Last night, I debated the University of Chicago’s Brian Leiter on “Capitalism, Social Democracy, and Socialism” at the University of Wisconsin. Leiter wrote the precise resolution:
“Social democracy is preferable to market capitalism, but ultimately America will need to move towards a socialist system.”
Here’s my opening statement; I’ve debated Elizabeth Bruenig and John Marsh on this general topic before.
All First World countries are already social democracies. Their governments continue to allow markets to provide most goods and services, but they heavily regulate these markets, heavily subsidize favored sectors like education and health, and heavily redistribute income. The U.S. is moderately less social democratic than France or Sweden, but the idea that we have “market capitalism” while they have “social democracy” is hyperbole. If you favor social democracy, you should be happy because your side won long ago: free-market rhetoric notwithstanding, the U.S. has Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and public education, and strict regulation of labor markets, construction, and other major industries. My view, however, is that social democracy is an awful mistake. Despite its bad press, market capitalism would be much better than what we have now.
Advocates of social democracy typically claim credit for three major improvements over market capitalism. First, they’ve used redistribution to greatly reduce poverty. Second, they’ve used regulation to make markets work better. Third, they’ve used government funding to provide wonderful services that markets neglect. I say they’ve greatly overstated their success on all three counts – while conveniently neglecting heavy collateral damage.
Let’s start with redistribution. The rhetoric of redistribution revolves around “helping the poor.” When you look at redistribution in the real world, however, this is grossly misleading. The U.S. government spends far more on the elderly – most of whom aren’t poor – than it spends on actual poverty programs. Programs like Social Security and Medicare are popular because they “help everyone.” But “helping everyone” is extremely wasteful because most of the people government helps would have been quite able to take care of themselves. Instead, we absurdly tax everyone to help everyone.
This humanitarian rhetoric rings even more hollow when you examine the most important forms of government regulation. Domestically, nothing does more harm than our draconian regulation of the construction industry. This regulation, primarily state and local, makes it very hard to build new housing, especially in high-wage places like New York City and the Bay Area. It’s hard to build tall buildings. It’s hard to build multi-family housing. You have to waste a lot of valuable land; builders put houses on an acre of land because zoning laws force them to do so. The connection between this regulation and exorbitant housing prices is almost undeniable. In lightly-regulated areas of the country like Texas, business supplies ample cheap housing. Anytime someone tells you regulation makes markets work better, just look at San Francisco’s housing market for a reality check. And this hardly one tiny failure of regulation; housing absorbs about 40% of the average Americans’ budget.
Immigration regulation is an even more egregious failure. The single best way for people around the world to escape poverty is to move to high-productivity countries like the U.S. and get a job. This benefits not only immigrants, but us, because we’re their customers; the more they sell us, the better-off we are. A hundred years ago, immigration to the U.S. was almost unregulated, giving people all over the world a viable way to work their way out of poverty. Now, in contrast, immigration is very tightly regulated – especially for those most in need. Economists’ estimates of the global harm of these regulations sum to tens of trillions of dollars a year, because each immigrant worker vastly enriches the world, and hundreds of millions of workers wish to come. Again, this is the opposite of one tiny failure of regulation.
Finally, what about education, health care, and other sectors that government subsidizes? I say these policies are crowd-pleasing but terribly wasteful. Yes, more educated workers make more money, but the main reason is not that you’re learning useful skills. Most of what you study in school is irrelevant in the real world. Degrees mostly pay by convincing employers that you’re smarter, harder-working, and more conformist than the competition. That’s why there’s been severe credential inflation since World War II: the more degrees workers have, the more degrees you need to convince employers not to throw your application in the trash. Pouring money on education is an exercise in futility.
The same goes for health care. Almost every researcher who measures the effect of health care on health agrees that this effect is much smaller than the public imagines. Diet, exercise, substance abuse, and other lifestyle choices are much more important for health than access to medicine. But these facts notwithstanding, the government lavishes funding on health care that barely improves our health. If this seems implausible, just compare American life expectancy to Mexico’s. Medicare plus Medicaid cost well over a trillion dollars a year, yet we only live a year-and-a-half longer.
A reasonable social democrat could object: Fine, actual social democracies cause great harm and waste insane amounts of money. But we can imagine a social democracy that limits itself to helping hungry kids and refugees, fighting infectious disease, and other well-targeted programs for the betterment of humanity. Frankly, abolishing everything except these few programs sounds really close to market capitalism to me… and it also sounds like wishful thinking. In the real world, governments with lots of power and a vague mandate to “help people” reliably do great harm. This is true in the U.S., and it’s true in Sweden. Yes, the Swedes strangle their housing industry too.
