I’m creating English subtitles for a Dutch libertarian speech that I recorded. Would any of you mind looking over if there are any sentences that are particularly bad, and/or can be improved.
Confessions of a former socialist
Look carefully at me.
You won’t think so at first sight, but before you stands a product of socialism.
I received welfare benefits for years, and before that I spent even longer at schools and college/university.
And all of that was financed by our socialist welfare state.
That’s what made me who I am, and I am ever greatful for socialism, which would have never been possible without the welfare state.
Of course, that eternal grattitude doesn’t take away that it’s down-right dreadful that I actually lived at the expense of others for years.
That money was being taken from people who had earned it, and that this money was given to me without having to have worked for it.
Only using up what others had generated; that’s what I did.
However appaling it was, it was allowed according to socialism, and it even stated I had the right to do it.
But even still it remains deplorable that I profited shamelessly of socialism.
And that’s why it’s even more deplorable, that here tonight I’m going to denounce socialism by speaking out boldly for capitalism.
Perhaps you might suspect opportunistic motives on my part.
You might think: he’ll be earning his own money now, and now suddenly he’s going to declare that taxation is robbery.
And then again you could call such opportunism precisely capitalistic, because most people view capitalism as a corrupt system that stimulates opportunism and greed.
A system that because of that reason doesn’t bring about the good in man, but actually the bad in him.
I know that view, and I’ve believed it for a long time.
But not any longer.
By now I’ve been convinced of the opposite: that capitalism doesn’t bring the worst but the best out in people.
Because if we’re talking about capitalism which stands for the free market process, then a short look in history is enough to see that that free market actually made us into better people.
Better because since the free market, which in Europe started around the 17th century, a drive for renewal, a lust for enterprise and creativity was released in human beings which differs night and day from the orthodox and traditional mentality that people had prior.
The arrival of the free market meant that people for the first time could enjoy the fruits of their labor, and didn’t have to relinquish it to some feudal or absolute ruler.
That certainty drove people to ambition and competition which went together with the development of individualism, self-determinancy and courage.
Ambition and thrift led simultaneously to an unheard of height of productivity, and so the free market has also layed the foundation of our prosperity.
Our society has since the free market besides prosperous also become ever more complex, mobile and varied.
That resulted in a big diversity of lifestyles, and an equally big variety of ways of living together and working together.
In short, the free market didn’t bring out the worst but the best in us.
We have become more multi-faceted, colorful, and because of that plurality of lifestyles even also more tolerant.
But the important thing is that apart from that we’ve become much more free.
The rise of the capitalistic free market marks the beginning of the end of the oppression by feudal rulers.
The new economic order that arose due to the free market undermined the royal power, and with that eventually their possibilitties to extort some people arbitrarily to satisfy of their own desires.
With the free market the power came to the people.
And luckily a royal titel is nodaways not much more than a relic.
But even though the royal class has lost its power, we’ve ultimately not become that much freeer as we’ve become more versatile and colorful.
Because around the beginning of the 20th century we again see an unhealthy concentration of power occur.
Namely with the institute we call the government.
This same government has, in the 21th century, grown out to be an institution that has imposed itself on almost all facets of our lives.
The government meddles nowadays with almost everything: how we should think, how we should deal with ourselves, each other and our children, and even how should we act in the bedroom.
But where we feel its presence the most is in our wallets.
The government forces us monthly to part with a large potion of our earned money, through their system of levying: taxation.
Surely I know the argument: the government uses that money for the greater good.
They may do that partly, but if I tell you that 57 percent of our national income goes to the collective, and that services and products by the government on average are twice as expensive than comperable services and products would be in the free market, then I also get the impression that they’re doing it for their own benefit.
The government doesn’t differ in that respect from the old feudal lords who extorted their serfs.
Maybe it catches the eye less under government and is it all a little less harsch, but it remains just as well a form of abuse of power and theft.
We think we live in a democracy, but really we live in a kleptocracy (from Greek: thief-rule).
Now that I’m coming down on socialism so hard, you may wonder if I have shame.
Shame for the fact that I once committed myself to socialism, by taking money from the welfare state.
Absolutely, I’m ashamed.
I live with the painful realization that my educationl upbringing has been payed with stolen money.
That I’m basically guilty of handling stolen goods.
And yet I don’t feel that guilty.
I was blind at the time.
I believed passionately in the equality and justice that socialism as its core value propagated.
And I believed just as well in the message of socialism that we need a big and expensive government to guarantee that equality.
Now, however I see that equality is really not guaranteed by a big government that takes large summs of money of others, redistributes it a little and puts the rest in its own pocket.
Equality is better served with a government as small as possible, who only asks a modest contribution to protect us against crime and corruption.
Apart from that, every governmental intervention is itself criminal and corrupt.
Because the essense of equality is that everybody can and may earn what he’s worth, and that the reward of labor and effort don’t end up with people who haven’t done anything for it through a coercive system of redistribution.
Because precisely that is unjust, and stands opposite to freedom and equality.
So look at me carefully once more, and know that you’re looking at an anti-social and unjust product of socialism, and realize that capitalism would have never created such an awful thing.
