Tag Archives: Socialism

Bernie Sanders Wants To Deal… Your Property

18 Sunday Oct 2015

Posted by in Socialism, The Road To Serfdom

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Bernie Sanders is very sincere in his beliefs, and yet he is profoundly ignorant regarding economic growth in the U.S. and the futility of socialism as form of economic organization. Chelsea German, at the HumanProgress blog, presents some simple facts that contradict a few of the Senator’s favorite assertions. In “Senator Sanders and the Fixed Pie Fallacy“, German quotes a line that Sanders has been using for at least 41 years: “The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.” Granted, his first utterance of that expression might have been in a recession, but aside from those relatively brief episodes, he’s been wrong for the duration. Apparently, Sanders cannot fathom the widespread gains made possible by capitalism and economic growth. Only a “fixed pie” (or worse) would necessarily imply that gains must come at the expense of others, as he seems to believe. (H.T. to Ken DeVaughn on the brilliant gif above.)

One chart in German’s post shows that after-tax income grew in every quintile of the U.S. income distribution from 1979 (pre-recession) to 2010 (post-recession). The chart is taken from CBO data used by Gary Burtless in a piece published by Brookings. Sanders should have a look. However, it’s also important to note that people generally don’t remain in the same strata of the distribution over time. A second chart, from Angus Deaton’s “The Great Escape“, shows that U.S. poverty rates have generally declined over time. Finally, German shows that with a few interruption, GDP has grown over time. All of these facts might be something of a surprise to Sanders. German quotes the great Deirdre McCloskey:

“The rich got richer, true. But millions more have gas heating, cars, smallpox vaccinations, indoor plumbing, cheap travel, rights for women, lower child mortality, adequate nutrition, taller bodies, doubled life expectancy, schooling for their kids, newspapers, a vote, a shot at university, and respect.“

Sanders showcases his lack of familiarity with economic principles almost every time he opens his mouth, or his Twitter account. He recently opined that rates of interest on student loans should be lower than rates on loans for autos and mortgages. Of course, both auto loans and mortgages are secured by valuable collateral and have much lower default rates. It’s a good thing for Sanders that he didn’t pursue a career in lending.

Recently, Hillary Clinton has been unable to restrain herself from chasing Sanders off the rhetorical cliff. Clinton is offering the public lots of “free stuff“, like Sanders, in a transparent attempt to buy votes with promises of future largess. Neither candidate has offered a credible plan for funding their promises. Higher taxes on “Wall Street” and other top earners are the supposed answer, but those measures would be woefully inadequate. Look out, middle class!

By the way, another recent Brookings study shows that increasing the top marginal income tax rate, a policy of which Sanders would approve, would do little to reduce the degree of income inequality.

Of course, Sanders seems just as unfamiliar with the great failures of socialism over the past century as he is with the successes of capitalism in eliminating poverty. He thinks the U.S. should adopt the socialist policies in Scandanavia, but the truth is that socialism has served to inhibit the continued success of capitalism in those countries (also see here). Perhaps that’s why Denmark is scaling back its redistributionist policies.

The Left, including Bernie Sanders, are burdened by a naive utopianism so powerful that they can rationalize the confiscation of private property to support their personal preferences and those of the political class. The aristocratic Left, like Hillary, differ only in the power they hold to influence policy. Perhaps a few suffer from a strong sense of guilt regarding their own circumstances. No, not Hillary. But both Bernie and Hillary are guilty of gross social and economic misdiagnosis. Politicians, heal thyselves!

Bernie Sanders: Just a Regular Looter

17 Thursday Sep 2015

Posted by in Free markets, Poverty, Socialism

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Economic illiteracy is getting to be a central theme in the early stages of the 2016 presidential race. The two candidates with whom the public and media are most fascinated at the moment are Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. Both are veritable case studies in delusional economic reasoning. I have already devoted two posts to Trump, the current frontrunner for the Republican nomination (both posts appear at the link in reverse order). At the time of the second of those posts, I recall hoping desperately that someone or something would rescue my blog from him. I have managed, since then, to resist devoting more attention to his campaign. In this post, I’ll focus on Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, currently the top rival to Hillary Clinton for the Democrat nomination.

