Who Would Choose Socialism?
reason.com
reason.com
Most countries aren’t purely socialist in the same way the US isn’t purely capitalist.
Who would want to live in a purely socialist society? Probably very few people.
Who would want to live in a social democratic society? Most of the developed world.
Canada has almost 100% public health insurance coverage, while Switzerland insurance is entirely private. The US is a mix.
The US public school system is based on where you live, while Sweden has a school voucher system where parents can choose where their kids go including private schools.
So what exactly is a social democratic society?
As a side note, I live in a wealthy European parliamentary monarchy with stellar press freedom ratings and an abysmal quality of press that makes me want to ignore all local news outright. Is there an -ism for that? Decadentism?
But... The only news-only FM radio that expanded from a nearby country was banned and replaced by a stub Catholic FM radio some 10 years ago. Politics is non-existent. Parties are melting pots of scrubs.
But we get by.
Talking about these concepts in broad general strokes is worse than useless; it just muddles things. Talk about health care, or social security, or specific free market issues, or specific things like that instead.
Medicare is "socialism" and popular; it was already instituted in 1973 (when this article was written). The American people had already "chosen socialism", just not the extreme version the author seems to implicitly assume.
Have a look at one of those "happiness surveys" [1] and you'll find that the top countries in those list tend to be social democracies in some way or form. Find some Socialist countries - hint: look towards the bottom of the list - and you'll find people are less happy when the promised Utopia remains outside of reach - for them.
The US has killed, jailed, blacklisted, and otherwise denied civil liberties to people for having leftist politics. Whether that's "purely capitalist" or not, it's still not safe to be a leftist in the USA.
I don’t disagree.
Remember that “shocking” scene from the Newsroom years ago where the main character had the audacity to suggest the US wasn’t the freedom-est country in the world?
The rest of the world just nodded and said “yeah, we know”.
It's not. It's got nothing to do with capitalism, pure or otherwise. In fact, I think there's a case for saying that the US state is both very large and highly invasive in people's lives both in, and outside, the USA. And that's a very un-capitalist trait.
Are there still the same number of people? Rising? Declining? Morphing?
What changed after Kibbutz crisis [1]?
"Robert Nozick ... teaches philosophy at Harvard. He recently spent a year in Jerusalem".
Why is this so funny?
There's nothing about disallowing private ownership of the Earth's common resources, natural monopolies, etc. that stops having free markets everywhere else.
If anything, allowing that is what corrupts free markets - as even with privatisation, you never have a real free market on the railways, highways, or electricity grid because we can only build a limited number of them and can't support multiple disjoint networks. But those corporations can then use that captive market for an unfair advantage entering other markets / verticals.
I think the best solution would be free markets and liberalisation, except in natural monopolies, and a lot of taxation against accumulated and inherited wealth (not income) to provide a level playing field and economic mobility.
My philosophy is to have a system that monitors innovation done in a sector and if it is deemed insufficient we turn it into a government department (and pay a reasonable price) The government department is compared to private industry in other countries, if performance is deemed insufficient it will be privatized. (with privatized I don't mean given away for 1 euro) It should continue to have the same employees after the transition unless it switches between public and private and back to fast. Then people should be replaced and shuffled around at all levels.
To use the railroad example, if the company is able to find funds to stay on the cutting edge technically, in service level, price and reliability it should [most definitely] stay a company. If it is just sitting there not doing much of anything besides maximizing revenue we might as well have the government run it.
If we really need the service (as is the case with railroads) and it needs bailing out we give each tax paying person or entity an amount of shares that scales with the amount of tax they paid.
So separating healthcare coverage from your employment is one important step, as is providing modern, in-depth STEM + Medicine education so people are able to work in highly skilled jobs where we really need them.
That's a big part of driving disruption and progress.
It almost seems like a metric designed to mislead about economic mobility in fact. Where did you read about it?
Seems like a decent proxy measurement to me.
Search indexes too - the electricity costs alone for running one are prohibitive.
What are "the Earth's common resources"? Is farmland one of those? What about forests, are those part of those "common resources"? If the answer is "yes" your claim of there not being any hindrance between Socialism and "free markets everywhere else" falls flat since it would not be possible to have a free market in essential goods - food and shelter.
