After reading the two brilliant Hate-Bill relevant commentaries of Jeff Davis and Jim Dean in this very Georgia Heritage Council publication, I could not help but think back and relate the infamous HATE BILL to a most powerful something I found in a book entitled The South Under Siege-- written by a third genius of an author named FRANK CONNER. I hope Mr. Conner will forgive me for herein paraphrasing some of his comments on Socialism (found on his pages 262-264) and interspersing throughout them, Frederic Bastiat’s ideas as well as some of my own less profound thoughts on that subject.

The writings of Bastiat, Davis, Dean and Conner serve as the foundation for most of my thoughts expressed here. You should be able to find The Law by Frederic Bastiat at your local book shop or public library. Davis and Dean’s words can be found elsewhere on this site. Conner’s tome may be obtained from Amazon.com. Don’t look for it at your local library, as those high stepping library professionals are far better than we are at deciding what we all should read. They abide by the guidelines of their national organization, The Library Association and do not carry Frank’s absolutely magnificent work on their shelves.

With all of that as preface, I now leap into the fray of Socialism versus our Republic with these words: Goodbye American rights! Goodbye the natural rights we have—those rights that come from God—to defend our persons, our liberty and our property. Goodbye the right God gave us to defend, even by deadly force, our God-given rights. Is this our America? Do we live in World War II Russia or WWII Germany, or WWII Italy? How does one find freedom, happiness and truth in a time warp? But why compare our U.S. government with Russia, Germany and Italy? -- Because all three of those nations had totalitarian governments. No matter that the Russian Commies managed to label and have the world label the Fascists, the “rightwingers” and themselves the “leftists”—--the three nations were all practitioners of Socialism designed to give total power, ultimately to dictators for the supposed purpose of allowing them to, supposedly, protect the workers from Capitalists.

The Russian, the German and the Italian governments continued to practice nearly identical types of SOCIALISM, even after Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini became dictators and elected to fight their traitor Socialist-comrade Russia. (Remember Russia and Germany started WWII as allies.)

And just what is SOCIALISM? Most Americans have little knowledge of its definition or of its faults. Today’s dictionary definitions parrot the old ones, “government ownership and control of the means of production and distribution of goods,” but now add to this that socialism is impossible to define because there are so many varieties of it. Since Socialism failed so miserably and the wall came down in the Soviet Union, government ownership of business is no longer the criterion which defines socialism.

Socialism is now used by people as a word meaning “statism”—--that is, the concentration of economic planning is in the hands of highly-centralized government—--one which regulates the production and pricing of goods and the wages of labor by taxation and other means. Socialism is found in a central government which REGULATES THE SOCIAL CONDUCT OF THE CITIZENS. -- Telling folks what they can and cannot say or write certainly falls under that definition.

When government controls almost every aspect of society, Conner explains, the issue as to whether or not it owns the factories and directly tells folks where they can work and where they can live becomes immaterial. Thus we can conclude that a nation in which the central government engages heavily in central planning and social engineering is a socialist nation, and its politics is always to the left.

Bastiat gives us the simplest definition of all for SOCIALISM. He terms it LEGAL PLUNDER. We know that the law is supposed to protect citizens from plunder. Sadly, the law (our U.S. government) today, not only fails to do so, it participates in it.

“Sometimes the law defends plunder and participates in it. Sometimes the law places the whole apparatus of judges, police, prisons and gendarmes at the service of the plunderers, and treats the victim - when he defends himself - as a criminal.” --Frederic Bastiat, from The Law, p. 17