Category: Socialism

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Why and How Genuine Socialism has Disappeared

Paul Dowling has referred to socialism as: “government-Induced slavery in the name of the general welfare.”* After a couple decades of socialist indoctrination, an apparent majority of American students from their K12 days through the university have now come to endorse and support what Dowling refers to as “government-induced slavery.” They think of themselves as socialists. Thus there are now more socialists in the world and in the United States. Interestingly, however, there is no longer any real socialism in the world. My book, Socialism, reviews a hundred years of European history in demonstrating why and how we now have many socialists, but no socialism!

*Paul Dowling, “What Do Democrats & Republicans Believe, & Just What Is a Free Republic All About?” http://eaglerising.com/47186/what-do-democrats-republicans-believe-just-what-is-a-free-republic-all-about/ Eagle Rising, 9/15/2017.

Dowling’s point is that socialist thinking has made government over-reach seem natural in political life today.  There has always been a place for the government to provide public services, i.e., those services such as national defense, state highways and infrastructure, police and fire services, etc., but a graduated income tax for the purpose of income redistribution and the institution of the welfare state under Lyndon Johnson provide political justification for the pursuit of socialist policies that have become ever more popular in the absence of real socialism. This has enabled the promotion of “freedom-killing socialist beliefs by many in government, media, and academia.”

Once, socialism was a term for an economic system that:

1) demanded the nationalization of industry.  All business was to be owned and controlled by the government. Socialism also

2) insisted that all economic activity be based on a governmentally-designed and -directed economic plan; it also

3) mandated governmentally-controlled and -directed industrial regulation through a large, omnipresent bureaucracy. When these economic policies and strategies failed, the system simply

4) diverted its focus to social policies.  Socialists have long enjoyed threatening and attacking the established, culture-based traditions that had been the social glue of nations for centuries.  Originally, in the early socialist years of the Marxian era, social traditions such as marriage were under attack.

Traditional social policies were considered the creations of and glue for bourgeois society. The view was that the “haves” of society had made the social rules and imposed them on the “have nots.”  To “expropriate the expropriators” it was important for the socialists to destroy the old traditions and build new ones for the new order.

In a later era, it appears that social policy, once a mere footnote to the more significant economic policy, became a set of hot items to constitute part of a political platform and substitute for economic policies that had proven ineffective and undesirable.  For example, after World War II, all socialist countries felt it essential to

To control a massive economy, Stalin had to resort to economic planning,

follow the example of Josef Stalin and develop a national economic plan. Gradually, it became apparent that this effort added nothing to economic performance.  One should not have expected that one gargantuan, state economic plan could be detailed and complex enough to replace the millions of individual plans that are developed formally and informally by the myriad of individual firms and consumers that comprise the national economy in a market system.  So when one drops the national plan from the socialist party’s political platform, it can easily be replaced, for example, by the feminist movement. Another substitute for traditional socialist economic policies is simply an expansion of the entitlements of the welfare program, such as providing free secondary education or cancelling student debts.

All of the traditional economic pillars of socialist policy failed.  Nationalization didn’t work because the

Nationalization of industry and economic planning failed.

parliament, charged with the management of the nation’s industries, did not have time to manage the many thousands of firms involved.  That would mean hiring managers who would act for the state, but may in practice be inclined to pursue their own personal interests rather than the interests of all the citizens. So there would have to be a national review from time to time of the state-owned firms’ performances. That all worked very poorly, so the alternative was simply to rely on a large bureaucracy to regulate all the activities of the private firms. Thousands of bureaucrats could then drown the private managers in an avalanche of rules and red tape, raising production costs and the prices we consumers pay as those costs are passed on to us.

Today, socialism consists only of 1) bureaucratic regulation of industry, 2) extensive social policies including welfare statist entitlements and legalizing and endorsing traditionally anti-social private activity. Where the latter involves mutually-acceptable personal activity of adults this seems reasonable and acceptable to tolerant and peace-loving individuals in the community.  What is more troublesome is the increasing proclivity to push, for example, for the coming social acceptance of pedophilia. In any case, the final and fundamental pillar of contemporary socialism is 3) the redistribution of income.

The Nature of Socialism Part II

Income Redistribution

Individuals opposed to socialism find income redistribution unjust. This is based on the hypothetical case of a person wanting to help a poor old woman by giving her money. To acquire the needed funds, however, the benefactor robs you at gunpoint.  This simply forces you to be “charitable” by constraining you to use the fruits of your labor for redistribution to someone else to whom they do not belong.