Given all this, I predictably deny that “ultimately America will need to move towards a socialist system.” Full-blown socialist systems make social democracy look great by comparison. Indeed, once you draw the distinction between social democracy and socialism, it’s very hard to find to find any socialist regime that isn’t a tragic, despotic disaster. If Sweden is the jewel of social democracy, what’s the jewel of socialism? Cuba? Nor is there any sign that socialism somehow becomes “more necessary” as countries progress. The main reason governments have gotten bigger over the last thirty years is just the aging of the population.
Finally, let me underscore what I’m not saying. I’m not saying that life in the U.S. or Sweden is terrible. In fact, human beings in both countries enjoy close to the highest quality of life than human beings have ever achieved. My claim, rather, is that even the most successful countries in history could do far better. I know that social democratic policies are emotionally appealing. That’s why they’ve won. Yet objectively speaking, market capitalism should have won because market capitalism offers much better results.
READER COMMENTS
David Henderson
Mar 12 2020 at 11:13am
Really nice statement, Bryan.
Floccina
Mar 12 2020 at 11:15am
Should be:
U.S. has Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and public education
Joel Pollen
Mar 12 2020 at 11:33am
Thanks for coming to the University of Wisconsin, Bryan! I enjoyed the debate quite a bit. I would have liked to have more than the brief interaction that we did, but you had to get to dinner!
The audience responded to you fairly negatively, as anyone who knows the political climate of Madison would expect — two of the three largest employers here are the state government and a public university. Even so, I was a bit surprised at people’s reactions to your presentation. From their tone and questions, it was clear to me that they didn’t just disagree with you. A lot of what you said was fairly straightforward application of economic principles, but even this was so foreign to people that they simply could not grasp it. The most charitable interpretation is that the audience does not accept the basic concepts of economics, but simple ignorance also seems likely. Maybe this is unique to left-wing Midwestern urban audiences. I suspect it is not.
I suppose that’s good news for economic educators: the harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few!
David Henderson
Mar 12 2020 at 3:44pm
You’ve got me curious. Was the tone of most of the questions nasty or was it just hypercritical? Also, were there any disruptions or were the speakers’ and other questioners’ freedom of speech respected?
Joel Pollen
Mar 16 2020 at 3:20pm
David,
No, it was more subtle than that. A few people were angry, but a lot of people were just incredulous. Like I suggested, I think these folks don’t share the premises or language that a lot of economic arguments are based on, so the arguments don’t make sense to them.
People of course interrupted and talked over each other sometimes, but no more than is typical for a debate on a controversial topic. It was a mostly civil and pleasant event.
robc
Mar 12 2020 at 4:11pm
When I was at grad school in Madison, I went to see Buckley speak. I don’t think the crowd paid any attention to to what he said, they had their preconceived notions about him and asked questions then ignored the answers.
But it was entertaining. He was polite and funny.
Peter
Mar 12 2020 at 11:49am
Must have been a great event. Does anyone know if there is a recording of it? Couldn’t find it on youtube.
Thaomas
Mar 12 2020 at 1:16pm
Of course no one knows what “market capitalism” in the aggregate would be. But what are the policies that would make the biggest difference?
Granted that financing SS/Medicare/Medicaid with a capped tax on wages had a greater dead-weight loss than if financed with a VAT, but does it really do “great harm” relative to the best alternative, whatever that is?”
Granted that subsidizing employers to buy health insurance for their employees was a mistake but what is the best way to reform the system? Why did we not hear these proposals from Libertarians and “conservatives” before ACA was being debated or even after?
As Lenin said, “What is to be done?”
robc
Mar 12 2020 at 4:12pm
You did…well, I did. I don’t know what you heard.
Here is an “after” proposal: https://www.randpaul.com/news/obamacare-replacement-act-rand-paul
Matthias Görgens
Mar 13 2020 at 2:46am
You don’t have to have any ideal end state for market captialism in mind, and we don’t need much imagination:
Simple looking around the world and imitating the best policies we can find would move us along enormously. Even without coming up with a single new idea of our one.
When I say look around the world, I mean look around in space but also in time. History can be a great guide.
