Communism

So do we. Copying a paper doesn’t take it from anyone. This works because knowledge is non-scarce — sharing it creates value without creating victims. But this isn’t communism. It’s the nature of information. The Royal Society published the first scientific journal in 1665. Open science predates Marx by two centuries. You don’t need a 19th-century political label to justify what reality already permits. What you practice is freedom, not redistribution.

Common ownership of ideas works because ideas can be copied without loss. Common ownership of scarce things — land, bread, labour, cars — requires someone to decide who gets what, when, and how much. That someone is the state. And the state enforces its decisions with force. The moment you apply “common ownership” to things that can’t be copied, you need coercion. Every time. That’s not a design flaw in the implementation — it’s a logical consequence of ignoring scarcity.

A person who owns a fleet of luxury cars and drives only one may be wasteful. But a car sitting in a garage still cannot be in two places at once. It degrades, occupies space, and cost real resources to build. “Underutilised” is not the same as “non-scarce.” You can copy a PDF infinitely — you cannot copy a Lamborghini. The owner may be foolish, but taking their property without consent creates a victim. Waste is solved by better ideas and better trade, not by force.

Correct — monarchs killed millions, empires enslaved continents, and every concentration of power over scarce resources has produced victims. But capitalism is voluntary exchange. It has no army, no secret police, no gulags. When people die under capitalism, it is despite the system, not because of it. When people die under communism, it is because the theory requires the state to control all scarce production — and people who refuse to comply must be forced. More centralised control, more victims. This is not propaganda. It is arithmetic.

People theorised about flying from ancient times, but only achieved it recently. Fair analogy? No. Flying required solving an engineering problem within physics. Communism requires overriding three properties of reality: people act in their own interest (incentives), resources are finite (scarcity), and no central planner can know what millions of individuals know (decentralised knowledge). You can iterate wing designs. You cannot iterate away human nature. Every attempt escalated to coercion at exactly the point where people refused to comply voluntarily — because that point always comes.

R.J. Rummel spent his career at the University of Hawaii individually cataloguing government-caused deaths. His 262 million figure is not a slogan — it is a database. Soviet Union: 62 million. PRC: 35 million. Nazi Germany: 21 million. Cambodia: 2 million. Each entry sourced, cross-referenced, peer-reviewed. You can disagree with methodology. You cannot dismiss it as “propaganda” without engaging with the data. The question is not whether the number is exactly right. The question is: why does every implementation produce a number at all?

Yes, Merton’s “communism” (knowledge belongs to the scientific community) and Marx’s communism (scarce resources belong to the state) both use the words “common ownership.” But common ownership of non-scarce things requires no force. Common ownership of scarce things always does. One word hiding two completely different mechanisms is not breadth — it is confusion. And the confusion is not accidental. It lets the blood-soaked half hide behind the beautiful half. Your work deserves a word that doesn’t carry 110 million corpses as baggage.

The criminal, by harming someone without consent, demonstrated by their action that they accept the same framework being applied to them. The Golden Rule is reciprocity: if you break someone’s boundary, yours becomes breakable in return. You don’t need the criminal’s consent to restore the victim — you need the victim’s mandate. That’s the definition of Justice. The death penalty is a separate question (proportionality of punishment), not a refutation of the principle.

Inequality of outcome is not the same as injustice. Two people making different choices, having different skills, or working different hours will end up with different results. That’s not a violation — it’s arithmetic. Injustice requires a victim: someone harmed without consent. A surgeon earning more than a janitor has not harmed the janitor. A billionaire who built something millions of people voluntarily paid for has not stolen from anyone. If no one’s boundary was crossed, there is no victim. If there is no victim, there is no crime. Feeling that a gap is “unfair” is not the same as someone being harmed. Confusing the two is how coercion gets justified against the innocent.

A worker agrees to a wage. An employer agrees to pay it. Both sides consent. If either side is forced, that’s coercion and it’s wrong — we agree on that. But when both sides choose freely, profit is not theft. It’s the signal that the employer created more value than the inputs cost. Without profit, there is no signal for what society needs more of. Without that signal, someone must decide centrally — and that someone is the state, guessing, with your resources, and enforcing the guess with force. Marx’s “surplus value” assumes the worker is entitled to the full output, ignoring the risk, the tools, the coordination, and the idea. Remove any one of those and there is no output at all.

This is the zero-sum fallacy: the belief that one person’s gain must be another’s loss. If that were true, total wealth could never grow — but it has, spectacularly, for centuries. When two people trade voluntarily, both gain value by their own measure. That’s why they trade. The baker who sells bread is richer; the buyer who eats it is fed. Neither stole from the other. Some rich people did steal — through fraud, through government contracts, through coercion. Those are crimes with victims and should be punished. But “rich” is not a synonym for “thief.” Treating it as one punishes creation and rewards resentment.

Denmark, Sweden, and Norway are not socialist. They are market economies with high taxes and generous welfare. The means of production are privately owned. Trade is free. Property rights are strong. In the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom, Nordic countries consistently rank among the freest in the world. Denmark’s prime minister explicitly corrected Bernie Sanders: “Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy.” What Nordic countries prove is that capitalism generates enough wealth to fund extensive public services — not that socialism works. The engine is free trade. The spending is a policy choice. Confusing the two is how the word “socialism” keeps borrowing credibility from capitalism’s results.

Loyalty to a label is not the same as loyalty to a principle. If your principle is “knowledge should be free,” that principle predates Marx by millennia. Every scientist who ever published, every library that ever opened its doors, every teacher who ever shared what they knew — none of them needed the hammer and sickle. The label didn’t create the principle. The principle will outlive the label. Holding onto a word that carries 110 million corpses because it also describes something beautiful is not loyalty. It is letting the dead borrow the reputation of the living. Your work is bigger than the symbol. The symbol is smaller than your work.