What’s the big deal about socialism?
February 12th, 2009
The Socialist Papers-Part 1 of ???
Before the big recession gave birth to premature reports of capitalism’s death, I slept easily because I knew that socialism was a thoroughly discredited theory. No matter what the left could conjure up, it couldn’t match the comprehensive nightmare of the Orwellian (or is it Huxlean?) socialist state. Everything I had learned about Stalin, bread lines, inherent inefficiency, political prisoners, suffocation of the press, Che Guevara, and show trials demonstrated the folly of collectivism. When the U.S.S.R. collapsed, the poster child for statist economic theory crumbled as well. Thus, whenever I would meet a socialist I would catch myself tilting my head and thinking, “they still make you guys?”
Apparently they still do. As the economy is falling and control freaks are eager to blame it on the scary free market, socialistic sentiment is coming back into vogue. Newsweek ran a cover story where the authors stated (without irony) that Americans should acknowledge the growing role of the government in the economy, which implicitly means we should just accept it. As President Barack Obama recently said about arguments that FDR mishandled the Great Depression, “They’re fighting battles that I thought were resolved a pretty long time ago.”
Like roaches in Florida, socialism never really dies, and always comes back the moment a family stops maintaining their home. I’m sorry, but just because the left wants the right’s “20th-century” perspective to be outdated, that doesn’t make it so. Reaganesque ideals are still relevant, even in the marketplace. I admit that President Obama’s election indeed coincided with a fundamental shift in American politics, but it’s not the death of conservatism; it’s the reemergence of economic issues at the top of the political food chain. Compared to debating the best way to parry the recession, arguing whether or not some 30-second advertisement was sexist seems silly (which won’t stop the gals at feministing from indulging in their favorite party game).
Thus, the Socialist Papers were born. Because the struggle for economic freedom touches seemingly all aspects of life (The sheer volume of political literature dedicated to economic theory attests to that) there could be five, twelve, of fifty of these. The ideas, motives, and consequences of socialism are so varied and often complex that attempting to slay them all in one essay would only be disgustingly disdainful. With that in mind, perhaps I should get on with it.
For a word that few people seem to be able to define, “Socialism” nevertheless has a strong effect. Politicians run form the label as if were a disease. Past intellectuals, including British historian W.E.H. Lecky and the Austrian economist Frederic Hayek, have said “socialism is slavery” during a time where it was easy to understand what they meant. Saying that now would only cause maleducated (it’s a word now) college students to shake their heads, squint, and say, “what are you talking about? What’s so bad about socialism?”
Even among liberals, socialism isn’t a well-understood concept. Some describe it in terms of social justice, synonymous with “equality,” and “fairness,” which is both close and way off the mark. Most describe it as some sort of system where the government controls the means of production, but disagree on the particulars. Some sort of fusion between these two ideas, idealism and state ownership, lies the essential meaning of socialism.
Getting right to the point, socialism is any program that advocates state control of the economy in the name of fairness or equality (obviously this makes it potently appealing with those who believe they’re downtrodden). The more a nation’s government dictates the way business is done, the more socialistic a nation is. Hence, the United States government’s dramatically increased involvement in the banking system in response to the economic downturn in 2008 was decried as socialistic. I don’t even want to talk about the stimulus package. Pure socialism is a system where literally all resources are allocated by the state.
Thankfully today there are few truly socialistic nations, and those ones are clearly more impoverished than they were before socialism. Few Americans would move to Venezuela, Cuba, or especially North Korea, where private property is flat out illegal via decree from Pyongyang. Most countries, including the United States, host mixed economies; free market systems handicapped to varying degrees by excessive regulation such as price controls, state ownership of various industries, and high taxation. Even Red China privatized much if its economy in order to grow into the power it is today.
So what makes socialism so bad? One, it doesn’t work. Ever see a map of North Korea at night? It looks like a sheet of Light Bright paper with only one of the holes punched. Two, socialism is inherently authoritarian. The intrusive legislation conservatives and libertarians warn Americans about ad nauseam becomes a reality in socialistic eras. One example is price floors, which make it illegal to charge below a certain price for a good or service. A well known slice of historical trivia in conservative circles is the fact Leo Nebbia was arrested and fined during the Great Depression for selling milk for less than nine cents a quart. This is what happens when unity trumps liberty.
Some defend socialism by conflating it with “fairness,” which is not only inchoate, but wrong. The mere presence of income inequality signifies a society where people are rewarded differently for achieving different things. This isn’t a tragedy. If one person works their butt off, and finds themselves making six figures a year, while someone else doesn’t, and relies instead of the government to pay for their cell phones and video games (oh, and food and shelter), the former has a right to their higher economic status.
