Before and after my “Capitalism vs. Socialism” Debate with Elizabeth Bruenig, we had quite a while to chat. While I was nonplussed by her case for socialism, she was quite gracious in person. There are probably plenty of socialists like her: Nice people who find capitalism disgusting. Which gets me thinking: If capitalism made my flesh crawl and I knew socialism wasn’t coming anytime soon, how would I cope? What is the best way for a can-do socialist to find socialism in a capitalist world?
Step 1: Live very modestly. Shop at Walmart – or better yet, Aldi’s. Move to a low-cost part of the country. Don’t own a car; just take the bus – or Uber if you must. Get books and DVDs from the library. Buy durables at estate sales; they’re practically giving furniture away. Use a 5-year-old phone. Victims of consumerism may scoff at your frugal lifestyle, but you know that real happiness comes from autonomy and community.
Step 2: Cheat the rat race. If you want to consume lots of luxury products, you’ll probably have to run capitalist rat races for decades. But if you practice personal austerity, you have flexibility. You can take a low-paid full-time job you enjoy. You can take a better-paid part-time job you don’t enjoy. You can run the standard rat race for a 5, 10, or 15 years – then shock your co-workers by retiring. Or any mix thereof.
Step 3: Get some roommates who share your values. You aren’t really living socialism until you live in a commune. Start by recruiting family members and close friends. Then expand from there. Sure, many landlords will object, but shop around until you find some outliers. And remember – you can approximate a commune just by living in the same apartment complex as your comrades.
Step 4: Delay child-bearing until you’ve found a livable escape from the rat race. If you’re an eco-socialist, of course, you might want to avoid kids altogether. If and when you have kids, don’t compromise with the outside world. No kid “needs” Nikes or iPads.
Step 5: Avoid capitalist vices. When greedy businesses try to sell you alcohol, sugar, tobacco, or illegal drugs, just say no. To repeat, real happiness comes from autonomy and community, not ephemeral and addictive stimulants.
The top objection to my advice, I expect, will be that it’s imperfect. What if a socialist doesn’t want to work a square job for a single second? This objection is true but childish. In the real world, there are no perfect solutions. You have to game the system as best you can. If I were a socialist, I would use my playbook.
You could also object that my approach is tantamount to surrender. I’m teaching people how to endure capitalism, instead of how to end it. Reply: Why not be the change you want to see in the world? You can live a socialist lifestyle and promote broad social change at the same time. The key difference is simply that you don’t have to convince the world to build your socialist Bubble. So why wait?
Last, you might object that you don’t want to live an austere, unambitious, communal, puritanical lifestyle. If so, some soul-searching is in order.
Yes, socialists have long quarreled about what ideal socialism would look like. Should we just meet everyone’s basic needs and focus on community – or produce enough to let everyone live like a millionaire? But in practice, this debate is premature. Whenever socialists actually acquire the power to remake society, the modest lifestyle I’ve sketched above remains far out of reach of most of the population. People in Cuba and Venezuela struggle even to feed themselves, and feel far more fear than fellowship; and both are paradises compared to the Soviet Union or Maoist China. As a practical matter, the best place to experiment with a socialist lifestyle is in a wealthy capitalist society. So why not give it a go – and tell the rest of us how it works out?
READER COMMENTS
JFA
Aug 15 2018 at 11:17am
Hey Socialists! Do you know how to find socialism in a capitalist world? Shop at Walmart.
This almost had me rolling in my cubicle. I understand Bryan’s point about living modestly, but the suggestion would sound so absurd to an actual socialist that I wonder if Bryan is really trying to convince anybody.
Why would this not really convince anyone? Because Bryan is basically saying: “You see those poor people over there who don’t buy the good stuff and live in their parents’ basement because they have low-paying jobs. Go, and do likewise… except for the drugs, booze, and candy… don’t do those.” This post is very well done satire.
Weir
Aug 15 2018 at 9:44pm
There are plenty of actual socialists whose precise objection is to the wealthy western world’s vulgar luxuries and disgusting prosperity. It’s not even just socialists. Herbert Spencer thought the rat race was ridiculous. Bagehot mocked the “undeviating pursuit of small material objects.” As did Adam Smith.
