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davywavyI've been involved ni any number of arguments on socialism, communism, and the redistribution of wealth over the past few weeks, mainly with people still their first blush of idealism (bless 'em) who haven't thought through the implications of their happy ideas. And so, as I've promised to several times, I've started to write down my 'Why I don't like Socialist/Communist economic forms and governments' thoughts.
I've started by getting together some of the more outrageously absurd statements that I've had to argue against and writing my views on them. I'll go from there another time, but I expect this to firmly put the cat amongst the pigeons to start with.
So here we go...
“Communism believes in the fundamental good of human nature and that freed from the sociological effects of grubbing for food and (in some cases) the directives of religion we're basically all good chaps with each others best interests at heart working together for the betterment of the community/species as a whole.”
This load of old nonsense, you may be astonished to know, is actually a quote from a comment on my LJ quite recently. It’s so hopelessly divorced from reality that I thought it needed tackling first. I respond to it with a question; if it gives individuals the greatest credit, why does its fundamental principle involve taking the dispensation of resources and property out of their hands? If Communism/socialism believes that people are so fundamentally good, why does it take away the fruits of individuals’ labour from that individual? Why does it believe that people will not give freely of what they have without a central mechanism to oversee that distribution?
Of course, the answer is that left wing thinkers give the individual the very least credit for disposing of their resources for the betterment of man. It is, in short, a self-declared elite (who oversee the distribution of resources) overseeing the rest of their fellow man whom they believe aren’t to be trusted to live their lives responsibly. A philosophy which I find abhorrent. Give me libertarianism any day.
“From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs”
I propose that of all economic systems, in practise only free market capitalism comes close to fulfilling this statement, and even then it comes only halfway; that is, the economy takes peoples abilities and pays what it considers to be a market rate for those abilities. Admittedly, sometimes that market rate may be horrendously skewed one way or another, but the abilities of the individual are their primary trading commodity within the economic system. As the socialist experiments around the world have shown us, the reality of living under those systems is “From each irrespective of their abilities, to each depending on what we can supply”. As we know; Mao put university lecturers to work in the paddy fields, Stalin sent civil engineers to the front lines, and Castro sent anyone capable of building a boat to Miami.
(Speaking of Castro, don’t you think that if the Cubans enjoyed living in a socialist paradise, they’d want to stay there? Just a question…)
“Socialism would work in Cuba if the Americans lifted their trade sanctions!”
Now, perhaps this is just me, but any economic system whose success relies upon it’s sworn enemies trading with it against their will strikes me as fundamentally flawed from inception. People often claim that by not trading with Cuba, the US is dooming it’s citizens to poverty. That argument works just as well the other way around; by enforcing an unworkable governmental and economic system upon it’s citizens, Castro is also dooming them to poverty.
“But Stalin wasn’t a Communist!” (1)
A common cry. For that matter, if you ask a little further, nor were Lenin, Brezhnev, Mao, Kim il Sung, Cauecescu, Marshall Tito, Hoxha…oh, Hell. Nobody who has ever run a country that claimed to be a Communist/ Socialist ‘peoples’ state actually was one. Got that? You see, they couldn’t have been proper lefties because they didn’t make the government work without comprehensive repression of their citizenry and, as we all know, if everyone just held hands and loved each other then a socialist paradise would work. Yeah. Right. And if the moon was made of fuckin’ cheese, then Wallace and Gromit would be millionaires.
This is why I rebel against the idea of yet more socialist state experiments. You see, none of the above people were stupid – in fact they were all incredibly intelligent people, and most of them started off with the very best of intentions. However, their good intentions vanished just as soon as they realised that it was necessary to force people to live in a Communist utopia. ‘”They’ll thank me for this later!”, Stalin must have thought as he starved the Caucasus into submission. “A glorious peoples utopia will ensue where everyone works for the good of everyone else! Now ship those Cossacks off to Siberia, would you?”
There is a serious point here as well; as I’ve noted before, the majority of the people I know with strong left wing views tend to be students and the unemployed. Now, ask yourselves this: if the intellectual elite of nations consisting of billions of people can’t make left wing economic systems work, what the hell makes you think that you can?