It’s ironic that Sanders, a self-proclaimed socialist, shares several areas of acute economic illiteracy with Donald Trump. There is a strong similarity between Sanders and Trump on foreign trade (and both candidates are pro-Second Amendment). Like Trump, Sanders demonstrates no understanding of the reasons for trade, as Kevin Williamson notes:

“The incessant reliance on xenophobic (and largely untrue) tropes holding that the current economic woes of the United States are the result of scheming foreigners, especially the wicked Chinese, “stealing our jobs” and victimizing his class allies…. He describes the normalization of trade relations with China as “catastrophic” — Sanders and Jesse Helms both voted against the Clinton-backed China-trade legislation — and heaps scorn on every other trade-liberalization pact. That economic interactions with foreigners are inherently hurtful and exploitative is central to his view of how the world works.“

Sanders lacks an understanding of trade’s real function: allowing consumers and businesses to freely engage in mutually beneficial exchanges with partners abroad, and vice versa. Trade thereby allows our total consumption and standard of living to expand. It is not based on “beating” your partners, as Sanders imagines. It is cooperative behavior.

Opposition to free trade nearly always boils down to one thing: avoiding competition. That goes for businesses seeking to protect or gain some degree of monopoly power and for unions wishing to keep wages, benefits and work rules elevated above levels that can otherwise be justified by productivity. The result is that consumers pay higher prices, have access to fewer goods and less variety, and have a lower standard of living. It is no accident that trade wars deepened the severity of the Great Depression domestically and globally. But Sanders, like Trump, has failed to learn from the historical record.

Another area of Sanders’ deep economic ignorance is his position on wage controls. He advocates a mandatory $15 federal minimum wage with no recognition of the potential damage of such a change. Kevin Williamson has this to say:

“Prices [and wages] in markets are not arbitrary — they are reflections of how real people actually value certain goods and services in the real world. Arbitrarily changing the dollar numbers attached to those preferences does not change the underlying reality any more than trimming Cleveland off a map of the United States actually makes Cleveland disappear.“

The minimum wage was the subject of a recent post on Sacred Cow Chips. A higher minimum is a favorite policy of well-meaning leftists and social justice warriors, but they fail to address the realities that the least-skilled suffer adverse employment effects, that a higher minimum wage hastens the substitution of capital for unskilled labor, and that the policy often benefits non-primary workers from middle and upper-income households. It’s a lousy way to help the impoverished. Moreover, minimum wages were originally conceived as a tool of racial exclusion and in all likelihood still act that way. Most of the research supporting minimum wage increases focuses on short-run effects or on sectors that are less capital-intensive. Findings about long-run effects are much more negative (see here, too). It’s a given that Sanders understands none of this.

Other elements of Sanders’ platform are essentially freebies for all: universal health care (see the first link from this Bing search), free college tuition for all, and expanded social security benefits. And of course there is a promise to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure, taking full advantage of the myth that our infrastructure is so decrepit that it must be replaced now. All of these ideas are costly, to say the least, and there is nothing adequate in Sanders’ platform to pay for them. He’ll raise taxes on the 1%, he says. Just watch the capital fly away. Ed Krayewski of Reason discusses Sander’s rich promises and the lack of resources to pay for them in “Bernie Sanders, the 18 Trillion Dollar Man“:

“The Wall Street Journal spoke with an economist at the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, who acknowledged taxes would have to go up for the middle class too to pay for Sanders programs.“

Middle class tax hikes would undoubtedly be accompanied by a lot more public debt, and ultimately inflation. Freebies for whom? As Krayewski says, Sanders “wants taxpayers to ‘feel the Bern’“.

In fairness, Sanders suggests that some of the needed revenue can be diverted from military spending. Possibly, but the military budget has already been reduced significantly, and it is not clear that much fat remains for Sanders to cut. There will certainly be demands for greater military spending given the significant threats we are likely to face from rogue states.

Sanders’ promise to transform our energy system is another one that will come with high costs. What Sanders imagines is a widespread fallacy that green energy can be produced at little cost. However, we know that renewables carry relatively high distributed costs and their contributions to load are intermittent, requiring base load backup from more traditional sources like fossil fuels or nuclear energy. Like President Obama, Sanders would impose new costs on fossil fuels, but the poor will suffer the most without offsetting assistance. And subsidies are also required to incent greater adoption of expensive alternatives like home solar and electric vehicles. Sanders would authorize this massive diversion of resources for the purpose of mitigating a risk based on carbon-forcing climate models with consistent track records of poor accuracy.