There’s also the fictional socialist who looks out on London with its “square miles of meagre modern houses whose principal purpose was the support of TV aerials and dishes; factories producing worthless junk to be advertised on the televisions and, in dismal lots, lorries queuing up to distribute it; and everywhere else, roads and the tyranny of traffic. It looked like a raucous dinner party the morning after. No one would have wished it this way, but no-one had been asked. Nobody planned it, nobody wanted it but most people had to live in it. To watch it mile after mile, who would have guessed that kindness or the imagination, that Purcell or Britten, Shakespeare or Milton, had ever existed? Occasionally, as the train gathered speed and they swung further away from London, countryside appeared and with it the beginnings of beauty or the memory of it, until seconds later it dissolved into a river straightened to a concrete sluice or a sudden agricultural wilderness without hedges or trees, and roads, new roads probing endlessly, shamelessly as though all that mattered was to be elsewhere. As far as the welfare of every other living form on earth was concerned, the human project was not just a failure, it was a mistake from the very beginning.”
Hazel Meade
Aug 16 2018 at 11:43am
Shop at thrift stores is probably a better example.
You only need to go to walmart for cleaning supplies and the occasional pack of socks and underwear. Everything else you can get at a thrift shop.
JFA
Aug 16 2018 at 12:10pm
I love the thrift shop. My kids wouldn’t have nearly as many Legos and Lincoln Logs if I didn’t shop there.
I’m all about living frugally (that’s how I plan to retire early). But I think Bryan is wrong in the diagnosis of why ‘socialists’ are angry about the current state of affairs. It may have something to do with materialism that capitalism engenders. To be honest, as a lover of free markets, this also gets under my skin every now and then.
What Bryan misses is that ‘socialists’ today are mostly concerned about inequality and getting “the good stuff” to everyone who can’t afford it. This why Bryan’s advice “Go and be poor” is not likely to even dent anyone’s thought process, let alone convince them.
Hazel Meade
Aug 16 2018 at 3:13pm
I disagree. I actually know many left-leaning people who actually live this advice all the time. I don’t think they really want “nice stuff” to be distributed equally. Many of them are concerned about the environment and the effect of a modern industrial economy on it. the distribution of health care and education are the biggest issues because they don’t believe those should be unequally distributed. But they mostly don’t care that some people have bigger, nicers houses or have nicer cars or nicer clothing.
I’m speaking here of principled leftists, not partisans. There are some people who are just tribal partisan warriors who will come up with any excuse to be anti-capitalist. But the principled socialists very often do follow Bryan’s advice and live “off the grid”, form communes, and live frugal lifestyles for the sake of the environment.
Michael Kaufmann
Aug 15 2018 at 11:18am
I’m generally a free-market, yay capitalism, type of guy (as a reader of this blog, I’m here to confirm those priors — only half kidding), but I have to comment on how similar your description of ‘socialist’ lifestyle choices is to how I actually live now and what I plan to do in the future.
The big one for me is the level of commitment in terms of time and attention that is required at a full-time job. My desire to have control over my time, so I can explore all of the things I want to explore, keep relationships with people close to me, and really challenge myself physically are hard to do when my life is organized around a job. I’m saving and investing now in order to allow for more optionality in a few years where I can get control over my time (and thus, where my attention and my mind is allowed to look, and even where my body is allowed to go).
The thing that I struggle with the most in the business world at large, is reconciling the needs of the business and what we’re trying to do with my internal view, and how I would actually behave (which is almost always, “walk away, don’t buy it, stupid!”). I want to be straight with people, but the business reality has a tendency, at least where I’ve been, to make it hard to be completely upfront with our clients… Hard to say more, without going into specifics and making this a lot longer.
All that said, big-picture, I’m grateful for the abundance of opportunities and products that the system has made possible and for all of the hard-work, vision, and brilliance of these people/machines/companies/social structures/institutions that make it possible for me to even consider these types of questions. I’m firmly in the “this is the best time to be alive” camp, and I would not want to go back to any other time in history.
