The Opiate of the People - Socialism

On socialism creep, the boxcars I’ve watched for forty-five years, and the quiet surrender of what’s ours

The face of socialism - photo by Frederick R. Smith

Marx called religion the opium of the people — the comfort that numbs the masses to their real condition and kills the will to change it. The joke of our moment is that his own remedy turned out to be the better fit for the definition. Socialism is the opiate of the people.
Frederick R. Smith

Words 2,873 | Read Time 13 min | Enjoy

Foreword

I spent forty-five years in the rail industry. I’m retired now, though “retired” is a generous word for it — I still work a related job part-time, still spend some days around track and rolling stock, still stand at grade crossings watching trains go by the way some men watch the tide. So when I tell you something has changed out there, I’m not reading it off a chart. I’ve watched it happen, car by car, year by year, from the inside.

Here is what I’ve watched: the disappearance of the clean boxcar.

A generation ago, a graffiti-covered freight car was a curiosity. You’d see one and remark on it. Today, you can stand at a crossing and watch a hundred cars roll past, and damn near every one of them is sheathed top to bottom in spray paint — somebody’s name, somebody’s tag, somebody’s middle finger to whoever owns the equipment. The change hasn’t been gradual. In the last ten years, it has gone vertical. And no, it is not a coincidence. It is a symptom.

I want to tell you what I think it’s a symptom of.

The Creep Becomes a Campaign

For most of my working life, the spread of socialism in this country was a quiet thing. It didn’t come with a manifesto or a flag. It came the way water gets into a basement — slowly, through a crack you didn’t notice, until one day the floor is wet and you can’t remember when it started. A program here. An entitlement there. A regulation that sounded reasonable by itself. The slow migration of responsibility, and with it ownership, from the citizen to the state.

But quiet is the wrong word for it now. What used to creep now campaigns. Avowed collectivists — people who will say the word out loud and wear it like a medal — are being elected at every level of government, from school boards to city councils to Congress, and nowhere faster than in our largest cities. That didn’t happen by accident any more than the creep did. It is the harvest of a long planting. Three generations have now been raised on crummy collectivist content in the schools, flattered by it in the universities, and marinated in it by a mass media that treats private ownership as something close to secular original sin and the all-providing state as simple decency. Teach people long enough that what’s theirs was never really theirs, that the enlightened thing is to surrender it to the collective, and eventually they will vote exactly that way. They are voting that way. The classroom and the newsroom did the work; the ballot box is just where the bill comes due. Democracy has become a joke.

And it works first on the mind, long before it ever touches the law.

Private property rests on something older than any deed: a shared conviction that what a man earns and builds is his, and that the fact deserves respect. Knock out that conviction, and the paperwork is just paperwork. Every expansion of the redistributive state chips at it. The lesson, taught a thousand quiet ways, is that wealth isn’t earned but handed out, that what you hold you hold on loan, that the collective can call it back whenever it decides its needs outrank your rights. The taxpayer becomes a tenant on his own land. The man who builds something is told his success was luck and that he owes it back to society.

Teach that long enough, and people learn it. Then they act on it.

What the Boxcars Are Telling Us

Which brings me back to the freight cars.

A boxcar is private property. It belongs to a railroad or a leasing company — a real owner, with a name and a balance sheet. When a kid climbs into a rail yard at two in the morning and paints over the reporting marks, he isn’t making a statement about art. He’s acting on a conviction he probably couldn’t put into words: that the thing in front of him doesn’t really belong to anybody who matters. That it’s sort of everybody’s. Nobody’s coming, and nothing will happen. And he’s usually right — nothing does.

And it isn’t just boxcars. It’s everything that rolls. Gondolas, covered hoppers, open hoppers, flatcars, tank cars, autoracks — every class of equipment in the fleet wears the same coat now. Stand at that crossing long enough, and you’ll see it on all of it, end to end, the whole consist painted over by people who will never own a foot of it.

I’ve spent my whole working life around that equipment. I know what it costs to build a car, to maintain it, to keep it in service. I also know that the people defacing it have been raised in a culture that no longer believes property has an owner worthy of respect. That belief didn’t come from nowhere. It is downstream of forty years of being told, in a hundred soft voices, that ownership is a little bit shameful and a little bit illegitimate, that what’s yours is provisional, that the truly enlightened thing is to share what was never really yours to begin with.