Although charitably helping others is a virtue to be encouraged,  when government raises taxes in order to provide government relief, the taxpayer cannot control the level of giving, and individuals also lose their ability to provide charity to the recipients they would choose.  First, the government-provided charity forces productive people to work for unproductive people.   Second, politicians inevitably vote to award charity to people who are not truly in need, in order to win their votes. The structure of welfare programs such as social security is designed to win the support of taxpayers by including them both as payers and recipients in the plan. The program thus becomes very expensive with basically everyone being entitled, and the entire nation begins a process of drifting toward insolvency. Politicians support defined groups in exchange for votes.  Those opposed to the socialist system of charity for votes are not really supporting charity, but a form of pay-for-play corruption.

Correct Principles of Government and the US Constitution 

Socialists always call for “democracy” and rail against those who, according to them, are not permitting our “democracy” to function. But the word “democracy” does not appear anywhere in America’s founding documents. The United States governmental system is not a democracy so much as a republic. Republicanism is based upon the Constitutional view that the government follows a set of consistently applied, universal principles, rather than upon the notions of fleeting majorities who may wish to tyrannize over minorities. The Constitution is intended to promote liberty, not democracy. The Constitution protects the rights of individuals’ from their own government, as well as from their fellow citizens.  Thus, the Constitution establishes distinct, unequivocal and enforceable rules to protect the rights of the individual.  It is for this reason that the government’s size and functions were strictly limited to those not granted to states.  Every American is thus equal – equally protected against the mob tyranny into which democracy has the potential to descend. The government is the agent of the society’s individuals and it has no right to possess or implement any power to harm one individual or group in order to help another individual or group.

If all Americans thought it right to let the government run the agencies of charity, taking it out of the hands of the people, perhaps it would be appropriate to let the government take care of all of those who couldn’t (or who chose not to) take care of themselves. That would be sad, however, for those who wish to take care of their own children or their own parents.  Perhaps income redistribution is the choice of most Americans today, even of those who lose control over those funds which they could otherwise use for their own charitable impulses. It is clear in any case that the government’s choices lead to the dependence rather than the self-reliance of recipients. It is clear that in the presence of welfare-state entitlements, the demand for charitable services will ultimately far exceed the supply generated by available funds, given the presence of budgetary needs for other, non-welfare policies. These and other problems are also discussed in another blog on this site entitled “The Failed Welfare Policies of Socialism.” The economics of income redistribution and welfare policies are presented in detail in the book Socialism: Origins, Expansion, Decline and the Attempted Revival in the United States.

It should be noted from recent natural and terror disasters that Americans are willing, even anxious to help those in need. If those welfare transfers organized by government were left on a voluntary basis and were combined with the efforts of well-organized private agencies, generous Americans might even be able to meet legitimate charitable needs without relying on governmental redistribution of incomes.

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Was Barack Obama our First Socialist President?

This website and this blog are dedicated to those interested in basic political questions and more especially in questions about the nature of our economic system. I recently published a book entitled Socialism: Origins, Expansion, Decline and the Attempted Revival in the United States, which addressed the economic issues exhaustively.

In the book I speak of President Obama as a voice for socialism. Many have not been aware of his family heritage, his boyhood mentors, his college training and interests, and his brief professional life as a community organizer (preparing communities for socialism). In all those things he was well schooled in socialism and trained to be an advocate. Aside from his public political persona, he would doubtless confirm that he is at heart a socialist.  I have on occasion referred to him as a “stealth socialist,” since during the campaign he did not reveal his preferences and ideological bent, desiring to appear for political purposes as a rather ordinary, old-fashioned progressive.

President Obama, Owner of Pen and Phone

A word needs to be said about Obama’s performance as president.  Some analysts have reviewed his record in office and concluded that he was not much of a socialist, since he accomplished few long-term socialist goals.   One must remember that the country was already quite divided as socialist sentiment became more and more prominent in the Democratic Party.  Legislative gridlock was well in place and the constitution’s mandate for a division of powers placed constraints on the judicial branch, in spite of strong “progressive” representation.  Congress was starkly divided, hardly in a position to legislate the extreme left agenda with which President Obama had long since been indoctrinated.  But he did make it clear that his objective was fundamentally to transform our system. He took to his pen and his telephone to implement his socialist preferences so far as possible through executive orders.  Finally, socialist initiatives would have emphasized greater control over the economy rather than Obama’s diversion into divisive integration and immigration issues, but Obama left the economy to his regulators in government agencies and after the failure of the huge and useless stimulus package, neither he nor other democrats had any idea what in the world should be done about the stuttering and sputtering economy.  Not that the president really minded the lack of economic growth, justice, or success of the economy. He was more concerned with strangling large sectors of the economy to reduce it’s “carbon footprint” on the world stage.  A continuation of such policies would have truly required a magic wand to have brought back economic growth.