Dylan
Aug 15 2018 at 1:31pm
While I’m with JFA and appreciate this as satire, it does seem to miss the point about being familiar with the issues that actually animate those in America that call themselves socialists these days. Which seem to be primarily things like affordable healthcare and education. A good chunk of my friends are probably at least sympathetic to American socialists of the Sanders type, and most of them are already living a life not all that different from what Bryan is suggesting. I have one friend who’s worked for a total of two years in the decade that I’ve known him, and the rest of the time he’s either biking around the world, or couch surfing. Some other friends bought an apartment building together and have been living together in a kind of commune ever since.
That’s all well and good, but even with an austere lifestyle you need to have a fairly decent job to afford $1000 a month for unsubsidized health insurance.
Paul
Aug 15 2018 at 1:50pm
@Dylan, I would be surprised if this was satire – based on reading Bryans previous posts. Its a similar point that Tyler Cowen made in ‘Average is Over’ which was that the lower classes, after the machines take over most jobs, will have a lot of leasure time and eat affordable Beans, which if properly prepared can taste wonderfull!
BC
Aug 16 2018 at 3:16am
If your friend decided to work 8 years, instead of 2, each decade then he would only need to earn 20k/yr in the additional 6 years to earn the 120k necessary to pay for a whole decade’s worth of health insurance. Also, if he is single, then health insurance is more like half that, about 500/mo or 6k/yr. I’m not sure that someone that can afford to consume 8 years of leisure every decade should ever say that anything is unaffordable.
Hazel Meade
Aug 16 2018 at 11:47am
This is why alternative medicine is so popular with socialists. if you can’t afford health insurance, then knowing how to stay healthy and treat simple illnesses with herbal remedies or acupuncture or whatnot is a viable alternative.
XVO
Aug 16 2018 at 1:44pm
[Comments removed. Please consult our comment policies and check your email for explanation.–Econlib Ed.]
Paul
Aug 15 2018 at 1:45pm
@JFA, I don’t think this is a fair characterization of what Bryan is advocating. Opting out of the ‘Rat Race’ is not the same thing as living in your parents basement. Its more like giving up some capitalist luxury goods so you don’t have to be subject to so many of the onerous requirements of the operation of that system.
Personally I opted out of it for about 12 years and lived very cheaply and well. This included lots of budget travel, backpacking, reading, etc. But that ended when I wanted to have a family. Now I’m steeped in the system and its significant demands, but have a couple of children who I can provide for (didn’t want to opt out of the capitalist medical system). I think for some its a fine trade off, for others not; but there is at least to some degree a choice in our society.
Above statements is of course an over simplification. We have a mixed capitalist/socialist economy and society. The limited, or even no government system Bryan advocates for might not have left any open spaces for me to go fishing and backpacking – it might have all been private restricted cattle ranches and expensive vacation resorts. Then again, maybe some rich capitalist would have donated land as an open space preserve and let me camp on it. I’m not sure. Would be interested in knowing Bryan’s opinion about the potential of total control of all land by a wealthy few – I think that could dissuade me from going along with a completely free market system without any state intervention or regulation.
Alan Goldhammer
Aug 15 2018 at 3:49pm
@Paul – there groups such as the Nature Conservancy that are buying up large tracts of land and preventing them from being developed. I know they got the huge plot of land just north of my alma mater, UC Santa Barbara from a benefactor.
Paul
Aug 15 2018 at 7:54pm
Sure, I’m aware of this to some extent but don’t know how it works in detail. We have an open space preserve south of San Francisco just a few miles from my house. It runs for many miles down the Peninsula and I happen to know that they get some large donations – although I doubt they can afford much more land in the Bay Area at current prices.
My broader point is whether we would get anything equivalent to a National Park or even National Forest. I think Bryan is clever and has some original ideas but I think he is strongly guided by the principled belief in a limited state and derives all advocacy from that principle. While I acknowledge this could lead to good results, and if so would support it as I think its a good principle, I’m not comfortable knowing that his reasoning is so deeply influenced by this principle which is not absolute for me. I’m concerned it contaminates his advocacy. But, related to his essay, I do concur that our system does have enough flexibility and freedom to allow us to drop out of mainstream consumerism. Like I said, I did it for more than a decade and have fond memories of it. I’m not sure I would like to live on beans, rice, and fish in my old age, or raise my kids on it, I have fond memories of the freedom.