If free speech is your hot button, then Sanders’ promise to “overturn” Citizen’s United won’t make you happy. Why should an association of individuals, like a union or a corporation, be denied the right to use pooled resources for the purpose of expressing views that are important to their mission? Sanders is proposing an outright abridgment of liberty. From the first Kevin Williamson link above:

“… criminalizing things is very much on Bernie’s agenda, beginning with the criminalization of political dissent. At every event he swears to introduce a constitutional amendment reversing Supreme Court decisions that affirmed the free-speech protections of people and organizations filming documentaries, organizing Web campaigns, and airing television commercials in the hopes of influencing elections or public attitudes toward public issues.“

It is hard to take issue with Sanders’ call for an end to police brutality without a clear sense of his attitude toward law enforcement. I believe all fair-minded people wish for zero police brutality, but critics often minimize the difficulty of police work. No doubt there are gray areas in the practice of law enforcement; some police officers take their powers too far, which cannot be condoned. If institutional reforms can help, so much the better. But the police must be given the latitude to do a difficult job without fear of unreasonable legal reprisal.

On a related note, Sanders advocates an end to the war on drugs, a reform that I wholeheartedly support. Go you Bernie!

Finally, here is a more general illustration of Bernie Sanders’ backward views on economics. It is a Sanders quote I repeat from the second Kevin Willamson link above:

“You don’t necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry in this country. I don’t think the media appreciates the kind of stress that ordinary Americans are working on.“

Sanders’ complaint about the plethora of choices in consumer goods fails to recognize that they reflect real differences in consumer preferences, as well as an economy dynamic enough to provide for those preferences. Far from causing hunger and poverty, that dynamism has lifted standards of living over the years across the entire income distribution, even among the lowest income groups, to levels that would astonish our forebears. And it created the wealth that enables our society to make substantial transfers of resources to low income groups. Unfortunately, those very transfer programs are rife with incentives that encourage continued dependency. Other government interventions such as the minimum wage have diminished opportunities for work for individuals with little experience and skills. Meanwhile, regulation and high business and personal taxes undermine the continued growth and dynamism of the economy that could otherwise lift more families out of dependency. Sanders would do better to study the history of socialism in practice, and to look in his own socialist mirror to identify the reasons for persistently high levels of poverty.

Will ET Be a Socialist?

19 Wednesday Aug 2015

Posted by in Capitalism, Socialism, Space Travel

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If we are ever visited or contacted by agents from an extraterrestrial civilization, what kind of society will they come from? The issue is given scant attention, if any, in discussions of extraterrestrial life, at least according to this interesting piece in The Freeman by B.K. Marcus. The popular view, and that of many scientists, seems to be that the alien society will be dominated by an authoritarian central government. Must that be the case? Marcus notes the negative views taken by such scientific authorities as Neil deGrasse Tyson toward laissez faire capitalism, and even Carl Sagan “… could only imagine science funded by government.” Of course, Tyson and Sagan cannot be regarded as authorities on economic affairs. However, I admit that I have fallen into the same trap regarding extraterrestrial visitors: that they will come from a socialist society with strong central command. On reflection, like Marcus, I do not think this view is justified.

One explanation for the default view that extraterrestrial visitors will be socialists is that people uncritically accept the notion that an advanced society is a planned society.  This runs counter to mankind’s experience over the past few centuries: individual freedom, unfettered trade, capitalism and a spontaneous social order have created wealth and advancement beyond the wildest dreams of earlier monarchs. Anyone with a passing familiarity with data on world economic growth, or with F.A. Hayek, should know this, but it Is often overlooked. Central planners cannot know the infinitely detailed and dynamic information on technologies, resource availability, costs and preferences needed to plan a society with anything close to the success of one arranged through the voluntary cooperation of individual actors.

