Mises goes beyond warning about the destructive nature of socialism, going further to draw attention to what he considers “the main issue,” which he describes as “the desperate struggle of lovers of freedom, prosperity and civilization against the rising tide of totalitarian barbarism.” Socialism is destructive in itself, but more than that it fuels the “rising tide of totalitarian barbarism” through its many disguises. There is a persistent belief that socialism is an ideal worth pursuing if we could only work out just the right form that it should take. Part of Mises’s goal in Socialism is to explain the dangers of socialism and help readers to recognize socialism when they see it.
Among its many disguises, socialism cloaks itself in the mantle of ideals that many people value such as the ideals of justice and equality before the law. Speaking of the anthropomorphism that ascribes “justice” to the distribution of wealth that results from market interactions, Hayek in his essay “‘Social’ or Distributive Justice,” warns:
I believe that “social justice” will ultimately be recognized as a will-o’-the-wisp which has lured men to abandon many of the values which in the past have inspired the development of civilization….
In the contemporary context, the primary disguise of socialism is the ideal of equality. Thomas Sowell describes the tenets of socialism as “make believe equality”—the idea that we should create laws and policies that ensure we are, in fact, all equal—even though, as Murray Rothbard explains in Egalitarianism as a Revolt against Nature, seeking to make all people, in fact, equal would be a sinister Procrustean goal. As Sowell famously said, “No one is equal to anything. Even the same man is not equal to himself on different days.” Yet the concept of “equality” now provides cover for many socialist policies. Most notorious is the concept of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” DEI is based on theories of racial polylogism, which are explicated by reference to explicitly Marxist concepts. Indeed, this is one of the main methods by which Marxist ideals now proliferate—by being subsumed within the intellectual foundations of the latest iteration of socialism.
The object of the socialists is always the same, the revolution. It is never about what they seem to be bellyaching about, it is the revolution. They are trying to get us to use their terminology, their language and their ideas, so we can fall into their trap. We need to follow the non-aggression principle and not fall into the statist trap of using force for everything. This is the major conundrum that we are faced with in the battle with the socialists