I want to thank Jason Darensburg for providing me with the real gem of a column, titled “US trails in happiness worldwide” in Wednesday’s Daily Lobo. It once again displays the need for socialists to distort the truth about reports, even when it’s the most subjective and equivocal study about the human condition. It says little about the range of the survey or the standard of living of the general populace, and proves to be more of a percentage-poor and unscientific single track of reasoning.
However, using this report, I can help you objectively draw conclusions that are aligned with the truth, and the truth is that a free people is happier.
One should’ve immediately been suspicious when Darensburg started his column with “Let’s be honest.” What Darensburg did was extrapolate about social support from this report and proceed to draw ridiculous and fantastical conclusions about socialism and Denmark. Nowhere are the conclusions he draws found in the study.
He actually ignored some of the most significant findings about wealth, liberty and the strong correlations with individualism.
If you look at the entire study, not just Denmark, the opposite of socialism is what draws happiness. It is the ability and willingness to choose to help your neighbors, not a central power to force it on you, that makes people happy. I will tell you that Denmark does indeed have many welfare institutions; however, in the absence of its fiscal policy, it is far more laissez-faire than the United States.
It doesn’t surprise me how the left continually rams us with obvious lies about socialism given its horrendous track record and the misery it forces on the human race. But it’s not happiness that they are concerned about, it’s about making others as miserable as them. The lies are driven by a powerful and despicable human emotion: envy. Instead of celebrating achievement and embracing it like the emotionally-secure capitalists do, they envy it. Envy isn’t just that you want what someone else has, it’s a sad psychological phenomenon of wanting to watch those with more than you suffer. It’s a powerful emotion that drives many progressives into these delusional states. If you are around a lot of lefties, and a businessman walks in the room, what is the immediate reaction — envy or friendliness?
First off, the report references this idea of “social support.”
Darensburg either naively or deceitfully claims this is correlated to government support. I’ll assume the latter, as he has done this several times before. The truth is that “social support” is related to the support by immediate friends and family, and is voluntary, not forced. The question that researchers specifically asked was, “If you were in trouble, do you have relatives or friends you can count on to help you whenever you need them, or not?” This is what is called voluntarism, not some form of socialism.
Capitalism is similarly based on voluntarism, or free people deciding what to do with their lives; if they do not want to participate in the collective, they do not have to. They vote with their dollars, and cannot infringe on others. A right embraces one single absolute, it is not subjective, nor is it relative to any law or country; you have the right to your own life, and all other rights extend from this absolute.
You don’t have a right to health care; that confiscates the right of a doctor to his own life and his own work. A philosophy of a right to health care is no different from a philosophy of having a right to have cotton picked for you.
Furthermore, if you look at the data that attributes happiness to this “social support,” you will not see a significant difference between the U.S. and Denmark. Darensburg must have simply ignored this as it doesn’t fit his view. I also couldn’t find anything about most of the social claims he makes and their contribution to happiness; actually, the entire document doesn’t even mention any of it.
What was notably different between Denmark and the U.S. in this study was the level of happiness due to a lack of government and business corruption. The questions were, “Is corruption widespread throughout the government or not?” and “Is corruption widespread within businesses or not?” Here is where I will say that my personal endless fight is to completely separate the state and business in a laissez-faire economic system for the same reasons as the separation of the state and religion. The only role of government would be to prosecute fraud and misuses of force.
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In a socialized system, as we have here in the U.S., there is the endless lobbying, control of the money supply, control of retirement and a collusion of the state and big business, particularly in health care. Just look at the decades of Medicare and Medicaid that we have suffered through, or the banking system.
The complete reach of the state into the health and lives of innocent Americans is no free market. This is all the result of central planning and progressive philosophy.
Denmark, on the other hand, according to the 2013 Economic Freedom Index, ranks higher than the U.S. in economic freedom. I will not go as far as to say that happiness is correlated to economic freedom, however, there is a much more statistical correlation between happy countries and liberty than there is between happy countries and socialism, particularly socialized medicine.
Actually, socialism has a negative correlation, as we have seen throughout history.
So there you have it — the truth. Denmark may have more socialized medicine, but in science, we do not draw the correlation unless it is consistent throughout societies. What correlation we can draw is the consistent and endless parasitism of socialism on capitalism, even in Denmark. We can draw the conclusion that socialism can only last so long as it drains the production from capitalism dry; it will then collapse, and will rear its ugly head again once more wealth is generated for the taking. It’s an endless vicious cycle to blame capitalism for socialism’s unequivocal failures. Darensburg’s distortion of the truth and his rationalizations in this column proves this dishonest nature of socialism.
