Socialism, Minority Groups, and Personal Liberties
Socialists have managed to acquire the loyalty of a coalition of disparate groups by championing the principle of personal liberty. Especially in the United States, many women, disabled, gay people, transgender people, racial and ethnic minorities, and immigrants are among the proud supporters of the socialist cause, foolishly believing that capitalism or the free market is antithetical to their livelihood or lifestyles.
They could not be more wrong. Unfortunately, under socialism, people are not self-owners; they belong to the state.
The state owns everyone’s bodies under socialism. No example is more extreme than the gulags of the Soviet Union, where the state sent millions to forced-labor camps in which about 1.6 million died. The individual was merely a producer good in the state’s grand schemes. In current and former socialist countries, the minority groups that support socialism experienced this as well.
For example, in Dr. Paul Kengor’s book, Takedown, he retells the Bolsheviks’ history concerning the most cherished of modern women’s rights: abortion, or the right to choose. The Bolsheviks did legalize abortion once taking power (at that point, it helped wither away the family), but Joseph Stalin, under the fear of depopulation, outlawed abortion in 1936.
This ban continued until Stalin died and Nikita Khruschev’s more progressive administration revoked it in 1955. On the flip side, Fidel Castro’s socialist regime forced abortions as a means for cutting back on risky pregnancies. Additionally, through China’s one-child policy, many of the state’s abortions are compelled in what Kengor describes as “one of the most severe infringements on family life ever inflicted by a government on its people.”
Despite the right to choose being supported by feminists of socialist countries, it is among many of the r
Article from Mises Wire