Many of us have a strong memory of government domination of space exploration, so we tend to think of such efforts as the natural province of government. Private contractors were heavily involved in those efforts, but the funding and high-level management of space missions (NASA in the U.S.) was dominated by government. Today, private space exploration is a growth industry, and it is likely that some of the greatest innovations and future space endeavors will originate in the private sector.

Another explanation for the popular view is the daunting social challenges that would be faced by crews in interstellar travel (IST). Given a relatively short life span, a colonizing mission would have to involve families and perhaps take multiple generations to reach its destination. There is a view that the mini-society on such a ship would require a command and control structure. Perhaps, but private property rights and a certain level of democratization would be advantageous. In any case, that carries no implication about the society on the home planet nor the eventual structure of a colony.

A better rationale for the default view of socialist ETs involves a public goods argument. The earth and mankind face infrequent but potentially catastrophic hazards, such as rogue asteroids and regions of strong radiation as the sun orbits the center of the Milky Way galaxy. These risks are shared, which implies that technological efforts to avert such hazards, or to perpetuate mankind by colonizing other worlds, are pure public goods. That means government has a classic role in providing for such efforts, as long as the expected benefits outweigh the costs. The standard production tradeoff discussed in introductory economics classes is “guns versus butter”, or national defense (a pure public good) versus private consumption. IST by an alien civilization could well require such a massive diversion of resources to the public sector that only an economically dominant central government could manage it. Or so it might seem.

As already noted, private entrepreneurs have debunked the presumed necessity that government must dominate space exploration. In fact, Elon Musk and his company SpaceX hope to colonize Mars. His motives sound altruistic, and in some sense the project sounds like the private provision of a public good. Here is an interpretation by Tim Urban quoted at the link (where I have inserted a substitute for the small time-scale analog used by the author):

“Now—if you owned a hard drive with an extraordinarily important Excel doc on it, and you knew that the hard drive pretty reliably tended to crash [from time to time] … what’s the very obvious thing you’d do?
You’d copy the document onto a second hard drive.
That’s why Elon Musk wants to put a million people on Mars.”

Musk has other incentives, however. The technology needed to colonize Mars will also pay handsome dividends in space mining applications. Moreover, if they are successful, there will come a time when Mars is a destination commanding a fare. Granted, this is not IST, but as technology advances through inter-planetary travel and colonization, there is a strong likelihood that future Elon Musks will be involved in the first steps outside of our solar system.

While SpaceX has raised its capital from private sources, it receives significant revenue from government contracts, so there is a level of dependence on public space initiatives. However, the argument made by Marcus at the first link above, that IST by ETs is less likely (or impossible) if they live under a socialist regime, is not based primarily on recent experience with private entrepreneurial efforts like Musk’s. Instead, it has to do with the inability of socialist regimes to generate wealth, especially the massive wealth necessary to accomplish IST.

Discussions of ETs (or the lack thereof) often center around a question known as the  Fermi Paradox, after the physicist Enrico Fermi. He basically asked: if the billions and billions of star systems, even in our own galaxy, are likely to harbor a respectable number of advanced civilizations, where are they? Why haven’t we heard from them? My friend John Crawford objects that this is no paradox at all, given the vastness of space and the difficulty and likely expense of IST. There may be advanced civilizations in the cosmos that simply have not been able to tackle the problem, at least beyond their own stellar neighborhood. No doubt about it, IST is hard!

I have argued to Crawford that there should be civilizations covering a wide range of development at any point in time. In only the past hundred years, humans have increased the speed at which they travel from less than 50 miles per hour (mph) to at least 9,600 mph. The speed of light is approximately 270,000 times faster that that! At our current top speed, it would take almost 50% longer to reach our nearest neighboring star, Alpha Centauri, than the entire span of human existence to-date. With that kind of limitation, there is no paradox at all! But I would not be surprised if, over the next 1,000 years, advances in propulsion technology bring our top speed to within one-tenth of the speed of light, and perhaps much more, making IST a more reasonable proposition, at least in our “neighborhood”. There may be civilizations that have already done so.