Hazel Meade
Aug 16 2018 at 3:20pm
It’s funny because I remember literally making this exact argument to environmentalist friends back in the 1990s, over 20 years ago. Buy the land up! Don’t wait for court cases and don’t count on the government. Just buy it up and sit on it. Apparently someone took my advice.
Thomas Knapp
Aug 15 2018 at 3:19pm
Just for perfection assistance purposes, it’s Aldi, not Aldi’s.
Mark
Aug 15 2018 at 3:25pm
The steps described above seem very appealing to me, and I don’t see why they are considered socialist. To the contrary, they seem impossible to achieve in a socialist system. If you want to quit the rat race early, that means that you will be living off invested capital—something that would not be allowed in a socialist society, because the means of production would be publicly owned. Similarly, if you want to have a commune with your close friends (which is very different from having a commune with strangers), your commune and its property would need to be privately owned so you could choose who would be in it.
Hazel Meade
Aug 16 2018 at 3:25pm
Excellent point. In a truly socialist society, you would have some government official objecting to a bunch of lazy bums taking up a valuable apartment complex when some good comrades go in need of housing. If there’s no private property you can’t “drop out” or go off the grid.
Thaomas
Aug 15 2018 at 7:15pm
This rather misses the point. I suppose that Socialists (I’ve never met one and Ms Breunig certainly is not one) want Socialism for the “benefit” of everyone, not just themselves.
Philo
Aug 16 2018 at 10:17am
Don’t overlook Bryan’s Step 3: recruit some other people to live with you in a “socialist” commune: then *some* other people will benefit, along with you. Yes, you would like *everyone* to benefit, but *some* is better than *none*.
Note that socialist political parties are almost all focused on *national socialism*–on bringing socialism to the people in *one country*. That, too, is a limited objective, less than the universal ideal .
(What I find unsatisfying in Bryan’s post is that his recommended lifestyle entirely overlooks an essential feature of socialism: the social control of everyone else’s behavior.)
Maniel
Aug 15 2018 at 8:04pm
Prof. Kaplan,
Most “real-world” examples of socialism are painful because there are few, if any, avenues of escape. Your post offers the view that it is possible to do it yourself, or with a few comrades, within a capitalist entity. One real-world example along these lines is a typical Israeli kibbutz set up to offer the socialist life style. One difference between a kibbutz and a socialist country is that you are generally free to leave the former to join the majority (capitalist) society; to leave the latter, you may have to swim for it.
In my youth, I worked one summer on the kibbutz my aunt and uncle helped establish. I arrived at this socialist paradise ready to work at a time when the country was in need. After a few days in the chicken coops, I asked my aunt whether she could offer me other work options. Within one day, she had secured an opening on the ‘A’ team.
That was the hardest work, by far, I have ever done in my life. Rise at 3:30, assemble with the team at 4:00, arrive in the fields as dawn was breaking, to load bales of hay or straw left by a baling machine onto two flat-bed platforms pulled by tractors. As the sun and heat rose at the same time, some of us were on the ground throwing bales to others on the platform who were stacking them to the sky. Team members were army veterans who “had your back,” but never, ever admitted to fatigue or pain. By lunchtime, it was usually around 110 degrees (F).
Within two days, I sought out my aunt, to thank her (exhaustion does that to the mind) and to ask if she could find me some work gloves; my city-boy hands were a mess. When I showed up with the gloves on the following day, I was greeted by laughter and a show of farm-boy hands. However, by the end of the week, the whole team had found gloves. Closet capitalists?
Weir
Aug 15 2018 at 9:03pm
It’s a socialist world if you live in a big city. Hence: “Move to a low-cost part of the country.” Where the government isn’t so tirelessly involved in propping up property prices. The NIMBY nomenklatura in most of the world’s major cities have made the property market a socialist paradise for themselves.
Likewise, socialism has made higher education vastly more expensive than it used to be. And healthcare.