Multiply that mindset across a country, and you don’t just get tagged boxcars. You get the newer, uglier thing: the flash mob. A crowd summoned by phone that swarms a store and strips the shelves in ninety seconds, or gathers for no reason but to break what other people built. That is not the crime of a hungry man. It is the crime of a worldview — the same worldview that climbs the fence into the rail yard. It says ownership isn’t real and consequences are optional. When a society spends a generation teaching that what’s yours is conditional, it shouldn’t act surprised when the lesson gets learned too well and turned on the storefront and the boxcar alike.

I didn’t read that in a journal. I watched it roll past me at a grade crossing.

Marx, Inverted

Marx called religion the opium of the people — the comfort that numbs the masses to their real condition and kills the will to change it. The joke of our moment is that his own remedy turned out to be the better fit for the definition. Socialism is the opiate of the people.

It soothes. It promises that somebody else will provide, that risk can be abolished, that the hard work of standing on your own can be handed off to a kindly administrator downtown. And like any opiate, for a while it works. It deadens the ambition that builds things and the thrift that keeps them. The man on it feels cared for even as he’s made smaller. He stops striving, because striving has been declared unnecessary — unkind, even. The drug doesn’t cure his condition. It reconciles him to it. And a people anesthetized that way will never rise to take their liberty back, because they’ve been talked into believing liberty was the sickness and dependency is the cure.

The Captive Who Loves the Cage

The strangest part is the gratitude.

There’s a well-known pattern where a captive, given enough time, comes to identify with the very power that holds him — mistakes the hand that confines him for the hand that protects him. We have a name for it. And it describes, almost perfectly, the citizen who has fallen in love with the growing state.

He cheers every new program that enlarges the apparatus above him and shrinks the patch of ground he actually controls. He defends the bureaucracy that audits him, licenses him, rations his choices — and treats the people warning him as the enemy. Somewhere along the line, he stopped being a citizen, a sovereign man who constitutes the government, and became a subject, a man the government constitutes. The more it takes, the more grateful he grows. He isn’t free. But he’s comfortable, and he’s been taught that comfort is the same as freedom. The captor has won the only victory that lasts. He’s got the captive’s affection.

The Bill Nobody Reads

All of this would be merely sad if it weren’t also expensive.

The programs that “support” the people have to be paid for, and the appetite is bottomless by design — every benefit creates a new constituency to demand more of it. Taxes alone can’t keep up, because a tax hike is visible and people vote. So the government reaches for the quieter tool. It prints.

Every dollar conjured up to fund an entitlement waters down every dollar you already earned and set aside. That’s inflation, and it is not an accident of the business cycle or a run of bad luck with supply chains. It is the fuel the welfare state runs on — the mechanism that lets open-ended promises get financed without ever mailing anyone an honest bill. The working man watches his paycheck buy less every year and gets told the culprit is corporate greed, or the weather, or somebody overseas. The truth is plainer. He is paying — through the silent tax of a currency quietly debased — for the very programs sold to him as gifts.

Inflation is socialism’s invoice. They just scratch off the return address.

And once you see that, you have to call the whole arrangement what it is. The money to buy the opiate doesn’t fall from the sky. It is taken — some of it openly, at the point of the tax collector’s pen, and the rest of it quietly, by debasing the dollar in your pocket while you sleep. Socialism takes what one man earned and hands it to another to keep him sedated, then calls the transaction compassion. But a thing taken from its owner without his consent, by force or by fraud, has always had a plainer name. Socialism is stealing from the man who works to pay for the people’s opium.

What I Keep Coming Back To

I’ll be standing at a crossing again this week, almost certainly, watching another painted train go by. Forty-five years in, and the equipment looks worse than it ever has, and the reason isn’t the paint. The paint is just the part you can see.

Socialism creep doesn’t show up as a tyrant. It shows up as a benefactor, which is exactly why it’s so hard to fight. It hollows out property by first hollowing out the belief that property is worth respecting — and that belief is dying in plain sight, written on every boxcar and acted out in every flash mob. It’s the opiate that talks a free people into accepting their own shrinking. It earns the strange devotion of the very people it makes smaller. And it quietly empties their savings while calling itself generosity.

