Last week, I watched The Hunger Games with my wife and some friends. It seems that everyone was struck by the brutality. One of my wife's friends was upset that her young son had been to see the movie with a friend. She was worried that he would be scarred by viewing the violence.
I was struck by something else. I saw the people living with no freedom. The police were called peace keepers. That sounds very much like the United Nations military force. There was stark poverty. The people were supposed to stay within their home district, and electric fences were erected to prevent free travel between districts. The capitol district was filled with members of the ruling class. They were affluent. They were the trendsetters. The ruling class was an elitist bunch that smugly considered the folks from the outlying districts to be ignorant hicks.
I wonder if the kids today have any clue what they were watching. The fact that the characters spoke English with an American accent indicated that this was some futuristic United States. Many of the scenes of the outlying District 12 looked a lot like the Appalachian mountains in North Carolina or Tennessee. Everything I saw with the way the people lived brought back visions I had developed in my mind of the Eastern European communist states during the cold war. Is this the vision the communists have of the United States of the future? Is this their dream for America?
I hope that the schools today teach our kids about the realities of communism. After all, there are a number of countries in Eastern Europe and Asia where communism was tried on a very large scale over decades. Do the kids get a good, realistic view of what life in a communist country was like? Do they understand shortages of basic necessities like food and clothing? Have they been taught that making everyone equal doesn't mean that everyone will be rich? Are they aware that everyone won't be in the middle class? Is the brutality of an unbridled police force taught to our next generation? If communism is the ideal state, why did communist countries need to erect fences to keep people inside? We don't need fences to keep Americans here; I don't see hordes of Americans emigrating to communist states for a better life.
Communism allows the government to seize all private property and share everything with everyone. Although it seems that everything is shared equally, some folks are "more equal" that others. That's an interesting way of saying that the ruling class can be rich, while non-government rich folks get their property taken away.
In the 1960's and 1970's, Americans in general were strongly against communism. They understood the difference between our laissez-faire, capitalist economic and political system and communism. Any American that claimed to be a communist was considered to be pretty far out there. Today, things have changed. The MessAPolitico is slowly eroding our freedoms. They run for office and offer everyone a bunch of "free" services that will be paid for by getting the rich to pay more and more taxes. The tax system today has managed to get about half of us a free ride; the bottom half of the economic scale doesn't pay any taxes. The budget is hopelessly out of balance, and the MessAPolitico continues to tell us that the rich can afford to pay more to get it balanced.
Is this not taking from the rich and moving it to the poor to equalize us? That seems like a good idea on the surface, but there is a major flaw in the communist system. First, the communists will tell you that the rich got rich by taking from the poor. In fact, the rich got rich by selling products and services that deliver more value than they cost to produce and deliver. The difference is the profit. Everyone is better off for this exchange of money for goods and services. The purchaser gets a product or service that they need at a price they find acceptable. The business owner gets a profit and return on their investments in capital. The people that are employed by the business earn a salary and benefits helping the business produce and deliver the goods and services. The suppliers of equipment and raw materials to the business are also better off. When communists come along and convince us to punish the rich people that made all of this possible, everyone is hurt. All of the folks that received all of the benefits of a vibrant economy lose out. That's how we all end up poor, except for the ruling class that skims a bunch off of the top to feed the bureaucracy. That's why the government is so terribly inefficient.
Getting back to The Hunger Games, it was an interesting movie. I thought it was a good view of communism and the affect of a totalitarian government on the average people. I wonder if President Obama watched this movie with a gleam in his eye. I also wonder if the parents have pointed out something to their kids that wasn't pointed out in the movie. Have they told the kids that this is the way a communist country looks?
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