Communism is an idea. Ideas do not kill people; people kill people.
Stalin, Hitler, and Mao killed millions in the name of, and to further, their respective utopian ideas. Such ideas are inherently deadly. They instill a religious fervor in their followers because they are attempting to create their notion of “heaven on earth.” Anyone who gets in the way of “heaven” is denying future generations inestimable good and is therefore evil and can be slaughtered with no qualms. As German philosopher Friedrich Hölderlin observed, “What has always made the state a hell on earth has been precisely that man has tried to make it heaven.”
Socialism prevents corporate monopolies from forming.
Why is it that monopoly by corporations – which must satisfy their customers to survive – is bad, while monopoly by government – which can use deadly force to survive – is good?
Without government intervention, a company can maintain a dominant market position only by satisfying its customers well enough to discourage competitors.
Goods are distributed fairly under Socialism.
Probably not. The issue is one of incentives. What incentives do the following economic actors have?
- Producers of goods being confiscated for redistribution
- Government personnel doing the confiscation
- Government personnel doing the redistribution
- People receiving redistributed goods
Producers want to minimize their losses, so their incentives are to:
- Hide some or all of what they’ve produced.
- Produce less.
- Bribe the people trying to confiscate the fruits of their labor.
The people doing the confiscation are just as “human” as anyone else and just as subject to temptation. They want to increase their own material well-being and that of their families and loved ones. So, their incentives are to:
- Confiscate more than is required so they can “skim off the top”.
- Accept bribes from people trying to keep their goods.
The people redistributing the goods also want to improve their well-being, so their incentives are to:
- Skim off the top.
- Accept bribes from people who wish to receive confiscated goods.
- Always have goods available for important people (i.e., people who can affect their well-being), so they tend to…
- Skimp on the goods given to “non-important” people.
The people receiving goods have incentives to:
- Exaggerate their needs.
- Bribe the people who are redistributing the goods.
- Obtain whatever goods they can; even things that they don’t need can be sold or exchanged on the black market.
Real socialism has never been tried.
True, if by “real socialism” you mean “perfect socialism.” By the same token, “perfect capitalism” has never been tried either. Because people are imperfect, perfect societies aren’t an option. What we’ve found through experience, though, is that imperfect capitalism works quite well – well enough to pull billions of people out of poverty. By contrast, imperfect socialism always fails miserably and, often, fatally.
The claim that real socialism has never been tried depends largely on the definition of socialism. Certainly, many forms of socialism have been tried in the last two centuries – both on large and small scales.
Although Senator Bernie Sanders enthusiastically supported Venezuelan socialism until the country’s economy collapsed, he claims that what he’s wanted all along is the kind of “socialism” practiced in the Scandinavian countries. But none of the Scandinavian countries are socialist. All are capitalist welfare states that, in many respects, regulate business more lightly than does the United States.
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, which claims to be the “largest socialist organization in the United States” and which supports the Maduro dictatorship. Article II of the DSA’s constitution reads in part:
The highlighted text is far more in line with the Venezuelan, Soviet, Cuban, and North Korean regimes’ brand of economics than with that of any of the Scandinavian countries.
Richard Fulmer worked as a mechanical engineer and a systems analyst in industry. He is now retired and does free-lance writing. He has published some fifty articles and book reviews in free market magazines and blogs. With Robert L. Bradley Jr., Richard wrote the book, Energy: The Master Resource.
READER COMMENTS
vince
Aug 25 2022 at 10:58am
“Why is it that monopoly by corporations – which must satisfy their customers to survive – is bad, while monopoly by government – which can use deadly force to survive – is good?
Monopoly by corporations is bad. Monopoly by government is worse.
“Without government intervention, a company can maintain a dominant market position only by satisfying its customers well enough to discourage competitors.”
And there’s the playbook to keep the monopoly or oligopoly with less regard for customer satisfaction: government intervention, for example discourage competitors with red-tape barriers to entry.
JK Brown
Aug 25 2022 at 12:15pm
People don’t have ideas, ideas have people. I believe Jordan Peterson said that. And it is true, von Mises in ‘Liberalism’ noted
But the best summation of socialism I’ve found is:
–Socialism; a speech delivered in Faneuil hall, February 7th, 1903, by Frederic J. Stimson
I particularly like “Precisely what makes a slave is that he is allowed no use of productive capital to make wealth on his own account.” It pretty much sums up socialism/communism.
BTW, if you start from the liberty to keep and use your earnings to generate wealth for yourself through the participation in markets and enterprises, then from Laissez Faire capitalism through interventionism and socialism, to the bureaucratic control of communism are all on a continuum of increasing limitations on who is permitted to exercise the liberty to keep what they earn and use it to generate more wealth. You can even fit feudalism in as while peasants weren’t permitted to improve their lot, the nobility spent all their time trying to improve their wealth through trade they controlled.
Richard W Fulmer
Aug 25 2022 at 4:56pm
Another boat? Cubans aren’t allowed to own any boats for fear that they might try to escape to the United States.
Richard W Fulmer
Aug 25 2022 at 5:12pm
In his 1854 book, Sociology for the South, or the Failure of Free Society, George Fitzhugh, one of the South’s leading antebellum apologists for slavery, argued that slavery was the best form of socialism:
Like Adam Smith, Fitzhugh believed that slavery is incompatible free enterprise:
In his book, Fitzhugh described his socialist ideal:
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Aug 25 2022 at 4:39pm
All the supposed goals of “Socialism” are better achieved by Democratic Capitalist states. Which is probably why in practice there are so few Socialists in Western Democratic Capitalist states.
Richard W Fulmer
Aug 27 2022 at 11:53am
I certainly agree that capitalism has provided much of what socialism promised. For example, Karl Marx claimed that socialism would put the means of production in the hands of workers, but it was capitalism that fulfilled his promise. Today, the “means of production” increasingly translates into a worker’s knowledge, her laptop and cellphone, and, perhaps, a 3D printer.
Mass production in a free-market system enables even complex products to be made cheaply enough for people of even modest means to afford them. In the future, many more capital goods, such as robots, will be just as affordable as laptops and cellphones are today.
Marx envisioned a socialist utopia in which he “could fish in the morning, hunt in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening and do critical theory at night, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.” Again, it was capitalism that made Marx’s dream a reality by increasing productivity so much that people no longer must spend all their waking hours just trying to scratch out a subsistence living, and by placing leisure goods and experiences within easy reach of most workers.
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Aug 27 2022 at 10:26am
An interesting text for highlighting how far ideas labeled “Socialism” are from Socialism.
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