If you are looking for a sound bite sized answer: learn from Singapore.
nobody.really
Mar 12 2020 at 2:30pm
Now who is engaging in wishful thinking?
An alternative thesis: Corruption by powerful interests is unavoidable. Social democracies are no exception–but social democracies have the advantage of letting the majority become one of those powerful interests, thereby providing a countervailing force to the rest. Efforts to adopt “market capitalism” devoid of this countervailing force would, in practice, simply devolve into unbridled crony capitalism.
True, correlation is not causation. But if we were to ask Edmund Burke about the wisdom of discarding the practices of the ACTUAL most successful nations in history in the pursuit of a THEORETICAL improvement, what would he tell us?
Mark Z
Mar 12 2020 at 4:05pm
There are 11 countries/autonomous city-states that are wealthier than the US; 8 of them have smaller governments than the US. Even if we throw out Hong Kong and Macau and the Middle East oil states, out of the 5 remaining, 3 (Switzerland, Ireland, Singapore) are smaller and 2 (Norway and Luxembourg) are larger. In other words, if we’re to seek to emulate what few societies are wealthier than ours (I think this goes for the US and UK) it seems the direction is toward less social democracy.
You’re partly right in that developed countries in general tend to have robust social insurance systems; they have those because they’re successful, not the other way around. You can do the regressions to see which variable explains the other; increases in government spending don’t (at least from my cursory analyses) predict better economic growth, even controlling for current GDP per capita; rather economic growth leads to increases in government spending and social spending.
Rich social democracies, if they converted to market capitalism, would not be stricken poor. Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Ireland aren’t wastelands compared to France, Sweden, and Belgium. Social democracy seems like a societal luxury good that countries purchase as they get rich. One could argue that it’s a good purchase in its own right for moral reasons, but I think it’s difficult to argue that we’d be poorer on average without it.
KevinDC
Mar 12 2020 at 4:30pm
“Corruption by powerful interests is unavoidable”
Agreed.
“Social democracies are no exception”
Also agreed.
“social democracies have the advantage of letting the majority become one of those powerful interests, thereby providing a countervailing force to the rest.”
Yikes! Just…yikes.
That might be plausible if “the majority” had accurate beliefs about policies, their costs and benefits, their alternatives, etc. In that circumstance, this could be a realistic counterweight against powerful interests. But…is that actually true? Should we accept this as an article of faith? Or should we consider whether there is actual research on this idea? Because this is contradicted by a small body of research known as “literally everything examining the accuracy of the public’s political knowledge in the history of ever.” I’m not talking about controversial political issues about which there is widespread disagreement. I’m talking about basic, introductory, completely uncontroversial facts about which there is no dispute. For any subject X, if the majority is wildly misinformed about the most basic information regarding X, then giving said majority the ability to influence the operations of X is basically guaranteed to make things worse. This is as true with politics as it is with, say, whether or not biology textbooks should talk about evolution. (They totally should, by the way.)
No serious political scientist I’m aware of actually argues that “the majority” has accurate beliefs that would effectively countervail special interests in any real world situation. That’s a line that gets a lot of applause as a sound bite at a political rally but would get you laughed out of any serious political science conference. The only debate is about why “the majority” holds political views so out of touch with reality. There’s a wide range of explanations available. Modern Marxists argue it’s about “false consciousness” (mostly because they’ve never actually read Marx in detail and have no idea what Marx actually meant by that term). Robin Hanson suggests politics isn’t about policy, it’s about loyalty signaling. James Buchanan argues the public is rationally ignorant regarding policies and politics. Bryan Caplan suggests the public is rationally irrational. Jeffery Friedman argues that it’s due to “radical ignorance” – see his critique of “citizen technocrats” in his recent book Power Without Knowledge: A Critique of Technocracy. I consider all of these to be relevant factors – I don’t consider any one of them to be the “whole story.” But if even one of them is true, then the idea that “the majority” will effectively counteract powerful interests via democracy is automatically false. If you have information and arguments that would demonstrate that all of these bodies of research are wrong, and that “the majority” actually does effectively serve as a counterweight to powerful interests in the world we actually live in, I suggest you make this information publicly available, and in detail. You would have a Nobel Prize for Political Science in your future! All I ask is half the cash prize you would win, for encouraging you to make your knowledge public. That seems fair to me.
nobody.really
Mar 12 2020 at 5:37pm
I don’t know that accurate beliefs are required, by either majorities or minorities, for them to wield power. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Lehman Bros. and Arthur Anderson wielded power in evading/discouraging certain kinds of financial regulation–even if those policies ultimately led to their own demise. The accuracy of their beliefs may have been unrelated to their ability to wield power.