So for the big ticket items, we live in a socialist world right now. The kind of socialists who want government involved in every last thing really shouldn’t sweat the small stuff. That’s small ball. Real estate socialism has successfully locked out the kids and grandkids of the baby boomers, or forced them into a rat race worse than the boomers’ to pay for their little shoeboxes. The socialists should be proud of having achieved that much.
john hare
Aug 16 2018 at 5:04am
Several of the steps listed in the post are how millionaires are made. Live frugally for long enough to save investment money. When your investments make returns, still live frugally and add those returns to your income for more investment. Many first generation wealthy shop at Walmart and Aldi.
So I see several parts of the post not as a primer on Socialism, but as a partial list of steps to becoming a Capitalist. Living frugally, not becoming an alcoholic or mindless consumer, Waiting until you can afford children, and such have very little to do with Socialism as I see it. Just smart living. Of course, keeping low end or no jobs is a recipe for sadness later on, which is socialist.
No matter what system of government is involved, productivity beyond current needs leads to a wealthier society. Dropping out, and disincentivizing success are two ways to avoid that wealthier society, which is often what Socialism invites.
Weir
Aug 16 2018 at 11:04pm
Disincentivizing success is exactly what we’re doing. So there are two ways to afford a house in a big city.
The first is to work a great deal harder than your parents, and devote many more working hours to paying off the mortgage. Millennials start later, and it takes them longer to save for the downpayment in the first place. Plus they’re in school longer, racking up a lot of useless student debt (the excuse for which is that it’s an “insurance policy”).
The second way is so much easier. It’s like death and taxes in that it’s inevitable. The children of middle class boomers simply wait long enough until they inherit their parents’ houses. Your parents divorced? You’ll be twice as rich.
So what is the point of exerting yourself for 30 or 40 years? You end up owning some very expensive real estate no matter what you do, simply by virtue of having been born middle class. Smart, right?
We can double-down on the pointlessness of working hard by hiking income taxes on millennials to pay some fraction of the boomers’ unpayable debts. But it seems like the end game, as far as the boomers are concerned, is to pretend there is no end game.
dinky wink
Aug 16 2018 at 12:27pm
Socialism is collectivist ; you can’t live “as a socialist” without socialism. These individualist prescriptions don’t make sense. (Not to mention that many of us do most of what you say as an absolute necessity, not as some exercise of ideology).
Philo
Aug 17 2018 at 10:03am
Agreed. That’s what I meant by writing (above) that “Bryan’s post . . . entirely overlooks an essential feature of socialism: the social control of everyone else’s behavior.”
Erv
Aug 16 2018 at 12:28pm
Ah yes, Step 4 is clearly the outcome of socialism and would never, ever happen in capitalism. Why, people in capitalist economies like here in America are never forced to delay becoming a parent.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/05/upshot/americans-are-having-fewer-babies-they-told-us-why.html
Floccina
Aug 16 2018 at 2:37pm
I think most educated socialists would exclaim “I do not care so much about me, I’m doing fine, I’m educated after all, but it causes me pain knowing that some of my countrymen have much less than others of my countrymen and that is what I care about.
I think I just pass an idealogical Turing test.
Hazel Meade
Aug 16 2018 at 3:39pm
I love this post because is exposes how much libertarians actually have in common with some on the left. Many libertarians want economic and financial freedom to escape the same rat race that leftists see as the disease of a capitalist system. Neither side wants to be a slave to economic forces. Libertarians see the market as a thing they can use to gain financial freedom, and leftists see it as the thing that enslaves, but the goal is similar – to be able live in a way that is unconstrained by economic necessity. Ultimatly, I do think libertarians are the more clear-eyed in this respect: resources are finite and a free market permits those resources to be distributed in an economically efficient manner. Leftists too often fantasize that resources are infinite, so it is easy to redistribute enough of everything to everyone.
Hazel Meade
Aug 16 2018 at 3:46pm
Also, I would love to see a book on this very subject! I think it would be very interesting. You could do all sorts of research on experiments “socialist” microcosms like the Amish or the Mennonites or hippie communes and analyze how and when they succeed. I guess some of these might not be strictly “socialist” but they might embody some leftist ideals like communitarianism or environmentalism. The point being that it would be interesting to see some research into economic microcosms that have survived inside the capitalism system.
