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| Photo: Ileana Johnson 2015 |
A friend asked me recently if I found any similarities
between the collectivist Home Owners Association (HOA) in the U.S. and living
in communist Romania in cinder block apartments the size of the average hotel
room. We did have a different HOA in
these reinforced concrete high rises, the Residents’ Association (Asociatia
Locatarilor). Its governing board was chosen from the least outspoken residents
who sometimes doubled as informers to the Security Police, reporting on the
comings and goings of the residents and on their political statements made
accidentally in ordinary conversations with neighbors.
The Residents’ Association decided when the water heaters
were to be serviced, what kind of cold and hot water schedule we were going to follow,
how much heat we received from the government mother ship, how much any repairs
would cost, and how the due bills were to be divided evenly between all
families, if the association would pay the electric bill for some widow who was
behind on her dues, which mechanic they were going to hire to fix whatever was
broken in the apartment complex.
In the egalitarian utopia, the total bill was to be split
equally between all families, regardless of how many people lived in one
apartment. Some had children, some lived alone and the consumption was vastly
different but the contribution share had to be equal. It was similar at work;
no matter how little effort a person put in, they were paid the same. The
incentive died quickly when people realized effort and extra work did not
count. But everyone expected that 13th salary at the end of the year
– a bonus that few people deserved.
Residents had to take turns to sweep the hallways and the
street surrounding the apartment complex. Forced volunteer work beautified the
surroundings with flowers, grass, bushes, and trees, all with money from the
residents.
The HOAs here are actually associations that residents
willingly sign into in order to purchase or build a home. Those who volunteer
for the board and are actually voted in are either busy-bodies, residents who
like to be in charge, in control over “minions,” or those home owners who
expect something in return or get a high from controlling other people and
telling them what to do and how to do things with their own homes and
properties.
HOAs were initially sold to home owners as a way to instill
a sense of community, of belonging, for protection, and to preserve property
values. I fail to see how paying a fee each month to maintain the club house
and the swimming pool for the neighborhood children increases my property’s
value when I try to sell it. The way I see it, the only benefits derived to me
is garbage pickup and snow removal when that actually happens.
The HOA certainly does not deter crime nor protect the
neighborhood even though they park a “security” car by the club house. It is a
neighborhood joke as more and more cars are broken into and sometimes even stolen,
and people robbed at gun point in the dog park. Crime has spiked since the
Obama regime increased the number of illegals and refugees forcibly inserted
into peaceful communities. Obama was determined to reengineer how we lived
because we were not diverse, inclusive, and multicultural enough.
The covenant rules are so detailed that most contracts look
like a huge tome. They tell us what color to paint homes, fences, mailboxes,
whether we can or cannot grow vegetables, plant a bush, put an antenna on the
house, build a deck, a gazebo, a patio, whether we can park our cars in the
driveway, in the street, put up Christmas decorations, fly the American flag, etc.
Americans have lost homes because they did not comply with
the strict HOA rules, were fined, refused to pay the fines, and were eventually
evicted by courts from their own homes which were then sold in order to recoup
the escalating fines.
In Colorado, one unfortunate family eventually lost their
home and the husband’s good health after protracted and costly legal battles
with their HOA because they had dared to complain about the neighbor’s dogs
barking non-stop in the very adjacent home to their own bedroom window. It begs
the question why builders would place a home so close to another. However, if
we follow the development of property rights in this country and the Smart
Growth policy promoted by the National Association of Realtors (NAR) among
others, we understand the world- wide U.N. Agenda 2030 which endorses tiny
homes and small spaces, and denigrates suburbia as urban sprawl.
As Tom DeWeese recently wrote, “Rail trails, walkable
communities, complete streets, to help build ‘strong communities’ are all part
of the grand NAR vision for America’s glorious future. Its vision of utopia – a
beautiful, well-controlled community of high rises where shopping and jobs are
within biking or walking distance or a quick ride on a quaint trolley. Wind
turbines turn lazily in the background to supply all energy needs. There are no
dirty smokestacks, no cars, no parking problems, no gridlock, and no sprawl.
According to the vision, everyone is living in complete harmony.” https://www.thenewamerican.com/reviews/opinion/item/19850-private-property-rights-and-socialism-do-not-mix
Moving people into tiny apartments, most the size of a hotel
room or a jail cell is a “chic” trend presented as a desirable option for
someone who cannot afford a mortgage or rent on a decently sized apartment. Who
wants to assemble and disassemble their furniture every day in order to have
living space for different activities during the day?
One can rent an apartment in New York the size of a closet,
90 square ft., or a 250 square ft. apartment in California. You can call it the
euphemistic term, “minimalism,” but we should call it what it is, forced social
engineering into high-rise apartments. But
it’s worse in Japan, where rent is calculated in some highly desirable areas by
the square inch.
To promote micro-living and sell the idea to Americans who
like to live in normal sized homes, United Tiny House Association even has
festivals around the country. http://unitedtinyhouse.com/
I lived through this kind of controlled utopia under
communism. The only people who rented or owned luxurious living spaces and expensive
cars where the communist party apparatchiks. The Iron Curtain countries were among
the most polluted countries in the world. The communists had no regard for
human life, water, soil, or the air we breathed. And we certainly could not go very far just by
bikes, buses, and trains. What a fantastic way to control the comings and
goings of the entire population, every aspect of their lives!
Kevin Williamson wrote in Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism, “By the time the Soviet
government collapsed, fully one-sixth of Russia’s territory had been rendered
uninhabitable because of pollution and other environmental devastation.”