Don’t think for one moment that I’m saying that lefty economics cannot work; what I’m saying is that every time we’ve tried them so far, they’ve failed miserably and led to untold suffering of innocents - and the idea of yet more millions suffering and dying in yet more socialist economic experiments until we hit on the right formula kinda leaves me a bit cold. Call me an old softy.
“But Stalin wasn’t a Communist!” (2)
Hitler wasn’t a Nazi. Discuss.
“If the richer portion of society gave up just a little of what they have, it would relieve the poverty of the masses.”
Let’s look at the way things are set up at the moment. The higher waged pay tax at 40%; then they make National Insurance payments on top of that, and then they pay VAT on just about everything they buy at 17.5%. In short, the government takes in taxation approaching a massive 65% of everything that is earned by the vast majority of the wealthier section of society. (The really smart ones move their money offshore and avoid a lot of this tax, and good for them.)
So just where is this ‘just a little of what they have’ supposed to come from – what would be a fair percentage of earnings? Seventy? Eighty? Ninety? All of it?
Of course, the answer is none of the above. The amount of money paid in tax by the citizenry of this country (from the lowest to the highest paid) is many times what is needed to shift the economic demographic of the poorest section upwards dramatically: but it doesn’t do so, and it would continue to fail to do so regardless of the economic system we used. The reason for this is not form of government, or economic system, but human fallibility, waste, greed, and incompetence – and these are things that cannot be educated or voted away. Shifting to a socialist state has, in every example ever on the face of this green earth we have been given, failed miserably to improve the quality of life for the majority of it’s inhabitants (and, before you mention Sweden, the Swedish economy would have collapsed in 1998 were it not for immense loans and currency support from its – rather more capitalist – neighbours), and so when people try and thrust left wing politics at me I instinctively shy away in revulsion.
And this is why I believe that the model of Western, Liberal Democracy that we live under is the finest model of government that humanity has yet invented (and I’d rate Australia as having the best model of all). We live in a world where essential resources are easily in sufficient supply for all; our great limitation is of human ability and willingness - and simply changing economics isn’t going to suddenly make a population of hapless incompetents into dynamic successes. People are venal, inefficient, ineffectual, stupid, and more – and these qualities cannot be rid of by a shift of governmental form. Any system which relies upon central control of resources will be plagued more by these simple human failings than one which replies upon the individual to dispense with those resources that they have access to as they see best – to put it another way, the more steps in the ladder, the more likely that one of those steps will break.
Our current system of economy and government is superior to any of those tried before for the simple fact that it allows us, as individuals, the greatest freedom to dispense with what we have in the way that best suits us. It allows us to place the value upon ourselves that we choose to and strive towards that value without having the needs of a centralised state imposed upon us. And above all, it allows us to choose those rulers who we believe will make our lives least miserable. If people wanted to live in a socialist utopia, they’d have voted one in by now. The fact that the citizenry of this nation repeatedly elect right wing (and that’s Mr. Blair included) governments indicates to me that that’s because they don’t want a socialist utopia. The quicker the various lefties I know get used to the fact that their ideology, whilst pretty, has been weeded out by social Darwinism as effectively as Feudalism and Theocracy have been, the happier I will be.
I've started by getting together some of the more outrageously absurd statements that I've had to argue against and writing my views on them. I'll go from there another time, but I expect this to firmly put the cat amongst the pigeons to start with.
So here we go...
“Communism believes in the fundamental good of human nature and that freed from the sociological effects of grubbing for food and (in some cases) the directives of religion we're basically all good chaps with each others best interests at heart working together for the betterment of the community/species as a whole.”
This load of old nonsense, you may be astonished to know, is actually a quote from a comment on my LJ quite recently. It’s so hopelessly divorced from reality that I thought it needed tackling first. I respond to it with a question; if it gives individuals the greatest credit, why does its fundamental principle involve taking the dispensation of resources and property out of their hands? If Communism/socialism believes that people are so fundamentally good, why does it take away the fruits of individuals’ labour from that individual? Why does it believe that people will not give freely of what they have without a central mechanism to oversee that distribution?
