If you think Jesus is a socialist, you don’t understand socialism

It’s become trendy among angry young left-wing Americans to claim that Jesus is a socialist.

These naive and affluent people think they love socialism. They know that Jesus preached about feeding the poor and needy — and they think that a socialist system would take money away from rich people — so they draw the conclusion that Jesus and socialism are compatible.

It’s an incredibly ignorant conclusion, but most of them genuinely believe this nonsense. And their good intentions pave a path straight to economic and social hell for the people they claim to care about.

Jesus told his followers to love their enemies, feed the poor and store up treasures in heaven rather than in this life. Some of his followers obeyed. Some who claimed to be his followers did not.

In both cases, it was a voluntary decision.

But can you find any instance in which Jesus told his followers to take money and material goods away from other people — without their consent — in order to feed the poor?

Go ahead and read the gospels. All four of them. I’ll wait. You won’t find anything close to that. And taking money away from other people without their consent — what we generally call theft — is one of the central tenets of socialism.

Without theft, socialism cannot exist.

But well-meaning people whose thinking is muddled can’t see that. Instead, they post self-righteous graphics on social media. Here’s one that I saw today:

“Why is it when Jesus talks about feeding the poor, it’s Christianity, but when a politician does it, it’s socialism?”

Do you really want to know? It’s incredibly obvious if you understand what socialism is.

When Jesus and his followers feed people through their own voluntary actions, it’s a free choice. It’s doing the right thing because you love other people.

When politicians talk about feeding the poor, they are demanding that the force of government be used to take money from people without their consent. You see, these politicians have no money of their own. All they have is the threat to use government force against those who don’t voluntarily turn over the money they demand.

(The same is true of politicians who demand that people turn over their money to pay for other things, too, but we’re talking about socialism now, so I won’t be critiquing the other hypocrites here.)

But it gets worse, especially for the poor.

Even if you ignore the morality of stealing from people who have more than you do, the plain and simple fact is that the warped and confused system that we have in most of the West is far superior at helping the poor than socialism has been — in any country where it’s been tried.

Socialist economies require centralizing all power in the hands of politicians — and when politicians get that sort of power, guess who benefits?

In socialist systems, the people at the top — the elites and their friends — have ended up with the lion’s share of the wealth that those societies produce. This violates every principle that these people claim to believe in, but that’s the way it’s been regardless.

The corrupt and powerful become wealthy in socialist systems, even if they know to hide their wealth when possible. And the rest of the population — the people who are supposed to benefit from this immoral system — remain poor. To make things even worse, the entire economy stagnates, because individuals have no personal incentive to create wealth and build new things.

In every system where socialism has been implemented, the rich and powerful at the top have ended up employing terror and other violence to maintain their grip on power. When “the people” have resisted their orders and tried to build better lives for themselves, the people at the top have murdered millions and implemented tighter and tighter controls over speech and freedom of all kinds.

You see, socialism isn’t compatible with freedom.

Free people can choose whether to feed the poor or buy a yacht or build a new business. In a free economy, it’s their money, so those decisions are completely voluntary.

And here’s the thing that these affluent young wannabe socialists miss. The poor in a free society live better than the poor in a socialist society. The poor in a free society have the freedom to climb their way out of poverty — but there is no path out of poverty in a socialist economy other than becoming one of the powerful and barbarous rulers.

Those who try to pretend that Jesus is a Republican — or an American or any particular demographic or political orientation — are delusional. I’ve written about that before. But those who claim Jesus is a socialist are just lying to themselves in different ways.

Jesus taught his followers to make generous and even selfless decisions about how to use their material goods. But he never advocated forcing people to obey his commands against their will. And he never supported the immoral mess of terror and pain and hopelessness that are the inevitable result of a socialist system.

If you want to justify your devotion to a bankrupt and immoral system which will make humans far worse off and increase human misery immensely, you’ll have to look elsewhere. You won’t find any support for socialism — or any other political action — in the gospels.

If you believe you should feed the poor and help the needy — as I do — that’s between you and Jesus. But don’t pretend your economic and historic ignorance have anything to do with Jesus.