Answers to the Fermi Paradox often involve a concept called the Great Filter. This excellent HuffPo article by Tim Urban on the Fermi Paradox provides a good survey of theories on the Great Filter. The idea is that there are significant factors that prevent civilizations from advancing beyond certain points. Some of these are of natural origin, such as asteroids and radiation exposure. Others might be self-inflicted, such as a thermonuclear catastrophe or some other kind of technology gone bad. Some have suggested that the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland could be a major hazard to our existence, though physicists insist otherwise. Another example is the singularity, when artificial intelligence overtakes human intelligence, creating a possibility that evil machines will do us in. The point of these examples is that some sudden or gradual development could prevent a civilization from surviving indefinitely. These kinds of filters provide an explanation for the Fermi Paradox.

More broadly, there could be less cataclysmic impediments to development that prevent a society from ever reaching an advanced stage. These would also qualify as filters of a sort. Perhaps the smart ETs lack, or failed to evolve, certain physical characteristics that are crucial for advancement or IST. Or their home planet might be light on certain kinds of resources. Or perhaps an inferior form of social organization has limited development, with inadequate wealth creation and technologies to transcend the physical limitations imposed by their world. On a smaller than planetary scale, we have witnessed such an impediment in action many times over: socialism. The inefficiencies of central planning place limits on economic growth, and while high authorities might dictate a massive dedication of resources toward science, technology and capital-intensive space initiatives, the shift away from personal consumption would come at a greater and greater cost. The end game may involve a collapse of production and a primitive existence. So the effort may be unsustainable and could lead to social upheaval; a more enlightened regime would attempt to move the society toward a more benign allocation of resources. Whether they can ever accomplish IST is at least contingent on their ability to create wealth.

Socialism is a filter on the advancement of societies. ETs capable of interstellar travel could not be spawned by a society dominated by socialism and central planning. While government might play a significant role in a successful ET civilization, one capable of IST, only a heavy reliance on free-market capitalism can improve the odds of advancing beyond a certain primitive state. Capitalism is a relatively easy ticket to the wealth required for an advanced and durable civilization, and conceivably to the reaches of the firmament.

Unfortunately, there is absolutely no guarantee that capitalistic ETs will be friendly  toward competing species, or that they will respect our property rights. They might be big, smart cats and find us mouse-like and quite tasty. Their children might make us perform circuses, like fleas. In any case, if ETs get this far, it’s probably because they want our world and our resources. My friend Crawford says that they won’t get here in any case. He believes that the difficulty of IST will force them to focus on their own neighborhood. Maybe, but on long enough time scales, who knows?

I would add a caveat to conclusions about the strength of the filters discussed above. A capitalistic society might reach a point at which it could send artificially intelligent, self-replicating machines into space to harvest resources. Those machines might well survive beyond the end of the civilization that created them. Conceivably, those machines could act autonomously or they could take coordinated action. But we haven’t heard from them either!

For a little more reading, here is SETI‘s description of the Fermi Paradox, and here is a post from io9 on the Great Filter.

Don’t Call Leftists “Liberal”; They’re Not!

29 Wednesday Jul 2015

Posted by in Liberty

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Lenin_Got_Rope_Capitalists

Nor are statists, collectivists and socialists, but I repeat myself. The simple plea above is made by Daniel Klein in an essay appearing in the Intercollegiate Review and in Modern Age. He asserts that libertarians (and conservatives) fall into a semantic trap when they use the term as a pejorative for leftists. I have touched on the mangled, modern usage of “liberalism” several times on Sacred Cow Chips, but Klein brings some interesting empiricism into consideration and makes several points worth emphasizing.

First, Klein traces the historical record of appearances of certain words related to liberalism in published literature using the “n-gram viewer” on Google. He shows that the political use of “liberal” began around 1770. For the next 110 years, liberalism referred to a philosophy and policies associated with small government and individual autonomy. In the U.S., however, the term began to be co-opted by the political left in the late 1800s. Around the turn of the twentieth century, references to “New Liberalism” and “Old Liberalism” became more frequent. So the term was subverted in that time frame, a decade or two before the term “left-wing” came into use.