Even those who don’t “earn” their riches have a fairer claim to their inheritance than anyone else does. Donald Trump sacrificed his time on earth to accumulate enough wealth to ensure his children would live comfortably. Respecting Trump’s right to pass down his wealth to his family is fairer than the government’s prerogative to take it away and give it to people who haven’t been as successful. To demand that heirs and heiresses forfeit their fortunes because they are “unearned” is to demand that they equalize downward with the children of parents who were less wealthy, undermining mothers and fathers who’ve worked hard to give their children a better life than they had.
In certain instances, Americans have no problem allowing luck to be a part of the income-making process. State lotteries are such systems. No one who has ever purchased a Powerball ticket or sat at a slot machine has any room to complain about income inequality, when a cashier can potentially bridge the entire tax bracket simply by pulling a lever on a noisy mechanism. If it would be sadistic to allow someone to win a million dollars through blind luck, but then turn around and confiscate it to compensate everyone who didn’t win.
This doesn’t keep collectivists from marching towards their professed goal of economic equality. The website for the World Socialist Movement states that “Production under socialism would be directly and solely for use.” In other words, Corporations would only be able to produce (and consequently people would only be able to consume) what the state believes is necessary. The most glaring problem with this is that a governing authority would be assigned to dictate exactly what the people “need.” As anyone familiar with Freidrich Hayek knows, a centralized authority, divorced from localized knowledge, cannot possibly be sensitive to everyone’s demands. To correct this, the WSM suggests that democracy may be employed to decide what people “need,” but that would only expand the scope of the majority’s rule over the minority. What if 80% of the people decide that the other 20% doesn’t need more living space, or a side order of fries with that burger? What if a majority decides I don’t need air conditioning more than X hours a day in the middle of a hot, sticky summer? Totalitarian policy is no less suffocating coming from a mob than from a tyrant.
In contrast, Capitalism liberates us from the collective. It allows us to peacefully live as we wish, and to consume as much or as little as we can afford. But this is too unpredictable for the worrywart left. The end result of all this terrible freedom might be income inequality.
When reminded of socialism’s inherent aversion to liberty, some socialists, especially naïve college students, tell me that all work in a socialistic community would be done on a voluntary basis. This is the first thing I think about when I hear that socialism is unrealistic. How many people do you know would do their job for free? Even purportedly selfless teachers complain about their pay—imagine if they weren’t compensated at all!
A sense of duty gives hard work an admirable veneer, but it doesn’t overcome the plain fact that working 40 hours a week is not so much fun for most people they would do it out of the kindness of their heart. Humanity’s basic sense of fairness dictates that we should be compensated in some way for spending the bulk of our waking hours away from family, friends, and recreation. Even the world’s religions “bribe” us with the reward of going to heaven if we submit to God’s will instead of doing whatever feels good.
Another pro-socialist fallacy is the argument that communism is great in theory, just not realistic. Yet what’s so great about living in a society where everything you do, at least in economic terms, is evaluated on the standard of being for or against the collective? What’s so great about living in a culture where everything you do could potentially be rejected for not contributing to the public good? Who truly wishes to live in a place where your economic well-being is dictated by a faceless state? I have no desire to become part of a smiley-faced version of The Borg.
So does President Obama Advocate socialism? Not quite. While he’s definitively statist, and recites the tired poetry of social justice, he is not calling for the mass nationalization of industry.
Yet socialism’s aims have changed with the times. What most people who advocate socialism nowadays are pursuing aren’t pipe dreams about communes where currency is rendered irrelevant, but a system where the government takes pro-active measures (read: exerts political pressure on businesses) to make things “fair.” Again, as with “need,” “fair” is too subjective of a concept to guide just governance. In any system based on “fairness,” the spoils will go to the most articulate whiners, because they will be the ones who’ll concoct the most convincing sob stories.
Even if socialism is realized to its fullest extent, its underlying purpose of total equality can never be. If differences in income are eliminated, classes of people will form around beauty, presumed intellect or another factor susceptible to unfair distribution. Only in a nation without any diversity, where everyone is exactly the same, will it be possible to erase distinctions among people. In other words, to repeat Russell Kirk’s third canon of conservative thought, a civilized, classless society cannot exist.
I’m just scratching the surface here. If you want to know what socialism is really like, study the people who actually lived under it. Just as Americans deal with their least favorite leaders by making fun of them, citizens trapped in socialist states often cope with their oppression through sardonic humor. One of my favorite jokes, which I’ve taken straight from Radio Free Asia, goes like this:
An Englishman, a Frenchman, and a North Korean are visiting a museum. They come across a painting of Adam and Eve holding an apple in the Garden of Eden.
The Englishman remarks that “The man has something tasty and is eager to share it with the woman. Surely they must be English.”
The Frenchmen retorts, “I disagree. They are walking around naked, so they must be French.”
The North Korean says to all this, “they are obviously North Korean. They have no clothes to wear, barely have anything to eat, and they still think they’re in heaven!”
For some reason, I just remembered Obama’s inauguration.
Cross-posted at Modern Conservative