How to get it wrong

The year is 2005. The Communist Manifesto was first published 157 years ago (on the 21st of this month). Since then we've had Stalin, Castro, Pol Pot, Mao and many other good-hearted souls testing out the theories of Marx and Engels with well-known results. Still, despite all the cruel lessons of humanity, and in a rich, well-developed country like Denmark, socialists clean up 10% of the votes in free elections! How can this be?

Socialistic theory is interesting (I think!). It is a theory of how to shape society into some given form, for example that of an equal distribution of wealth (leading to no wealth existing at all, but that's another story). Socialists are willing to do a lot before they realize that humans are not pieces of clay, and some never realize this.

But is it all that wrong? Don't humanshapers (socialists) sometimes get it right? Yes, and that is a part of their remarkable success in an industrialized country in the 21st century - they sometimes get it right. But that's about it. When they get it right they usually mess it up with something wrong. I have an example.

The following text is taken from the Danish Socialistisk Folkeparti (SF) and roughly translated into English:

As far as SF is concerned, it's not a question of having free trade or not - but on what conditions we should have free trade. Today it's the rich countries which can export without limits to the poor ones. On the other hand, many obstacles hinder the poor countries from exporting to the rich ones. The European Union, for example, puts the special-interests of the European sugar-factories above the lives and well-being of the poor sugar-farms in the Third World.

Following this text is a statement saying that SF wants the agricultural-policy of the European Union dismembered. The text starts out good I would say. The rest is not so good:

There is need for playing-rules that serve the public and especially the poor's interests - for example in the form of environmental-demands, worker's rights [if I understand the Danish correctly] and a stop of weapons-trade. Also, there might be a need to give the poor countries possibilities to enforce customs and other trade-barriers for certain products to enable them to protect their home-marked. And there is need to remove tax-exceptions, make demands regarding pension-savings and other savings as well as limiting currency-speculations, for example via the so-called Tobin-tax

This is where the whole text goes wrong. The first part shows how even socialists learn, and that they have learned that free trade creates wealth and long lives. The second part shows that Marx and Engels might as well have written the text, giving its lack of historical understanding (along with every other form of lack of understanding there is!). A few notes:

• The Tobin-tax cannot be exercised, and its only purpose would be to slow down the market with all the difficulties/disasters that creates.
• Trade-barriers are the enemy of the poor - not the friend. Those countries who have removed barriers prosper. Others build up industries that cannot compete on the market, and will therefore always have to be protected unless they are to go bankrupt and again lead to great poverty.
• Demanding regulations on environment and worker's rights is not a good first-step for poor countries to take. How can a poor country compete with the Western world by being tied up with regulations that took 100 years for Europeans to adjust to in small steps? Perhaps someone thinks that the poor countries should also take 100 years to build up?

I understand how someone would want to control others and shape them according to a certain image. However, I will never understand anyone who thinks it's okay!