Thus, Obama’s socialism was mixed with legislative constraints and diverted objectives that kept him from focusing single-heartedly on pure and fundamental socialist policies.  Finally, a preference for golf and extensive vacationing kept him from being the driven and committed socialist that would have been an even greater devastation for our country.

Many Americans, especially those closer to my advanced age, would consider the socialist label as a negative thing, perhaps an outright insult. But to many, especially younger Americans, socialism has recently lost its traditional stigma. Europeans have long considered socialism a positive. So when I use the term “socialist” I am not doing so in order to insult anyone. I am happy to insult and denigrate most socialist policies, since I have made a study of those over a whole career as a systems economist. But socialists are usually people with a strong emotional attachment to the goals of eliminating poverty and achieving social equality. Those ideals appeal to most of us, although there are strong differences among us as to how they could or should be achieved.

We saw vivid evidence in the last presidential campaign of how many young people enthusiastically followed Bernie Sanders, a self-proclaimed “democratic socialist.” Those who follow politics at all would have known by the time that President Obama was running for reelection that he favored socialistic income redistribution, solution of major economic problems by government intervention and heavy governmental regulation of the private sector. In other words, by his social policy predilections it is clear that he is a socialist. For electoral purposes, of course, he wished simply to appear “liberal.”

Speaking of socialism or of socialists is appropriate in contemporary America, and it is not to be done with the disdain that might have seeped into the conversation at an earlier period in our history. We need a dialog about the subject, as is apparent in my book. You can find on the pages of this site some basic information about Socialism, and confirm that after a long career of teaching and researching comparative economics I favor market solutions to our economic problems.  I started out as a democrat when liberals merely believed in a basic safety net and in Keynesian economics. But as the democrats grew increasingly radical I could not obstinately follow simply because I had always been a democrat.  I had come strongly to believe that Adam Smith got it right and that Karl Marx was decidedly a dealer in flawed and specious principles of economics.

Incidentally, I also believe that an economic system should provide a good life for all our country’s citizens. I also share the religious values of many Americans who believe that poverty should be eradicated. That won’t happen through socialism in spite of its admirable economic objectives as I show in my book. But the well-being of all the planet’s inhabitants should be pursued because our universal creator taught that it should be so.

 

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Socialism and Social Learning II

How is an economist indoctrinated?

John Cassidy (2009, How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities) tells of his own education and how his indoctrination occurred.  He has remained true to his liberal faith, of course, and would not agree today that he was indoctrinated, although he himself describes the process. “When I began studying economics at Oxford during the early eighties, Hayek was widely seen as a right-wing nut. True, he had received the Nobel Memorial Prize in 1974,” but Cassidy “made it all the way through undergraduate and graduate school without reading any of his articles or books, and I wasn’t unusual. Until recently, few economics textbooks mentioned Hayek’s name, and there was no scholarly biography of him available.”

I received the same kind of indoctrination in college, but in those days the goat was Milton Friedman, whom my fellow graduate students referred to as “Uncle Milty.” Since Friedman was working very effectively in a compelling field, monetary economics, Keynesians could only mock for so long. Friedman ultimately was the leader of a rather revolutionary movement. Other conservative groups in economics, public choice scholars and the so-called Austrian school, for example, ultimately broke the Keynesian lock on economic thinking in the United States.

If professors are biased, whom can you trust?

It is crystal clear that nobody is completely without bias. But all biases are not equal. One cannot accuse conservatives of having being indoctrinated while in school or in college, since the academy as a whole is basically quite solidly liberal or progressive.  In my view, the description of “socialist” may be just as appropriate.  So how can you trust someone with strong convictions if they have simply been indoctrinated or have lost the capacity to judge objectively?

I have a suggestion for this problem.  It is more prudent to pay attention to the people who were democrat and who can give you good reasons why they actually traded the ideology for a market-oriented philosophy of economics.  There are not many of such people, but I know one such individual who, incidentally, was the author of my book, Socialism. Actually, I would hope that people would be willing to consider with an open mind the powerful verities I have revealed in my book. There, I lay out the reasons why I left the political faith I grew up with and actually began to worry about the implications of a society that might follow Bernie Sanders, Barak Obama, and other socialists.

I did not adopt a political ideology in lieu of religion.  I actually grew up with religious beliefs which have become stronger through the years than when I was a schoolboy searching for answers. I mention this only to point out that I do not see my socialistically-oriented brothers and sisters as enemies who are to be hated with the partisan fervor of a CNN or NBC.  Rather, the Christian scriptures suggest we are to love all our fellow men. The scriptures do not suggest, however, that we may not try to reason with different-thinking individuals, even if they do not reciprocate our positive feelings.