[Originally published in the Front Range Voluntaryist, article by Anonymous]
Socialism, rather than being a coherent and consistent theory, is actually just a way of people blaming everything they don't like about reality at any given time on private ownership. So the socialist will blame poverty and starvation on capitalism while at the same time blaming overabundance, consumerism, and obesity on capitalism. They will blame capitalism for bringing about too low of prices while at the same time blaming capitalism for bringing about too high of prices. They will say capitalism is too competitive while at the same time saying that capitalism is too monopolistic. And on and on...What they blame capitalism for changes based on what they happen to not like at the moment which can and does contradict what they did not like just a few moments earlier.
Then they contradict their own theory in practice. If the capitalist exploits the worker, as they claim, then that would mean that the small business owner with one employee should have his razor thin profit margins taxed while the professional athlete, a worker making millions of dollars a year in salary, should not be taxed at all. Yet they don't say that. Instead, they go against their own theory by saying the rich worker should be heavily taxed. This is because according to socialist theory, it is supposed to be impossible for a worker to be rich. According to socialism, all workers, including the best and most famous professional athletes should all be making minimum wage, as that is the lowest legal amount that capitalists are allowed to pay. Yet since reality contradicts their theory, rather than seeing the obvious, which is that they need a better theory, they just contradict themselves without even recognizing it.
Then there's the accusation by socialists that free markets are religion and not economics. Economics is a science and so must be able to be analyzed logically. The fact is that a society of people consists of individuals with ever changing values and needs in an ever changing and unpredictable world. There are an endless amount of bits of essential information which are spread out among all the individuals, and must somehow be aggregated so that all people can act in ways which harmonize with the actions of all others so that needs and values can be continually met. Free market economics can and has logically explained how prices come about and how they aggregate all the decentralized information making it possible to have an advanced economy of millions or billions of people who have no personal information of each other.
Socialism, on the other hand, assumes that the centralized state can obtain all the necessary information and plan things for people better. They are not able to logically show how this is possible. Instead, they have to assume that the state is an omniscient deity, as that would be the only way for socialism to work. So the accusation of religion actually applies to the socialist. Socialism is simply a religion whereby its adherents believe that the state is a god which can bring about a paradise situation where everyone has just the right amount to eat, prices are always just what they think they should be, etc.