An ideology growing in popularity, socialism is promoted as an idea that has never really been tried. When pressed, proponents of the ideology will try and claim Denmark, Norway, Sweden and other Nordic nations as versions of socialism. Don’t tell those nations, though. They admit to having social welfare states, but otherwise regularly score higher on market freedom indexes than most other nations. When presented with self-acclaimed socialist nations, such as Venezuela, they will reply that it is not real socialism. Fair enough. They told us for decades that it was until the Venezuelan people began eating zoo animals.
I believe that words have meaning, and although there is a tendency to use words loosely, that is why so many balk at the idea. According to an expert definition:
Socialism is
1: any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods
2a: a system of society or group living in which there is no private property b: a system or condition of society in which the means of production are owned and controlled by the state
3: a stage of society in Marxist theory transitional between capitalism and communism and distinguished by unequal distribution of goods and pay according to work done
Merriam-Webster online
By defining words, we can see that Venezuela meets the criteria for socialism. Socialists don’t like to accept that mass impoverishment could be the result of their measures, so they mince words and claim they want a democratic socialism. This implies, to them, that if the majority want socialism, that socialism will succeed. At this point, I have to ask, by what means did every other socialist nation adopt the policies?
Perhaps there is a better argument available to identify how socialism can work, but wherever it has been implemented wholesale, by definition, it has ended in failure. The closest thing they have available to a success is Bolivia, which has a productive economy compared to the other socialist nations it has as neighbors, and the success is always couched in the rate of growth. This rate has been faster than neighboring nations coinciding with Bolivia’s recent move towards freedom market freedom. It parallels China’s greatest communist success, which was keeping communism out of their economy. As these nations allow for more free market policies and less intrusive regulations and cast aside their ideas of collective ownership, their nations have started to increase their standard of living as a result of increased production capacity.
It would seem that all of the real successful socialist nations have failed to continue their trajectory towards collective ownership. Opting instead for a system much more like the systems they impugn everywhere else.
The caveat is always this idea of democracy, though. There is a hope among these ideologues that merely granting majority support to their theory will make it correct. I’m not sure they understand that failed logic. It should come as no surprise that nearly every great advance known to society throughout history started almost primarily as a minority view. Not every minority view gains prominence, but a passionate few, using reason and evidence, brought once foreign ideas to the forefront of science, math, markets, industry and even politics. None of these revolutionary and innovative changes in our world were successful if they only convinced a majority to adopt them.
Does alcoholism hurt your body less merely by a factor of convincing all of your neighbors to also be alcoholics?
In terms of economic views, socialism is relatively new. Its problem is that the zealots who endorse it are without any evidence that it can work. They opt instead to invoke popularity as the sole arbiter and then convince large groups of people that they are victims in a class struggle. Who are the classes? It is a moving target. The classes are whatever convenient divide they can exploit to convince the person or the group to give up on reason and to passionately support the cause for equality, or its more dangerous and just as evil, equity.
They appeal to emotional biases in order to get you to embrace their agenda. They don’t appeal to reason or logic.
There is also a tendency for these same people to impugn the motives of capitalists while glorifying the motives of their collective thought leaders. They ignore the outcomes of both. They must. If their goals are to help the poor and the helpless, nothing has done more to lift them from their impoverishment than capitalism. Free market systems, by their outcome, produce in such abundance that everyone benefits. We might bemoan the fact that someone who has excess wealth might own numerous homes and has far too many cars to need them, but most of the poorest in our nation have roofs over their heads and can easily get transportation. They might lack some of the comforts the wealthy do, but for how long?
The nature of capitalism is to make these luxuries affordable and available. Quality in production improves the capacity to increase quality in the product. As more is produced, costs drop and the system grows more efficient over time. Eventually, the poorest can afford something that only the wealthy could afford mere decades prior.
Further illustrating their willingness to ignore data in order to promote their motives, they fail to see that even the wage gaps they claim exist as a structure of capitalist exploitation do not stand up in the face of scrutiny. They find themselves unable to grasp that in a capitalist economy, those living in poverty in one decade may rise to living as the poor the next decade, or that after another couple decades, those same people that started off in poverty may have risen to the upper middle class. They can’t grapple with the idea that most of the top 1% of income earners weren’t born earning hundreds of thousands annually. Most of them weren’t even born into families making that much.
Complicating things, is that in a world where the means of production are owned by everyone, who mandates how much of one thing is to be produced? Who decides what materials are best used for the product or where to best allocate resources? How many doctors do we need? How do we keep them trained and arriving where they are needed the most in order to best help everyone?
Socialists really have no idea. They will tie themselves in knots trying to explain how it could be done, but there is a factor already working within free economies which already allocates resources to their most prized use and distributes the resulting products where they are needed most. Capitalism utilizes the price system to accomplish this. As resources are increasingly utilized, their prices rise, and the result is that those who require them less will find alternatives or innovate ways to recycle, reuse, or reduce the use of the materials in their respective industries. This is the same for everything. Not only does capitalism come complete with this magical device which provides this signal to every consumer, producer and retailer involved, but nobody has to control it for it to work.
Fact is, that attempts to control the prices through measures outside of individual ownership are strictly anti-capitalist. Every fault of capitalism identified by these self-acclaimed socialists boils down to some sort of collective effort to control prices by subsidy, tax, regulation or other measure. These restrictions, by definition, are antithetical to a free market. They stifle innovation and they siphon resources to inefficient market actors at the expense of those more efficient.
We are fortunate that in the United States, a market still does exist. It is no longer a free market. It is rife with regulatory burdens and large scale subsidies creating massive inefficiencies. These inefficiencies get exposed occasionally, when an asset bubble pops and the economy enters a recession, but our current system, complete with political privileges, bails out the least efficient of the industry titans. A free market would allow them to fail and have to liquidate their remaining valuable assets at pennies on the dollar in bankruptcy. Allowing for the appropriate allocation of their resources to better and more efficient actors.
Socialism wants to blame those functions on capitalism, but there seems to be a gap presenting itself between their hopes and the realities. They can’t vote for a highly regulated economy to be labeled free and expect it to also be true. They can’t vote for more regulations and honestly have any trust that they can improve the efficiency of the markets.
No promises of equality will make this lie true.
They know how to argue, though. They won’t win with facts, because the facts disagree with them. They will win with votes, because voters fall victim to the lies that they are fed. In the end, we all will lose.
Socialism veiled as anything else is still socialism. It is a failed ideology. They have tried to wrap it up in another failed ideology…democracy.
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