Dave
Aug 17 2018 at 12:14am
It’s interesting that you can be socialist within a capitalist system but never the other way around.
Dave
Aug 17 2018 at 12:18am
Or is China an example of capitalism inside socialism? Is it real socialism? Real capitalism?
john hare
Aug 17 2018 at 4:45am
Actually there is Capitalism inside many Socialist systems, though it is referred to as the black market rather than with a political title. Unmet demands often attract a supply, just not within the system.
Hazel Meade
Aug 17 2018 at 12:33pm
yes, but you can’t be a capitalist in a socialist system *legally*. And the illegality of being a capitalist in a socialist system comes with a high risk of death or imprisonment. In a capitalist system socialists pretty much only die or get imprisoned if they try to overthrow the government. If there are any laws making it difficult or impossible to form communes, I think libertarians would advocate doing away with them.
I think actual socialists might come up with some objections to this by saying that in some way the capitalist nature of the external society prevents socialism from being properly realized because the commune is forced to obey the rules of the capitalist system such as by respecting the property rights of wealthy landowners, or because they are unable to raise enough money to purchase land, and having to pay rent and taxes forces them to participate in the capitalist economy. Also, I believe communists of the Soviet era made the objection that the presence of the external capitalist system caused capital to flee to foreign countries, so you couldn’t really make it work as long as there was an external capitalist system that “capital” (i.e. wealthier people) could opt out into. Which I think is probably correct for strict Marxist socialist systems – it’s just fundamentally incompatible with individual liberty because you have to force people to stay in the system in order to compel them to give “according to their ability”. you can’t make it work with large numbers of people without making it illegal for people to quit and leave.
But there are potentially a lot of voluntaryist socialist systems that could work on a small scale within a capitalist economy where everyone in the commune actually believes in it, and people actually do it all the time in America.
Floccina
Aug 17 2018 at 10:31am
Despite my comment above I do believe that and it is a great point. In a free country you can join a commune if you want to but socialists are generally also nationalists and then humanists so they might argue that they cannot be happy knowing first that some of their countrymen have much less than others, and less so but somewhat that they cannot be happy knowing first that some of humans have much less than others.
Mark Brophy
Aug 17 2018 at 6:38am
There have been books written on the subject. The most successful commune was the Oneida society. It was successful for many decades because one of their members was a good engineer who invented top quality silverware that earned high profits. If Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg started a commune, I’m sure it would be successful, too. The Oneida commune died over 100 years ago but the Oneida silverware brand still exists.
John Alcorn
Aug 16 2018 at 6:36pm
@ Hazel Meade,
See Robert C. Ellickson’s brilliant, classic article,“Property in Land,” Yale Law Journal 102 (1993) 1,315-1,400. The article includes insightful analyses of group property, intentional communities (Hutterite Colonies and Israeli Kibbutzim), communitarian values, and revealed preferences (evidence from survivorship of communes, and evidence from migration into and out of communes).
SaveyourSelf
Aug 17 2018 at 3:28pm
I think this post and the follow up comments highlight the difficulty with discussing a topic that is not well defined. I agree with many of the comments, especially Mark’s, that most of Bryan’s steps are not actually Socialist in nature. In the main he is simply describing spending less than earning. But saving is not inherently socialist.
Socialism, as I have come to understand it, is a group of people who value something more than justice. As such, Socialists are willing to injure or allow injury to other members of their group and themselves in the name of their special priority.
Given that definition, if someone wants to practice Socialism in a purely capitalist society—assuming one existed—then that someone would need to donate their earnings and possessions to the government until it hurt, then depend on the handouts from the government for their needs and wants while fervently hoping their sacrifice of freedom and treasure led to the improvement of their overarching goal. Except in a free society Government serves no role other than justice. Thus, that government would provide nothing to the person in question except safety, regardless of their unasked donation, and would make no effort to improve the special priority desired by the socialist. The wannabe socialist could, as an alternative, donate his or her earnings to a friend or organization who could then make all purchasing decisions for the aspiring socialist, including investing in efforts to improve the chief concern.
