Where Leftists Take Over, People Vote With Their Feet
Vietnamese boat people, 1984, rescued by the amphibious command ship USS Blue Ridge (LCC-19)
Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons/PH2 Phil Eggman, U.S. Navy
The photo above shows an extreme example of what happens when Leftists take over a state: People vote with their feet (in this case with their boat) and flee the Leftists’ jurisdiction. In the case of the Vietnamese boat people, they were fleeing the tyranny of communists who had conquered South Vietnam in 1975. After the U.S. betrayed South Vietnam into the un-tender hands of communist North Vietnam, many thousands of South Vietnamese fled on mostly flimsy boats, like the one pictured above. How desperate South Vietnamese were who wanted to escape the communists can be gauged by the numbers of the boat people and the length of time over which they continued to flee. After the war it has been estimated 65,000 were executed with one million being sent to euphemistically labeled “re-education camps”, where an estimated 165,000 died. The flood of Vietnamese boat people lasted from 1975 to around 1995.We can not know how many boat people took to the ocean to flee the communists, as many were drowned and many were taken by pirates to be either murdered or sold into slavery. The number of boat people has been estimated as high as 1.5 million. Estimates of the number who lost their lives vary from as low as 50,000 to as high as 200,000 by the Australian Immigration Ministry.
Leftist Government Repelling People and Assets
The example of the Vietnamese boat people is admittedly an extreme case, although not as uncommon in history as one would like. Remember the Nazi death camps, the tyranny of Josef Stalin’s communist regime, and the death toll of Mao Tse-Tung’s “Great Cultural Revolution” — not to mention the current tyranny of the most oppressive country on Earth, North Korea.
Recently, my wife and I were traveling from the Miami Airport to her mother’s house in Coral Gables in an Uber car driven by a refugee from Venezuela. He was very effusive about how great it was to live and work in the United States, rather than in Marxist Venezuela, his native country.
All of the examples I have cited were of Leftist regimes that drove many of their people out as refugees. (Those of you who claim Nazi Germany was an example of right wing extremism should read my post, The Economic Nature of Fascism.) What is it about Leftist ideology that leads to such horrific results? From what I have read about the beginnings of these autocracies, these Left wing movements hardly ever — if not never — begin as political movements to oppress people and to profit from that oppression. Lenin might have ended as the ruthless communist dictator of the Soviet Union, but he began by trying to realize an idealistic socialist workers’ paradise with the overthrow of the Tsar. If he had to use secret police to do it, well, “you can not make an omelette without breaking eggs.” Nevertheless, the absolute corruption of absolute power, to paraphrase Lord Acton, can lead the most idealistic of us to raise a tyranny. Lord Acton ended the statement “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” with the judgment, “Great men are almost always bad men.”
I suspect the basic worldview of Leftists the world over, i.e. their assumptions about the nature of reality, are much like those of American progressives, which I discussed in the posts Progressives’ Basic Assumptions and The Complexity of Reality, and which I list for convenience below.
- Capitalism and free-markets are inimical to the material well-being of the people.
- Ordinary people lack the power to withstand what progressives view as the rapacious oppression of corporations and of the wealthy “1%”.
- Ordinary people lack the necessary knowledge and understanding to cause effective change, even if they had the power to solve their own problems. Therefore, it is the burden of the progressive, university educated nobility to do all the necessary thinking for the common people.
- Reality is simple enough that educated, intelligent people in government can sufficiently control it over the entire country to do more good for society than harm.
I would suggest that these basic assumptions of American progressives are shared by most other Leftists all over the world—at least at the beginning of their use of power. Little-by-little, Leftists are led by these assumptions and their desire to do good for their fellow man (or woman if you will) to concentrate ever more power in the state. In the post The Economic Nature of Fascism, I related Friedrich Hayek’s vision on how such initial uses of power corrupted its users and almost inevitably drove them to dictatorship. Hayek’s vision of this makes his slim book The Road to Serfdom one of the most important works of the 20th century.
Other less extreme examples of how Leftist regimes drive their people away, especially those with any amount of wealth (including the middle class), abound. Some time ago, I wrote a very short post, France in Distress, to provide a link to a video that chronicled how French youth were being driven out of France because Leftist economic policies were denying them economic opportunities. The video appears to have been produced in September 2014 , so it is several years old. Nevertheless, if it were updated, it would probably reflect even more badly on France. The video begins with the declaration “According to one poll, half of all young adults in France would leave the country if they could, because the future looks so bleak.” Later the video notes, “Trying to stave off economic disaster, socialist President Francois Hollande, the man who once said he doesn’t like rich people, invited the executives of 30 leading companies to Elysee Palace on Feb. 17 in an effort to lure them to invest in France.” It also reported that as of September 2014 “The most recent statistics available show 26,000 French families left in 2010, and 35,000 in 2011. London is now called the ‘sixth largest French city.‘ ” One final quote sums up the entire video.
“The entrepreneurial young people, they’re going to London,” Paris economist Jacob Arfwedson said. “They’re going to Asia; they’re going to the United States because they want to achieve something that is not automatically taken away by a state that says, ‘You have, therefore I take it.'”
Virtually all of the Western European nations are afflicted with the statist disease, as I describe in the posts Echoes of the Great Depression: Europe, and The Long-Term Economic Stagnation the World Faces. According to Ivanna Kottasova in the CNN Money post 10,000 millionaires left France last year, those 10,000 millionaires left mostly for the U.K., the U.S., Canada, Australia, and Israel — places where governments were not quite as economically inflexible and confiscatory as France. In addition, she reported China lost 9,000 millionaires in 2015; 6,000 left Italy; India lost 4,000; and 3,000 left Greece. Of these emigrating millionaires, Australia gained 8,000; around 7,000 came to the U.S.; and 4,000 went to Israel. [So why, I ask myself, have so many millionaires come to the United States? Perhaps they are deluded into thinking the U.S. is still a capitalist nation.] All of these statistics are observational proof that capital flees from where it is ill-treated to countries where it is well-treated.
Examples in the United States
Internally in the U.S., we can see the same phenomenon in capital and people fleeing states where they are economically badly treated to states where they are welcomed. One of the most hostile states toward free-markets and capital is California. As a result California continues to force thousands of businesses to leave the so-called Golden State for more healthful economic climates, such as (in descending order of company transplants) Texas, Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, Washington, Florida, Georgia, and Virginia. Since people not surprisingly will move to where the jobs are, a Sacramento Bee study showed about 5 million California Residents left for other states over the last decade. During that same time period about 3.9 million people moved into the State, giving California a net loss of more than 1 million. Also not surprisingly, the much more free-market friendly state of Texas attracted more of those Californian emigrants than any other, about 600,000. An American Thinker post by Silvio Canto, Jr. says that Money’s leaving California in a hurry. It reports
According to IRS migration data, which uses individual income tax returns to record year-to-year address changes, over 250,000 California residents moved out of the state between 2013 and 2014, the latest period for which data was available. The tax returns reported more than $21 billion in adjusted gross income to the IRS.
The Silvio Canto post also quotes Nathan Nascimento, the director of state initiatives at Freedom Partners, that
California’s taxes and regulations are crushing businesses, and there are more opportunities in Texas for people to start new companies, get good jobs, and create better lives for their families. … When tax and regulatory climates are bad, people will move to better economic environments—this phenomenon isn’t a mystery, it’s how marketplaces work. Not only should other state governments take note of this, but so should the federal government.
Similar tales of free-market-crushing state governments can be told for Illinois, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Vermont, Maryland, and many others.
If you want to know which countries or which states will not prosper in the near future and which will, look for which countries or states are losing people and money, and which are gaining them.
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