See Lemieux latest post, quoting Anthony de Jasay: “When the state cannot please everybody, it will choose whom it had better please.” (I’d guess that’s true of everybody, not just the state.) Under a social democracy, the state has a greater incentive to try to please the majority of the voting public, not just the cronies.
Sure, accurate beliefs are nice. But democracy means governance by amateur, not expert. You can hate that; you’d have good cause and much company. But I’d offer Churchill’s admonition that democracy is the worst form of governance ever devised–except for all the others. Do you prefer North Korea, where the government labors to keep the public’s access to power on par with it’s access to news?
As a final example, consider Social Security: According to Pew, 77% of people don’t want it cut. You might regard their opinion as ill-informed–but it’s an opinion that politicians ignore at their peril. For better and worse.
KevinDC
Mar 12 2020 at 6:45pm
“I don’t know that accurate beliefs are required, by either majorities or minorities, for them to wield power.”
Well no, of course not. But that’s besides the point. Your initial comment contained the claim that majority power served as an effective as a counterweight against the corruption of powerful special interests, which in turn served as an advantage for social democracy – and in order for that claim to be valid, accurate beliefs on the parts of majorities would be required. I was arguing that was unsupported by all the available evidence. So responding to that by simply pointing out that majorities can wield power with inaccurate beliefs isn’t of any particular interest – it’s an unrelated point.
“But I’d offer Churchill’s admonition that democracy is the worst form of governance ever devised–except for all the others.”
This claim has much less purchase than many people seem to think. There are two different questions about government we ought to consider – what type of government we ought to have, and the scope of power that government ought to have. The “democracy is the worst government except for all the others” adage is of some interest when considering the first question. But it does nothing to address questions about the scope of government. If the best form of government available is still pretty crappy, then it seems to me the sensible response is use democracy where government is needed, but also tightly limit its scope because majority rule has strong systemic defects still built into it.
“Do you prefer North Korea, where the government labors to keep the public’s access to power on par with it’s access to news?”
C’mon man 😛 Seriously? Are you really playing the “so do you prefer North Korea” card??? You know better than that. One can argue that democracy should have limited scope because of various issues without becoming a fan of North Korea. Saying democratic governments should have limited powers does not entail believing “therefore we should have a totalitarian government with unlimited power”. That’s…just obvious, right? Did you really need to ask that question???
nobody.really
Mar 12 2020 at 8:13pm
A fair point.
So let’s compare broader vs. more limited concepts of government. For a long time, male leaders–celebrities, Catholic priests, scout masters–sexually abused people subordinate to them. And for a long time, government did nothing. Private citizens were left to seek their own remedies. But recently, government has begun taking remedial actions against these men.
Now, I’m perfectly willing to acknowledge that the public is rationally ignorant, that government is power-hungry and self-serving, yadda yadda. Yet, as between a world in which government turns a blind eye to these private abuses and a world in which government takes a greater role in remedying those abuses, I prefer the latter. I am NOT persuaded that smaller is always better.
Or consider governmental reactions to the outbreak of the caronavirus. Some have been more aggressive; some less so. Time may tell which approach was more effective. Again, am NOT persuaded that less is always more, standard disclaimers notwithstanding.
Or consider the world before the pre-Civil Rights Acts world to the post-Civil Rights Acts world. The various federal Civil Rights Acts expanded federal powers. And I’m not persuaded that this was a bad thing, even after all your political science friends offer all their caveats.
In sum, we might concede that the best form of government available is still pretty crappy (relative to perfection), and that majority rule has strong systemic defects built into it. It does not therefore follow that LACK of government capacity produces better results, because private interests ALSO has defects built into them.
You have ably argued that X does not imply Y. But that does not demonstrate that NOT X does imply Y.
KevinDC
Mar 12 2020 at 8:53pm
A quick point and then a longer one –
There’s some interesting stuff there, but still, nothing that substantiates your original claim that majority rule is an effective bulwark against corruption by special interests, which is where this whole conversation started. Despite the detour, there’s a few things worth noting in your reply
I don’t know of a single advocate of smaller government who has as part of their vision that government “turns a blind eye” to abuses as you describe. Stopping and prosecuting sexual abuse is exactly the sort of thing that even the most minimal of minarchists would say is a justified thing for governments to do. I suppose in a very technical, all else equal sense a government that does nothing about sexual abuse would be smaller than a government who does. But this seems so far removed from what actual advocates of smaller government are arguing for that I don’t think there’s much progress to be made in that line of inquiry. You’d just be bashing your shoulder against a wide open door there.