The fix isn’t complicated. It’s just hard. Remember that a citizen is not a client. That ownership is a right, not a privilege the state lends you. And that a people who will not provide for themselves will, in the end, be provided for — on somebody else’s terms.

I’ve watched the boxcars for forty-five years. I’d like to see a clean one again before I’m done.

Parting Shot

Don’t read any of this as despair about the alternative. The alternative works. It works splendidly, and we have generations of evidence to prove it.

Milton Friedman liked to hold up an ordinary pencil. Not one person alive, he pointed out, knows how to make one from scratch — the wood from one place, the graphite from another, the rubber and the brass and the lacquer from a dozen more, and not one of the thousands of hands that touched those materials ever met the others or set out to make your pencil. No planner ordered it. No committee in any capital decided how many pencils the country would need this year. And yet there it sits on every desk in America, for pennies. That is competitive capitalism. That is the price system doing in silence what no bureau could manage with a thousand meetings and a trillion borrowed dollars — feeding people who never met the farmer, clothing people who never met the weaver, not out of charity but out of the ordinary self-interest of millions of strangers, harnessed by competition and bent to everyone’s good. Friedman saw it plainly: leave people free to trade, and they will build a prosperity no planner can match and no slogan can counterfeit.

But the engine needs an umpire, and Friedman was the last man to deny it. The proper role of government, he said, is that of rule-maker and referee — not player. A free market has real enemies, and the worst of them is monopoly: the firm grown big enough to rig the game and choke off the competition that keeps it honest. Keeping that ring clear — punishing force and fraud, breaking up the combinations that strangle competition — is a legitimate job for the state. Maybe the most important task.

Here is our trouble. The referee has walked off the field.

The same government that ought to be guarding competition can’t be bothered with the task, because it is consumed by a hundred others that were never its to take up. It would rather be the provider, the planner, the parent. It is too busy standing up sprawling socialist and “private-public partnership” programs and managing lives from cradle to grave to do the one economic job only it can do.¹ So the monopolies that a healthy market needs to be checked go unchecked, while the state pours itself into the very apparatus that smothers competition in the first place. It has dropped the job that helps the market and embraced the job that wrecks it.

That’s the whole thing in one line. We have a government that won’t referee the game because it would rather own the stadium.

Friedman handed us the manual. We threw it out and bought the opiate instead. 📕

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1. Calling almost any deal between government and private capital “fascism” can be a generalization or a minomer. The word carries weight only because real Fascism meant something specific, and that something was not cooperation between the state and a contractor. It was corporatism. Mussolini’s Italy folded industry, labor, and capital into a single party-controlled apparatus, abolished independent unions, and outlawed strikes. Through the IRI (Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale), established in 1933, the Italian state took direct ownership of much of Italy’s banking and heavy industry. Property kept its private nameplate and lost its private will. A public-private partnership, in its proper form, is the reverse of all that. It is a contract with a defined scope, awarded by open bidding, voluntarily won, and enforced by courts that the government does not own, while the legislature still legislates and the press still prints. The people quickest to cry “fascism” at a toll-road concession are very often the same people who want the state to direct the whole economy from the center, which is the thing Fascism actually did. They denounce the contract and campaign for the command.

None of which should be mistaken for a defense of the partnership as such. The distinction I just drew lives entirely in those safeguards, and safeguards rot. A bid comes in low to win the award and gets renegotiated upward the moment the ground is broken, and the public can no longer walk away. Concessions migrate toward the politically connected through no-bid awards and a revolving door, until the word “competitive” describes nothing. Scope expands, liabilities slip off the books, risk settles on the taxpayer, while the return settles on the partner, and when the partner stumbles, the state catches it and calls the catch a partnership. That is the danger worth naming, and it is not that the arrangement is fascist. It is that a partnership drained of competition and transparency, and a court willing to enforce the terms, drifts back toward the corporatism it was supposed to stand against. The blade cuts in both directions. The critic who shouts “fascism” while demanding an end to market discipline is walking toward the corporatist pole, and so is the enthusiast who waves the deal through with no bid, no audit, and no expiration date. Keep the safeguards, and the partnership is what it claims to be. Lose them and, given enough time, the ugly word starts to earn its place.