“The literature of the so-called New Liberals declaimed openly against individual liberty and in favor of state collectivism and socialistic reform.“

Today, the association of “liberalism” with the left is confined mostly to the U.S. and Canada:

“…when we step outside North America, we see that, by and large, liberal still means liberal (in the UK, usage is in-between). …

Where liberal still means liberal, such as in Europe and Latin America, leftists have no reluctance in calling their imaginary bogeyman ‘neoliberalism.’“

By way of suggestion, Klein reviews a few alternative labels for the left. In doing so, he notes that in general, the left supports the “governmentalization of social affairs”. For that reason, one of my favorite labels is “statism”. Oddly, Klein never mentions this as a possibility. (Klein concedes that the left supports liberty on a few issues, which happen to be issues upon which most libertarians are in agreement.) He does refer to the old standby “collectivists” in passing.

Klein likes the label “Progressivism” for the left, despite the positive associations some might make with that term. He argues with some merit that progressivism implies activist, goal-directed policy, as opposed to non-intervention and the spontaneous social order favored by true liberals.

“That collectivists should join together for what they imagine to be progress is perfectly fitting. For them the term progressive is suitable. By contrast, conservatives and libertarians look to, not progress, but improvement. …

Another fitting term for leftism is social democracy, which is standard in Europe. Social democracy is a compromise between democratic socialism and a tepid liberalism. The socialistic penchant is foremost, but a vacillating liberalism gnaws at the social democrat’s conscience.”

I fully agree with Klein that we should never refer to leftists as liberals. They are completely undeserving of the description, and doing so concedes a glaringly false premise. Every leftist I know advocates the increasing governmentalization of social affairs and a naive acceptance of an impossible proposition: that government can ever possess the detailed knowledge necessary to successfully regulate individual actors from above. And leftists are foolishly willing to place faith in the benevolence and wisdom of political agents and central controllers. Klein mentions a recent editorial by Kevin Williamson in National Review:

“Williamson ends the piece by quoting two leftist authors writing in The Nation, one decrying ‘unbridled individualism,’ the other ‘unfettered capitalism.’ Williamson concludes: ‘A ‘liberalism’ that is chiefly concerned with the many clever uses of bridles and fetters does not deserve the name. It never has.’”

Francis’ Statist Vision Not Shared By Venezuelan Clergy

16 Friday Jan 2015

Posted by in The Road To Serfdom

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Some people lament our tolerance in the U.S. for “religious crazies.” Of course, these misgivings might reflect a certain view that religious people are crazy to begin with, as well as an outright hostility to constitutional protections of religious freedom. Do they mean that religious speech should not be protected? That one’s religious beliefs should not inform their political views? That religious freedom should not exempt anyone from rules imposed by government (the dispute in King vs. Burwell)? These possibilities cover a lot of ground, but none of them stands up to scrutiny in a free and liberal society. In fact, the apparent resentment of the Left toward “religious crazies” largely misses the point: the very expansion of government activity, in kind, degree and complexity, often brings the state into conflict with religious imperatives. And regardless of one’s stance on the taxation of religious activity, exemptions necessarily become more controversial in the sort of high-tax environment needed to fund big government.

But it is not just the secular Left that fails to recognize the inherent conflict between big government and religious liberty. Pope Francis himself seems oblivious to the dangerous implications of big government for religious freedom. His apostolic exhortation for greater reliance on the state to care for the poor simultaneously embraces socialism and condemns capitalism. I take no issue in principle with the provision of a social safety net, but the Pope should be more results-oriented in assessing different forms of social organization and their impacts on poverty. Big government typically fails to achieve the kinds of humane objectives usually espoused by the Left. The sad “road to serfdom” has played out many times in the past. In fact, in an apparent rebuff, Pope Francis’ Venezuelan Archbishops just issued a strong condemnation of socialist solutions to poverty. From Investors.com:

“The Venezuelan archbishops make the useful observation that if capitalist economies have problems, socialist alternatives are far worse for the poor and needy. Could it be the pope’s Latin American colleagues on the ground in the cesspool of communism are the ones who can get through to the holy father on economics?”

The Pope would do well to listen to his Venezuelan flock or to this great economic thinker, Thomas Sowell, who emphasizes the inability of government to craft solutions that “do no harm.”

Apart from lousy economic results, basic freedoms are seldom immune to compromise under the grip of big government. These reports from China should give the pontiff pause. The Chinese Communist Party is said to feel “threatened” by the growth of Chinese Christianity, and the government is cracking down, dismantling religious symbols and even destroying some churches. Similar outcomes have followed authoritarian governments many times in the past, and of course this isn’t the first crackdown on “religious crazies” under Chinese communism. No one should be surprised. Capitalism, with its miracle of market self-regulation, is the only economic system that is truly consistent with freedom and diversity of religion.