Of course, the answer is that left wing thinkers give the individual the very least credit for disposing of their resources for the betterment of man. It is, in short, a self-declared elite (who oversee the distribution of resources) overseeing the rest of their fellow man whom they believe aren’t to be trusted to live their lives responsibly. A philosophy which I find abhorrent. Give me libertarianism any day.
“From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs”
I propose that of all economic systems, in practise only free market capitalism comes close to fulfilling this statement, and even then it comes only halfway; that is, the economy takes peoples abilities and pays what it considers to be a market rate for those abilities. Admittedly, sometimes that market rate may be horrendously skewed one way or another, but the abilities of the individual are their primary trading commodity within the economic system. As the socialist experiments around the world have shown us, the reality of living under those systems is “From each irrespective of their abilities, to each depending on what we can supply”. As we know; Mao put university lecturers to work in the paddy fields, Stalin sent civil engineers to the front lines, and Castro sent anyone capable of building a boat to Miami.
(Speaking of Castro, don’t you think that if the Cubans enjoyed living in a socialist paradise, they’d want to stay there? Just a question…)
“Socialism would work in Cuba if the Americans lifted their trade sanctions!”
Now, perhaps this is just me, but any economic system whose success relies upon it’s sworn enemies trading with it against their will strikes me as fundamentally flawed from inception. People often claim that by not trading with Cuba, the US is dooming it’s citizens to poverty. That argument works just as well the other way around; by enforcing an unworkable governmental and economic system upon it’s citizens, Castro is also dooming them to poverty.
“But Stalin wasn’t a Communist!” (1)
A common cry. For that matter, if you ask a little further, nor were Lenin, Brezhnev, Mao, Kim il Sung, Cauecescu, Marshall Tito, Hoxha…oh, Hell. Nobody who has ever run a country that claimed to be a Communist/ Socialist ‘peoples’ state actually was one. Got that? You see, they couldn’t have been proper lefties because they didn’t make the government work without comprehensive repression of their citizenry and, as we all know, if everyone just held hands and loved each other then a socialist paradise would work. Yeah. Right. And if the moon was made of fuckin’ cheese, then Wallace and Gromit would be millionaires.
This is why I rebel against the idea of yet more socialist state experiments. You see, none of the above people were stupid – in fact they were all incredibly intelligent people, and most of them started off with the very best of intentions. However, their good intentions vanished just as soon as they realised that it was necessary to force people to live in a Communist utopia. ‘”They’ll thank me for this later!”, Stalin must have thought as he starved the Caucasus into submission. “A glorious peoples utopia will ensue where everyone works for the good of everyone else! Now ship those Cossacks off to Siberia, would you?”
There is a serious point here as well; as I’ve noted before, the majority of the people I know with strong left wing views tend to be students and the unemployed. Now, ask yourselves this: if the intellectual elite of nations consisting of billions of people can’t make left wing economic systems work, what the hell makes you think that you can?
Don’t think for one moment that I’m saying that lefty economics cannot work; what I’m saying is that every time we’ve tried them so far, they’ve failed miserably and led to untold suffering of innocents - and the idea of yet more millions suffering and dying in yet more socialist economic experiments until we hit on the right formula kinda leaves me a bit cold. Call me an old softy.
“But Stalin wasn’t a Communist!” (2)
Hitler wasn’t a Nazi. Discuss.
“If the richer portion of society gave up just a little of what they have, it would relieve the poverty of the masses.”
Let’s look at the way things are set up at the moment. The higher waged pay tax at 40%; then they make National Insurance payments on top of that, and then they pay VAT on just about everything they buy at 17.5%. In short, the government takes in taxation approaching a massive 65% of everything that is earned by the vast majority of the wealthier section of society. (The really smart ones move their money offshore and avoid a lot of this tax, and good for them.)
So just where is this ‘just a little of what they have’ supposed to come from – what would be a fair percentage of earnings? Seventy? Eighty? Ninety? All of it?
