Social Programs vs Socialism

January 10, 2020

By NZB3

The difference between socialism and social programs.

A social program, properly speaking, is generated by and run by the people it is there to support. It is Localism, it is needed, it is eternal.

Socialism is when The State comes in and takes it over. They run it top-down from an office in Wellington or some branch office in town. They pretend like they invented the thing and that you’d be lost without them to run it and they make you pay their prices for it. You got to jail or pay for a licence if you want to do it because it’s theirs now.

“Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work. Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavour are defined as little more than the performance of the intitutions which claim to serve these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources..”- Deschooling Society, Ivan Illich (1970)

Your best leaders and community organisers don’t stay in your town anymore. Their talents have been commodified and they go somewhere else to be a politician or a bureaucrat. Your withering town gets professional outsiders who bungee in to Administrate as part of their career path; Just passing through. Often they’re not even New Zealanders either but perhaps Canadians or Irish or Americans.