I still remember as a child the oil slicks in most of the
creeks and rivers running through my hometown or the neighboring villages and
the pungent smell of petroleum by-products coming from most lakes and bodies of
water. When we hanged laundry to dry on the balcony, by the afternoon the
clothes had a tinge of greyish powder which had deposited from the polluted
air.
We had to travel to the mountains by train, sixty miles or
so to escape the industrial pollution of my hometown and to breathe fresh air,
that’s how little regard the Communist Party planners had for the environment
and for what they were doing to our health.
We did not have a Declaration of Independence, all humans
were not “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” we had
whatever rights and responsibilities the dear leader said we had. The communist
government had no limits on the power they had over each individual citizen.
The dear leader was always right and, if the minions dared
to question or complain about anything, they became dispensable “units”. That
is why 100 million people were killed in various communist regimes.
It rankles me when I see Millennials wearing Che Guevara and
Mao t-shirts, while arguing that socialism is great. The numerous countries
where socialism and communism were utter failures have done it all wrong, but,
if they have a chance, they will do it the right way. If you ask them what the
right way is, they stare stupidly into the camera like a deer in the headlights
because they have no idea.
The communist party and their social engineers had moved
many people off their small farms, confiscated their lands for co-operative
farms and moved them into towns in high-rise apartments with elevators in some
that stayed broken a lot of the time while others had none. The apparatchiks
leveled their farm homes and forced the villagers to work in the fields for an
equal share of the crop regardless of effort, with the communist party getting
their lion’s share of each crop.
The elites of the party and their underlings occupied the
beautiful villas they confiscated from those they considered part of the
bourgeoisie, after they threw them in jail and left their families destitute to
fend for themselves while their loved ones served as much as decades in hard
labor camps for no fault of their own other than the fact that they inherited a
piece of private property.
Private property is what gives us freedom yet the Marxist
propaganda machine vilified anyone who owned something more than the next
person. Uncle Paul served seven years for such offense and luckily survived but
his family became destitute. The late Dr. Petrasovich was sentenced to 17 years
of hard labor in a lead mine because he had a villa in the fashionable mountain
resort of Sinaia. He survived his incarceration as well and was able to
immigrate to the U.S.
Marxism indoctrinated its followers into the idea that humans,
after intense forced education, will willingly give up their private property
and thus forever eliminate economic inequalities that “allegedly created class
conflict.”
Using force, Marxists tried to reengineer human nature, to
force people to change the historical tendency to own land, whether be it
through families, tribes, or individuals. But they failed miserably. Humans are not that
altruistic to give up everything in the name of “social justice,” a pie in the
sky concept devised to entice the newbies to adopt the Marxist philosophy.
The desire to acquire and accumulate private property
throughout one’s life and pass it on to heirs is an intrinsic part of our human
psyche. Why else would we save for a rainy day, acquire land, real estate, why
do we collect, and, in the more extreme cases, why do we hoard certain things?
Forcibly nationalizing industries, confiscating any private
property, land, homes, paintings, jewelry, bank accounts, cash, cars, tractors and
other farm implements, and distributing them to communist officials loyal to
the dear leader was a recipe for disaster which expressed itself in the
declining productivity, theft, and turning the citizenry into wards of the
state, dependent on government for their daily existence and survival. The
change was so drastic that, after many years of communist exploitation, people
would wait on the government to tell them what to do next, that’s how
brainwashed they were. Any incentive and motivation to do better, to do more
that would benefit society too was dead.
Friedrich Hayek said that citizens motivated by the possibility
of wealth, worked harder and beyond their immediate needs, thus bringing other benefits
to society at large. Communist apparatchiks have used deception, coercion, and
force to translate their goals into action. If millions who stood in the way or
questioned anything had to die in the process, that was just collateral damage
in the quest of utopian communism.
As we had constant shortages of everything because
communists were not good at all at centralized economic planning, the people
were turned into slaves to the state and as such, they became more
materialistic and avaricious, hoarding in excess of what they needed. The
communist party solution was not to improve economic planning using the free
market supply and demand, but to adopt laws that punished hoarders, to
institute the financial police, more rationing via coupons, and laws that
prescribed how much each person could consume in calories per day.
People started stealing from their work and traded with
others in order to meet their survival needs. If the state did not respect
their property rights and stole everything they had owned, why should they
respect the government’s property even though the state kept telling them, you
are the collective owners of the means of production, if you steal, you are
stealing from yourselves. They knew better, they had no claim to anything
surrounding them, it was not their private property to be had, and it belonged
to the communist party elites who could take whatever they wanted or needed.
The non-conformists such as my dad were silenced. People
lost self-reliance – they had seen too many times when initiative was treated
as a crime, so they started waiting to be ordered what to do next. The work
ethic died quickly and the sense of civic and public responsibility disappeared
as well. As an example, people would wait in their own homes while mounds of
snow or mud were cutting off any possibility of egress from their village to
the rest of the world. If an earthquake struck and people were buried alive,
they also waited for officials to dig them out.
Dennis Praeger remarked that “socialism teaches its citizens
to expect everything, even if they contribute nothing… they have a plethora of
rights and few corresponding obligations.” Many citizens in Romania objected to
being taxed after the “fall” of communism in 1989 and many still do today.
The rapacious materialism bred by communism translated into
less charitable acts. Non socialists tend to donate much more to their fellow
man in need. Socialists may donate to family but much less to others in need,
they expect the state to do it all. We can see that in Democrat politicians
today who are very generous with other people’s money. Margaret Thatcher said
that socialism was great until they ran out of other people’s money.