For where it concerns "natural monopolies" I tend to agree. As to "a lot of taxation against accumulated and inherited wealth (not income)" I mostly disagree since this is a big disincentive against saving and living within one's means. Parents who want to take care of their children to help them on their way would be punished for their thriftiness (which turns "income" into "wealth") to finance slackers and spendthrifts, the classical dilemma which gave rise to the likes of Ayn Rand writing "Atlas Shrugged". Such a system does not promote economic mobility either since it takes away the incentive to become mobile - why bother when the state provides "equity"?
The only thing I can think of that's achievable is worker co-ops, and a lot of start-ups are like that for early employees and founders.
It's a full commune - more like a cult than normal society. So it's quite a strawman in that respect.
The distinction here is that even under a hypothetical laissez-faire ideal, socialists would be free to create their own socialist communities of any type. Whereas within a compulsory socialist economy laissez-faire markets are prohibited.
The laissez-faire ideal can accommodate the socialists' individual choices, but the converse is not true.
I agree that the argument made in the article is a strawman argument: no wanting to live in a kibbutz should not be equated to not wanting to live in a socialist society.
I even wonder how many people with a socialist party membership lived in kibbutz at the period of this article, which would demonstrate that this assertion is ridiculous. As this article implies that kibbutz where promoted by the government, I would say that the government was pro-socialism, and if it was an elected government, it would show that a majority of the population is pro-socialism and yet does not want to live in kibbutz. I wonder how many socialist politicians at the time did not even lived in kibbutz, demonstrating the logical flaw of the argument.
But I also disagree with your argument "laissez-faire ideal is an environment where if X does not take off, it means X is a bad idea or is not wanted". It's like saying "you can choose to be a wolf or a sheep, and in this pen, you have a laissez-faire ideal, and we observe that the majority prefer to be wolves, so it's the proof that a sheep pen is a bad idea". No, it means that as soon as there is a laissez-faire that allow wolves eating sheep, it's better to be a wolf even if your ideal was to be a sheep.
Naturally, under market forces those socialists would pursue these more desirable arrangements.
>No, it means that as soon as there is a laissez-faire that allow wolves eating sheep, it's better to be a wolf even if your ideal was to be a sheep.
Most analogies are problematic, but this one is especially so. Voluntary association is equated with "wolves eating sheep" or violence. While violent repression of free exchange is somehow peaceful. From that point I'd expect an invocation of the (widely debunked) labor theory of value, followed by a sloppy generalization claiming free exchange is exploitative in all cases.
The well known analogy of wolves and sheep is, "Democracy is like two wolves and a sheep voting on what is for dinner"
At least far back as Plato, the problem of the tyranny of the majority has been raised. Perhaps this is the more desirable outcome?
But why capitalists don't do so too? Why is there still capitalists living in countries with strong socialist policies like in Canada, Europe, ... Sure, those countries are not socialist ideals, but they are certainly not capitalist or libertarian ideals either.
It feels like you are assuming that the default world is "capitalist", and that the socialists have to prove themselves. The reality is that the capitalist ideal is as rare as the socialist one (but when asked about that, some pro-capitalists will come up with reasons or excuses that they will never accept when they are used by pro-socialists. It's not a discussion, they just believe they are smarter when they are not)
> Voluntary association is equated with "wolves eating sheep" or violence.
You did not understand the analogy. When someone does an analogy with bees and flowers in it, it does not mean that they mean that sexual relationships involve literal honey. If my analogy contains wolves and sheep, it does not mean that I mean that society, capitalism or interaction between socialists and capitalists involve literal wolf-vs-sheep predation.
Simply, it is incorrect to say that if you let everyone be free, everyone will be able to reach their ideal. The wolves and sheep thing is not an analogy, it's an counter-example showing that this way of thinking is just very very naive.
As for capitalism, capitalism is different from socialism, it interacts differently, BUT it interacts with socialists. It is stupid to pretend that socialists are somehow living in a bubble and capitalists in another bubble. If a bakery is using the capitalist system to diffuse bread, it affects the bakery next door that is using the socialist system to diffuse bread. And inversely, sometimes it is even the socialist system that is the "wolf" for the capitalism. But the interaction is complex and pretending that it does not impact the choice of individuals that will therefore not choose their ideal but choose what is best in the current environment is ridiculous.