The longer one comes in response to your noting that regarding the cornonavirus, it’s not clear that a smaller government would be more effective than a bigger one. I don’t know what to say about hypothetical smaller or bigger governments that exist in the Platonic realm, but in this world, with the government we actually have – well, I’ll just import this from Scott Alexander:
So, I find it pretty plausible that large state capacity, given how states operate in the real world, has made the situation worse, and that a situation where the state was less involved would have led to much better reasons – for all the standard disclaimer reasons you acknowledge in your post. This is exactly the kind of handling of things a cynic about state capacity like myself would have predicted would occur in this situation.
KevinDC
Mar 13 2020 at 11:29am
[Prescript – I attempted to post a response yesterday but it seems to have been caught up in the system – possibly due to the abundance of links it contained. I’m attempting another response, based largely upon my vague memory of what I said last night but also expanded, but this time with links removed. To the Econlog editor, if you find my earlier attempt at a reply in the system somewhere, feel free to kill it, and just let this one come through instead. Or if they both come through, could you please delete the previous and leave this one in its place?]
Hello again nobody –
A few quick thoughts, and not so quick ones as well.
Firstly, this conversation had definitely drifted a fair amount away from your original claim that social democracies benefit by allowing majorities to serve as an effective counterweight against corrupt special interests. There’s nothing in your responses which defends that specific claim against the criticisms I raised, which was the original point under dispute. But still, some of your other comments are interesting, so I’ll add a few thoughts of my own.
You point out that for a long time, the government was ineffectual against claims of sexual assault, due to incompetence, or indifference leading to turning a blind eye, or maybe both. You then conclude “between a world in which government turns a blind eye to these private abuses and a world in which government takes a greater role in remedying those abuses, I prefer the latter. I am NOT persuaded that smaller is always better.” I think you’re laboring under a serious misapprehension if you think this is normally what’s meant in the debate about smaller vs larger government. Now, technically, if you have Governments A and B, exactly the same in every way except that A prosecutes sexual assault and B never does, then you could say that Government B would be smaller than A. But if you actually think that means advocates of smaller government would therefore judge B superior to A, you are wildly misinformed about what they actually mean when they talk about wanting smaller government, why they want it, and what that means. Even the most minimal of minarchists, who want the scope of government to be as narrow as it can be, would place things like “prosecuting sexual assaults” well within the proper scope of government. I mean, if you know of any serious counterexamples to that, I would appreciate if you could cite a specific source.
The coronavirus is another interesting case. You may not be convinced that “less is more” regarding state capacity. But at least as far as the state we have in America, I think there’s a pretty strong case to be made. I’ll import the specifics from Scott Alexander, especially for the systemic issues he notes in the second to last paragraph quoted:
Some people might respond to those concerns by saying “Well the solution is to have strong intervention by government agents but have them act in a way that is competent and effective instead.” To them I say – you have not sufficiently understood the problem. Not even close. To my ear, it sounds as naive as if someone said “Of course the US should militarily intervene in fractured third world countries, but next time they should just make sure things don’t descend into blood soaked death squads instead.” That never works, ever. It’s practically a law of physics at this point.
As far as why I think that, I think a good explanation of the reasons and thought processes which lead me to that conclusion are also found in this Scott Alexander post on, of all things, public food options, particularly the arguments he makes in section III. I realize I’m being very heavy on quoting him in this response but, well, he’s smarter and and a better writer than me, so I’m happy to just point people his way.
nobody.really
Mar 12 2020 at 2:45pm
Grandpa: Suppose I pay you this money [for taxes—] what do I get for my money?
IRS Agent: ….How do you think the Government keeps up the Army and Navy? All those battleships….
Grandpa: The last time we used battleships was in the Spanish-American War. And what did we get out it? Cuba—and we gave that back. I wouldn’t mind paying if it were for something sensible….
Moss Hart & George S. Kaufman, You Can’t Take It With You (1937), Act I.
Matthias Görgens
Mar 13 2020 at 2:49am
That’s a funny quote, but to steelman the argument a bit:
If you pay for impressive enough weapons you don’t have to use them. And what you get out of it is not Cuba, but keeping your already acquired territory.