Labels For The Authoritarian Left

08 Monday Dec 2014

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Who said this? “I have put into practice what these peddlers and pen pushers have timidly begun … the whole of National Socialism [was] based on Marx.” And this? “What Marxism, Leninism and Stalinism failed to accomplish, we shall be in a position to achieve.” And this? “How, as a socialist, can you not be an anti-Semite?”

You probably know or can guess that it was none other than Adolf Hitler. But if you persist in thinking that the National Socialist German Workers’ Party was not really, truly a party of socialists, you are wrong. Daniel Hannan discusses the connection at length in “Leftists become incandescent when reminded of the socialist roots of Nazism.” Before you accuse Hannan (or me) of violating Godwin’s Law, read his piece. He’s simply noting an historical fact. He’s most sensitive about use of the term “right-wing” as a synonym for “authoritarian,” but in fact it may be authoritarian along some dimensions.

Still, it shouldn’t be much of a surprise to learn that the authoritarian Nazi regime was packed with socialists. Socialism is a philosophy based on the preeminence of society over the individual, emphasizing public provision of goods and services, and control (if not ownership) of the means of production. In such a regime, central authority must supplant decentralized decision-making to a significant extent. The word “authoritarian” is fitting. From Hannan:

“In fact, authoritarianism was the common feature of socialists of both National and Leninist varieties, who rushed to stick each other in prison camps or before firing squads. Each faction loathed the other as heretical, but both scorned free-market individualists as beyond redemption. …

Authoritarianism – or, to give it a less loaded name, the belief that state compulsion is justified in pursuit of a higher goal, such as scientific progress or greater equality – was traditionally a characteristic of the social democrats as much as of the revolutionaries.”

The Italian etymology of “fascism”, implying the strength of a “bundle” relative to individual pieces, also suggests the socialist roots of the totalitarian regimes in Nazi Germany and in Italy under Mussolini. Left-wing fascists or right-wing socialists? Take your pick. In a strong sense, the labels applied today make no sense, including the modern misuse of the term “liberal” to describe a preference for a strong central government. Perhaps labels are unavoidable, but words usually have meaning apart from the latest political usage. Unfortunately, distorting or co-opting words for political purposes has a long and dishonorable tradition.

Collectivists Need Police Power To Tread On You

26 Saturday Jul 2014

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Most people have no trouble understanding that increasing government control imperils individual freedoms, including freedom of expression. Sandy Ikeda discusses this linkage in “Dissent Under Socialism,” which inevitably means suppression and oppression.

First, to the degree that the State undertakes central planning of the resources it controls it can’t allow any person to interfere with or oppose the plan. Or, as Hayek puts it, “If the state is precisely to foresee the incidence of its actions, it means that it can leave those affected no choice.”

Second, the more resources the State controls, the wider the scope and more detailed its planning necessarily becomes so that delay in any part of the system becomes intolerable. There is little room for unresponsiveness, let alone dissent.

Statists and radical egalitarians harbor a naive belief that their goals for society, and for “social justice,” can be achieved by collective action. That belief is naive on several levels. In practical terms, government is incapable of achieving complex social goals, and it will botch the effort. Even more ominous is that police power must always stand behind the effort. That police power will be brought to bear on a wider range of issues seems to surprise collectivists, as illustrated by the following quote used by Ikeda:

“Fascist states stop people demonstrating against wars—it is beyond belief that French Socialists are following their example.”

Really not too surprising.

Be Strong Comrades: Loot ‘Em And Do It Fast

26 Wednesday Mar 2014

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Read the words of an intellectual founder of so-called “market socialism.” They are brutal, the words of a tyrant masquerading as a man of “courage” and conscience. In Socialism Was Born Bad: The Case of Oskar Lange, Bryan Caplan offers these illuminating quotes along with this parting observation: 

“At least Lenin was honest enough to call his policy revolutionary ‘terror.’ But it’s just two perspectives on the same policies. For Lange – like the other founding fathers of socialism – courage is the courage to practice terror.”