But hell even rich people want socialism. Poor people carry diseases that they can spread so clean drinking water was installed in the slums.
> Even this does not enable us to disentangle (imagined) self-interest from our topic: the desire to participate in socialist interpersonal relations of equality and community.
Why would we want to "disentangle" material benefit? Material benefit is the whole entire point.
> these communities have been widely admired for performing the important functions of... Jewish self defense...
Going mask-off here. Socialism is when imperialism.
The writer obviously started with the agenda to justify Zionism and capitalism, and the article is a thin argument in favour of his preconceptions.
Note, old Reason was pretty wild in content and contributors:
"Did Reason Really Publish a "Holocaust Denial 'Special Issue'" in 1976?"
https://reason.com/2014/07/26/did-reason-really-publish-a-ho...
> Another of that issue's contributors, Gary North, would later be excoriated in this 1998 Reason article for arguing in favor of violent theocracy and the stoning of gays and others.
Reason isn't my favorite libertarian outlet. The pejorative commonly used is "beltway libertarian". There's a divide between the Rothbardians and the Koch, Reason and Cato types. Even today, you can find a somewhat recent crusade against Hoppe by a Koch funded academic Phil Magness. Of course Reason uncritically gave airtime to this crusade.
That said, whenever there is a vaguely free-market publication submitted here, the guilt-by-association comments seem to come out of the woodwork.
Interesting that the same is not true for CNN, BBC or the New York Times articles. They all have a long history of printing horrible deceptions. We could squabble over these past misdeeds or discuss the article at hand on the merits.
Maybe CNN and the BBC are more often submitted here due to the actual news they are covering rather than as part of an agenda that they are continually and explicitly expounding and so need that context less?
Maybe you can elaborate on how "stoning gays" is relevant in this context?
Try bringing up communism and see what happens. It'll be all guilt by association with various dictators concerned more with with personal power than communism (i.e. exactly like capitalist dictators).
The libertarian movement was largely dragged from obscurity in the 80s by the Kochs during their fights with the EPA.
That's where all that nonsense about hairdresser licensing got its headwinds. It was entirely an investor driven ideology, with its roots in letting rich businessmen enrich themselves by freeing themselves from the constraints of "overbearing" environmental regulations.
Socialism takes too much control away from people, stifles creativity, and IMO doesn't mach human nature.
A hybrid system is ideal, or something even new that takes what works from both.
For starters, a wealth and income threshold is needed. No individual human needs hundreds of millions of dollars let alone cash, and none of them directly earned or deserve that much. Everything past the threshold can be redistributed.
Increasing taxes on a ladder, I can understand. High taxes (50%) past a certain point, I can understand.
Even universal income.
>For starters, a wealth and income threshold is needed. No individual human needs hundreds of millions of dollars let alone cash, and none of them directly earned or deserve that much. Everything past the threshold can be redistributed.
Absolutely not. Any country that does this would have me (and most people who actually value hard work) leaving.
The idea should be to provide the basics (as above) to everybody, and not more.
So that they can live a basic life, acquire skills, and potentially get an actual job and the benefits that come with it.
Nothing really to do with democracy, honestly, although on that note democracy is not a great system and needs to be replaced with something better.
Like plutocracy?
It mirrors human nature? From the time of the early cave paintings tens of thousands of years ago to the rise of the class system 10,000 years ago, social classes did not even exist. Even 1000 years ago there were no capitalist societies.
Odd how an economic system which "mirrors human nature" is so recent.
In France I watched the yellow vests protest economic conditions and then the more recent strikes. Lula just took over in Brazil, and most (not all) of Latin America is run by governments of a like mind. Also 2022 did not see an expansion of trade, but Russia being cut off from it, and steps to cut China off from it (chip ban). The capitalist economic system may have a short life span.
Why do we bail out fragile financial institutions and reward the billionaires who run them? Why does a poor person with a good idea get ignored, while a wealthy grifter with a terrible idea gets treated like the second coming of christ?
Is my post bashing Reason and the selective memory of the right, conflating all socialists (and modern Israel) with the Nazis, or advocacy / apologism for national socialism? Well that all depends on your own bias as you read it.