Of course, the answer is none of the above. The amount of money paid in tax by the citizenry of this country (from the lowest to the highest paid) is many times what is needed to shift the economic demographic of the poorest section upwards dramatically: but it doesn’t do so, and it would continue to fail to do so regardless of the economic system we used. The reason for this is not form of government, or economic system, but human fallibility, waste, greed, and incompetence – and these are things that cannot be educated or voted away. Shifting to a socialist state has, in every example ever on the face of this green earth we have been given, failed miserably to improve the quality of life for the majority of it’s inhabitants (and, before you mention Sweden, the Swedish economy would have collapsed in 1998 were it not for immense loans and currency support from its – rather more capitalist – neighbours), and so when people try and thrust left wing politics at me I instinctively shy away in revulsion.
And this is why I believe that the model of Western, Liberal Democracy that we live under is the finest model of government that humanity has yet invented (and I’d rate Australia as having the best model of all). We live in a world where essential resources are easily in sufficient supply for all; our great limitation is of human ability and willingness - and simply changing economics isn’t going to suddenly make a population of hapless incompetents into dynamic successes. People are venal, inefficient, ineffectual, stupid, and more – and these qualities cannot be rid of by a shift of governmental form. Any system which relies upon central control of resources will be plagued more by these simple human failings than one which replies upon the individual to dispense with those resources that they have access to as they see best – to put it another way, the more steps in the ladder, the more likely that one of those steps will break.
Our current system of economy and government is superior to any of those tried before for the simple fact that it allows us, as individuals, the greatest freedom to dispense with what we have in the way that best suits us. It allows us to place the value upon ourselves that we choose to and strive towards that value without having the needs of a centralised state imposed upon us. And above all, it allows us to choose those rulers who we believe will make our lives least miserable. If people wanted to live in a socialist utopia, they’d have voted one in by now. The fact that the citizenry of this nation repeatedly elect right wing (and that’s Mr. Blair included) governments indicates to me that that’s because they don’t want a socialist utopia. The quicker the various lefties I know get used to the fact that their ideology, whilst pretty, has been weeded out by social Darwinism as effectively as Feudalism and Theocracy have been, the happier I will be.
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no subject
Date: 2002-10-04 04:44 am (UTC)Oh, (dammit, did it again) and Capitalism's great strength is the ignorance of the masses, and the ease with which they can be convinced that they must have things that they can happily live without. You could save money on TV, Cinema and other hobbies by hooking everyone up to a drip of morphine outside of working and sleeping hours, but it's not a particularly palatable suggestion.
no subject
Date: 2002-10-04 06:25 am (UTC)Whilst the specialisation they pursue may depend on personal inclination, I think you'll find that people have many base motives for going into it in th efirst place.
Re:
Date: 2002-10-04 06:31 am (UTC)No, I'm saying that if the promise wasn't there of a well-paid and prestigious career then we'd see a different set of people doing the same jobs.
At the end of the day, you can't have more than everyone else, unless someone has less than someone else, and though it would be tempting to blame it all on "get-on-your-bike" Tebbitism, there is a large proportion of society who are disadvantaged from birth and/or circumstance, and a laissez-faire, I'm-all-right-jack*, NIMBY attitude doesn't help them achieve their rightful level of dignity and achievement in any way.
*And yes, I know that was the anti-Trade Union film starring Peter Sellers.
Re:
Date: 2002-10-04 06:53 am (UTC)1) Saving people with genetic problems, nobody is born 'stupid' or 'disadvantaged from birth'. Human beings have the potential to be anything, if that potential is nurtured. To say that some people just ain't capable is the most offensively demeaning crap I've heard this week.
2) Bearing this in mind it stands to reason that there are social reasons why some people just don't make it. It's interesting to note that people with the same educational opportunities can go either way (a good case in point is the school I went to - produced any number of worthless layabouts on one side, and William hague on the other. say what you like baout him, he is from a crap mining town, and he got where he did from his own efforts - I know his parents, and they're no richer or more priviledged than many in the town).
Those social reasons, I propose is that people are told from an early age they can't make it; the welfare stae encourages this attitude in an incredibly damaging way. If you give people a safety net, it implies that you think they NEED one. There has to be a better way to provide for people who slip through for one reason or another. Getting able-bodied or capable people to work for dole would be a good start.
