when it's unequal.
What you get under socialism is not a collection of millionaires and billionaires who got rich by providing much-desired goods and services or making smart investments. You get a smaller group of apparatchiks who get rich through political connections - i.e. FORCE.
The super-rich elites of collectivist systems are completely above reform and criticism. They'll kill you for trying to take their ill-gotten gains away. Eventually they'll kill you for merely discussing their wealth because they're always paranoid about public uprisings.
As you might have noticed, there isn't much of a second act for rich socialist commissars who lose their power. Most rich capitalists have stories about losing huge amounts of money and bouncing back, maybe even rebuilding from bankruptcy. Socialists lose big when they lose.
Compulsive force is a highly inefficient way to allocate resources, so systems that rely on it tend to become more impoverished overall. The people lose their ability to walk away from bad deals or seek better opportunities. All they can do is complain and hope they're heard.
Systems based on force are not nimble. They don't adapt well to changes. They're more likely to use force to fight against changes and compel obedience. They fall out of the habit of SELLING anything, i.e. persuading people. Compulsion always looks faster and easier.
Of course, that shrinking group of powerful, rich, privileged socialist leaders needs the people to believe their highly unequal wealth is justified somehow. They do this by creating an aristocracy. They're smarter, wiser, more compassionate - they DESERVE to be rich!
Maintaining that pretense requires constantly gaslighting the people and making them think worse of themselves, and more paranoid about their neighbors. In the West you can see the groundwork for this mindset being laid with what we call "virtue signaling."
Before that small and powerful elite can seize the nation's wealth, they must teach the public to accept they are superior people. THEY need air travel, top-shelf medical care, huge carbon footprints, armed security, secret financial accounts, and other things YOU can't have.
Most urgently, the elite must suppress private ambition. Only the socialist rulers are allowed to dream big and demand more for themselves and their families. The Little People must grow accustomed to making do with less. This means they must be made to believe they DESERVE less.
The rulers of a communist, socialist, or fascist state are the living avatars of the people's will. If you disagree with them, you're an enemy of the people. If you want more than has been allocated to your station, you're greedy, selfish, disobedient, and a danger to the state.
That's the thing about socialism and other systems based on coercive force: the resource they truly run on, the currency that really matters, is OBEDIENCE. They must create an climate of submission and obedience to maximize the value of the force they wield.
Capitalism is not perfect, and it can be implemented badly or corrupted with the taint of force, but one thing it does very well is maximize the value of DISOBEDIENCE. Individuals have the power to say "no" by choosing where to spend their money. Innovation is rewarded.
The very act of owning capital - very much including the capital represented by your own labor, no matter how much it's worth per hour - is fundamentally disobedient, an assertion of individual authority. You choose who you work for, and they must pay you.
These ideas are always caricatured as greed or soul-crushing subservience by the left, but that only works if you remain steadfastly ignorant of the alternative and all that it implies: You work for who COMMANDS you, and you accept what you "deserve."
Of COURSE socialism always produces worse and more brutal inequality, no matter its fanciful promises! The number of people with the power to give commands and force obedience is always small. The lives of those who OBEY are always worse than those who get PAID. /end