Daniel Lurker
Mar 12 2020 at 5:56pm
I was at the event and enjoyed it a lot. However, I think that Leiter’s resolution was both too broad and too narrow.
For instance, its wording made everything related to social democratic policies, socialism and capitalism fair game. So Caplan was prepared to defend basically every single policy position that he holds, many of which are controversial. Bryan devotes entire semesters and entire books to covering some of those topics, so he had to paint with broad strokes.
At the same time, Leiter was unfair. The moments he shouted that he didn’t know what collectivism were was were particularly disturbing. Similarly, he refused to engage with Bryan on housing policy because he said that he didn’t know about it and that it was out of scope. I found this peculiar because few things are more capital intensive than construction. Leiter also seemed to accuse Caplan of not truly understanding Marx.
Another thing that struck me as weird was that Leiter was confident that Marx’s predictions would play out, but when Bryan said that there would be more jobs created in the future he said that history was young and Bryan couldn’t truly know that.
A narrower topic and clearer ground rules might have allowed people to listen more closely. Still a fun time, with some people clearly intrigued to learn more about both scholars.
Jacob Thompson
Mar 12 2020 at 6:32pm
I think you need to argue that the collateral damage done by socialist governments is related to those governments being socialist. Those two extremely costly regulations, construction and immigration, aren’t unique to governments that advocates would call “socialist” or “social-democratic,” but feature in essentially all nation states at the moment.
Matthias Görgens
Mar 13 2020 at 2:53am
Yes. And if you refine your argument to talk about degrees instead categories, you can handle this:
You don’t even have to leave the US to find an example.
California’s housing restrictions are explicitly clad in more social democratic / progressive rethoric than Texas’ relative freedom.
Similarly for Sweden’s restrictions.
Mark Z
Mar 13 2020 at 10:11pm
I’m interested in Bryan’s opinion on the usefulness of speaking debates in general. I assume he thinks they’re a viable means of persuasion since he participates in a good number of them (or I suppose he could just enjoy them), but I’m skeptical of their value – especially compared to written debates like the ones one finds at Cato Unbound. I think spoken debates risk rewarding rhetoric over logic and make it more difficult to make complex arguments. For that reason, even if you do persuade someone via such a debate, I’d worry that it wouldn’t be for rational reasons.
Chuck Woolery
Mar 14 2020 at 8:46am
Nothing defeats the concept of market forces better and faster than a global pandemic. Pathogens are the greatest threat humans, our governments, and our economies have always faced regardless of race, political party, nationality, or species. Prevention requires long term global investments that short term local or national profit goals rarely consider.
Until we talk about prevention of pandemics on the global level in the context of the United Nation’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals we will continue to deal with them in astronomically expensive reactionary efforts within each nation, each state, and each home. A truly holistic approach requires a whole world approach. The protection of fundamental human rights is the foundation of national security. National sovereignty and market forces are meaningless to pathogens. Clean water, sanitation, basic education, adequate nutrition and access to basic health services is fundamental to sustaining everyone’s freedoms, security, and prosperity.
Jens
Mar 15 2020 at 9:46am
Good post. I have no doubt that you can learn a lot from Bryan Caplan on immigration, regulation and redistribution. The Open Borders comic / graphic novel has been ordered and I will read it with my sons.
As others have noted, there are of course a few logical breaks. E.g. the question of why social democracy should be explicitly held against open borders, when it is a detail that almost all nation states of the world implement. And it is precisely a confederation of states (the EU) that at least tore down most its internal borders and is simultaneously and markedly shaped by social democracy.
It is also somewhat unclear why market capitalism “objectively speaking” “should have won because .. (it) offers much better results”, if at the same time “all First World countries are already social democracies” holds. That is probably the objectivity of longing or the unicorn.
I am standing in the middle there. When i read texts by socialists and left-wing social democrats, i am always happy that there are liberals (in the European sense) and libertarians. And when i read texts by liberals and libertarians, i am always happy that there are democratic socialists and social democrats.
But my expectation of social democracy is not that it implements regulation, immigration or redistribution in such a way that everyone is satisfied and all efficiency criteria are met. My expectation of social democracy is that it shows conflicts openly and without too much cruelty. And in my eyes it usually implements that quite good. Gulags are very cruel, taxes not necessarily so much. In a world full of Bryan Caplans, these conflicts might (inclined wording) not exist, but thats not the world as it is.
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