Commentary
Fifty-some years ago, I stood where you stand today. I passionately wanted to help the poor—indeed, to eliminate so far as possible the blight of human poverty. Poverty seemed unnecessarily cruel and morally indefensible in a world where there’s so much affluence. How could the enormous gap between the haves and the have-nots possibly be justified? I was a socialist.
Over the past half-century, my abhorrence of poverty hasn’t waned. However, I quit being a socialist long ago. It wasn’t because my values and goals changed, but because my understanding of how best to achieve the worthy goal of defeating poverty has evolved. Caring about a problem is the easy part. The harder part is to find the best way to solve the problem.
With that in mind, I would like to share with you a few thoughts that every socialist needs to confront. (By “socialist,” I mean everyone from a literal, dictionary-definition socialist who wants the government to own all the means of production to people who don’t go that far but want the government to reorganize production and redistribute wealth to varying extents.)
Point No. 1: If you’re going to be a socialist in practice and not just in theory, the first thing you need to do is to realize that you can’t believe in
egalitarianism and also believe in socialism. If you’re going to rearrange the economy in your striving for greater economic equality, you’re going to have to abandon any notion of political equality. As a socialist leader or planner, you need to be more powerful than your fellow citizens; you need to have power over them in order to compel and implement the changes that you want.
In other words, you have to be elitist—to see yourself as politically superior to your countrymen. You have to be willing to let your desired end of a fairer world justify your means of wielding power over others.
Point No. 2: Related to the first point, you must reject a truly democratic ethos. Like Marx and Lenin, you recognize
democracy as a rhetorical fig leaf and a useful device for attaining power. Once you and your fellow socialists have won the democratic struggle for power at the ballot box, you need to jettison notions that “the people” rule. Practically speaking, there’s no way that a majority of the people can agree on every aspect of the socialist plan for a more just society; it’s inevitable—a logistical imperative—that a small elite emerges to craft and implement the plan.
Point No. 3: How much do you admire bureaucracies? Surely you have scorned the Pentagon and several lesser bureaucracies for waste, inefficiency, incompetence, obnoxious obtrusiveness, and so forth. But have you ever stopped to consider that
socialism in practice is a system of total bureaucracy? How do you propose to remedy the defects of bureaucracy?
Point No. 4: The knowledge problem. As a socialist, you have a mental concept of economic and social arrangements that are fairer, more benign, and more humane than the status quo. Indeed, millions of us before you have found it easy to sit in our classrooms or studies and construct a better world in our minds. You reject free-market capitalism because some people produce, and therefore earn, much more wealth than others, and because capitalism, although having reduced poverty tremendously, hasn’t achieved the ideal goal of eliminating poverty entirely. (This is the problem, common to many Americans today, of
letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.)
But does any socialist or group of socialists know enough to intelligently plan and organize production to meet the needs of the masses of people?
Economic theory has already demonstrated (thank you, Ludwig von Mises) that by trampling property rights, socialism prevents the discovery of economically rational prices and, therefore, renders economic calculation (the ability to determine whether an enterprise is adding value or destroying it) impossible—the inevitable outcome being tragically unnecessary impoverishment (see Venezuela).
Under capitalism, entrepreneurs compete to best serve the needs and wants of the people, as communicated to them through the economic language of market-based prices. Socialist planners, lacking such prices, never can know what the millions of Joe and Mary Lunchbuckets of society want as well as Joe and Mary know. Socialist planners may be saints and geniuses, but they can’t know what they need to know to coordinate production in a way that improves standards of living.
Point No. 5: The lust for power problem. The early American statesman Daniel Webster made an astute observation about human nature: “There are men in all ages [and now women, too, of course] who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.” Does this describe you?
Are you so convinced of your own intellectual and moral superiority that you feel justified in exercising power over your fellow humans to compel them to live according to your plan—your notions of right and wrong, your particular concept of how society should be ordered? Did you ever consider that this is a rationale embraced by sociopaths? In extreme cases, this conceit has led to the deadly socialism practiced by the likes of Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Pol Pot.
Point #6: The best way to make the world a better place. Aldous Huxley, author of the visionary dystopic “Brave New World,” once said, “There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.”
Socialism is focused on changing others. It involves the presumption (a self-serving delusion, actually) that the only way the world can be improved is if I can find a way to compel others to do what I think they should do. Socialism embraces the gloomy and fallacious
zero-sum view of life—the awful notion that you have to diminish the welfare of some citizens in order to uplift others.
In this Christmas season, let me appeal to the venerable wisdom of the Bible. The Old Testament law teaches us to not do bad things to others. The New Testament gospel urges us to do good things for others when it’s in our power to do so. Socialism warps the Biblical ethos. It would hurt some in the name of helping others, but even the helping of others is a counterfeit, bogus charity, because it means making others provide help rather than providing it yourself. (See the
Good Samaritan parable to understand Biblical charity.) You don’t get bonus points for getting into heaven by compelling others to support good works; the key issue is: What are you giving?
You can do your part in improving our country and our world by becoming an entrepreneur and starting a business that meets a need of consumers while providing jobs that sustain the livelihood of employees. This is incremental progress, but very real. Socialism promises giant leaps of progress, but those promises are ephemeral and elusive. Choose wisely, young socialists.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