What's NIMBYism got to do with anything?
Let's have a heated debate.
Date: 2002-10-04 07:09 am (UTC)I know brilliant people who can't go to university because they have to look after sick relatives; people with first degrees who are stacking shelves in supermarkets next to Geoffrey from Rainbow because they can't afford to relocate to where the jobs are. I know single mothers crippled by the debts their ex-husbands ran up before they left the country. I know people who ran away from home and school due to abuse and now eke out livings in bedsits.
Like you, I do detest Whiggist paternalism, but the current economic climate, whilst moving closer to a meritocracy, still has a while to go before everyone starts off the same blocks. That said, at least in those days those with money were invested with a social conscience and obligation to help the impoverished.
Oh, and I meant NIMBP - Not In My Back Pocket. People are prepared to call for help to society as long as it doesn't affect their own income. Look at how popular the Lib Dem's 1% income tax rise was. If I asked you whether you'd sacrifice the cost of two pints a week to provide a bed for a homeless person, you might say yes. If I asked you at the bar for you to forgo your drink in order to make this contribution, chances are it would be less well-received. A visible effect on one's lifestyle, however minimal is always harder to take.
Re: Let's have a heated debate.
Date: 2002-10-04 08:16 am (UTC)I prefer to live in a society where people are told that they *can* do it, rather than one in which any number of happy social projects are set up on the assumption that they *can't*.
I recently read a pamphlet issued by a left-wing think tank which described Albinism as a disability, and almost popped a blood vessel as would any of the albinos I've ever known (3 to be precise). The sort of attitude that 'creates' new classification of 'disability' and people to 'help' makes my blood boil.
As for NIMBP, we're close to agreement, but not quite there; if you asked me for the price a pint of lager to help the poor, I'd happily give. However, the government takes the price of approximately 6,500 pints of lager off me every year and has singularly failed to raise the general standard of living as a result; I start to object when they ask me for yet more. This is what results in my being convinced that social programmes as are are failures and until I hear of a convincing way to make them work, I'm going to cavil at every extra penny the govt. steals from me.
Re:
Date: 2002-10-04 07:28 am (UTC)Unlike you, though; I don't like it.
Re:
Date: 2002-10-04 08:19 am (UTC)Re:
Date: 2002-10-04 08:28 am (UTC)I think the realisation that relinquishing your possessions and wearing (homemade) sackcloth and ashes is the only true rejection of capitalism is something that sticks in a lot of pseudo-anarchists throats, and kind of makes them draw their own wibbly line.
Hey, Levellers, you think your electric guitars were made by Yugoslavian peasants for love?
Just a couple of holes to poke
Date: 2002-10-04 08:10 am (UTC)2) There are certainly deficiencies to the welfare state. OTOH, when faced with those extremes, it is vitally important to have that safety net there. Moreover, there are the revolutionary-deflating aspects of such policies, which are their origins after all...and still hold true, perhaps even moreso today than before (as there are more people today, and wealth still has some nastily uneven distribution)
Re: Just a couple of holes to poke
Date: 2002-10-04 08:31 am (UTC)The research I'm aware of indicates the truth of the old Jesuit saw; "Give me a child until the age of four, and I will show you the man."
2) However, there is the argument that if you pay people to do something, then some will do it. Is there any objection to asking people to contribute to society in return for support from society? That's why I'm a fan of pensions, and am irritated by the govts' cavalier attitude towards them; pensioners *have* contributed, and society owes them a debt of obligation.
Re: Just a couple of holes to poke
2) Fair enough, but I consider pensions another component of that safety net. Still, throughout the developed world, those government-sponsored pensions are no longer the sure-bet for elderly survival they once were. This is especially true in the US.
Re: Just a couple of holes to poke
Date: 2002-10-07 01:24 am (UTC)Hence my feelings that people on benefit who can work, should. When I graduated, I was on the dole for a year and a half. During that time I worked as a volunteer at the Christie Cancer Hospital as I felt that I owed something back in return for the support society was giving me. As others obvoiusly don't feel the same sense of responsibility, I see no reason why we should keep giving them money.