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The pursuit of equal outcomes for all citizens contains a fundamental challenge. In any large society, there will be dissenters and high-achievers. To enforce equal outcomes upon those who disagree or outperform the norm, the state must eventually use coercion, such as jailing tax evaders, making force an inherent part of the system.
The ideology of collectivism, when put into practice, inevitably leads to the non-voluntary seizure of assets from productive individuals because successful people will not willingly surrender their gains, necessitating force.
Just as a parent uses discipline to keep a child on the right path, leaders must use unpopular but necessary fiscal measures (like balancing the budget) to ensure a country's long-term health, even if it's not what the populace wants in the short term.
Political ideologies like socialism consistently fail because they are not stress-tested against human nature. People inherently resist ceding their individual will and autonomy, even to a system promising a perfect outcome, leading to coercion.
Profit from coercion, like government confiscation via taxation or inflation, harms total productivity in two ways. First, the coercer spends time on non-productive confiscation instead of creation. Second, the victim, having had their labor's fruits stolen, has a reduced incentive to produce in the future.
Love is a powerful motivator within families and small groups. However, at a societal scale, it fails. A society that expects love to scale, like communism, inevitably resorts to force when that expectation is not met. Money, via markets, is the only scalable, non-coercive alternative.
Socialism's top-down control ignores market incentives, leading to predictable failure (e.g., rent control causing building decay). When people protest these failures, proponents who believe they "know better" must resort to coercion and violence to silence dissent and maintain power, rather than admit their model is flawed.
Command economies inevitably rely on force. In a free society, disagreement is resolved through persuasion. In an authoritarian system where directives are absolute, dissent is ultimately met with force. Adopting a top-down economic model means accepting state-sanctioned violence as a necessary tool.
To define government's role, one must first define government itself. Its only unique characteristic is the legal power to apply force. Therefore, its functions should be strictly limited to things society needs but individuals cannot accomplish voluntarily, such as national defense, border control, and some basic infrastructure.
Systems built on violence and coercion, such as authoritarian rule or forced taxation, are fundamentally unstable. They incentivize participants to constantly seek ways to escape, betray, or overthrow the system, creating a repeating cycle of conflict rather than sustainable social coherence.
Repression is presented as a necessary component of socialist systems, not a flaw. When individuals inevitably resist government mandates over their work—like a farmer refusing to plant sugar—the state's only recourse is violence to enforce its will. This conflict is inherent to the ideology.