A second valid way of practicing socialism in a free society would be to take from neighbors and give the [stolen] treasure to the government or previously described distributive authority. Unfortunately, this second way of practicing socialism is considered theft in a free society with individual property rights, meaning it violates justice. As such, the government and the people being robbed would prevent the socialistic activity. If the theft were tolerated by the society [as it is in our own], then that means the society is not free, which violates the goal of this thought exercise.
Another pragmatic way of practicing socialism in a free society is to stop working, contribute nothing to the government or a distributive authority, and depend on the handouts from government and charity to survive while devoting some of the time freed up to improve the desired prime virtue. Except that—again—in a free society the government would not participate in any activities other than providing justice, leaving only charity as a source of satisfaction of the personal needs for the socialist missionary. And if the charity is inadequate and the self-made Socialist starves, that too is permissible in a free society. Self-harm—except in the case of children—is not a violation of justice in a free society.
The most important take home from this simple but powerful definition of socialism, I think, is that—in the long run—there is no mixed capitalist/socialist systems. Society is either free or not. What we are all calling a “mixed socialist/capitalist” system is, in fact, a pure socialist system except the harm from the system is restricted to minorities–making it far better than past dictatorships where harm was applied to everybody but the dictator, but not nearly as good as a free society, where harm is explicitly prevented against all people no matter the stated intention behind the acts of harm. As it stands, we are all socialists now. This exercise backwards. The real challenge is trying to imagine ways of living free in a socialist society.
Elliot Frank
Aug 17 2018 at 7:48pm
I think people have peculiar ideological ideas about Democratic Socialism, which is what is practiced in much of Europe, few on the left here are interested in recreating Venezuela. A genuinely successful Capitalist society requires the adoption of a number of ideas that are often characterized as Socialist. For instance: Individual ethical businesses cannot compete in the marketplace with competitors who choose to dump toxic waste. The market, sadly, does not reflect the value of the environment to workers and businesspeople alike, so a third party (usually the government) must change market forces so pollution of the common air, water, and land is not profitable. Investment in public education assures future businesses of the trained workers that they often need now, and helps avoid dangerous(to everyone) social chaos as well. Hardly anyone in America has gotten rich without the infrastructure, and educational system that everyone helps pay for, and the dominant feeling on the left is not that the wealthy should not be successful, but that they are not paying a fair share of what it takes to build a 21st Century economy, and are often buying political control to assure that they do not have to do so. As one writer points out above, individual charity can give tremendous gifts to us all, and can do things that are new or untried. But, even the Nature Conservancy could not have created the National Park system.
I think we must all struggle to communicate across political lines, be open to recognizing the good intentions of others, and treating their concerns seriously. Setting up a straw man, a parody of other people’s point of view, is something that we all, no doubt, find ourselves indulging in, but the danger is that we begin to believe in the parody. If there is much to disagree about, I think there is quite a bit of common ground between the left and libertarians, and I personally am trying to seek it out without too many preconceptions.
SaveyourSelf
Aug 22 2018 at 6:09pm
Elliot Frank,
You write well. You have a nice voice. But your are mistaken when you wrote, “A genuinely successful Capitalist society requires the adoption of a number of ideas that are often characterized as Socialist.”
In support of that broken supposition you wrote, “The market, sadly, does not reflect the value of the environment to workers and businesspeople alike, so a third party (usually the government) must change market forces so pollution of the common air, water, and land is not profitable.”
There is a sprinkle of truth in what you say, but toxic waste and pollution are harmful acts. Redress of harmful acts is a function of justice, not socialism. Socialism is the subjugation of justice for some other purpose. Since the exercise of justice is not socialism, government redress on behalf of our environment is not socialistic. Since it is not socialistic, its existence does not require a concession to socialism to make Capitalism function.
You also mentioned “public” education as evidence, except public education is not required for markets to function. And since it is not required for Capitalism to function, it requires no concession from Libertarians. Furthermore, tax funding is not required for development of infrastructure. Nor is the national park system required for markets to work. Neither is recognizing “the good intentions of others”. None of these items that you associate with socialism are required for a successful capitalist market society.
You went on to say, “the dominant feeling on the left is not that the wealthy should not be successful, but that they are not paying a fair share of what it takes to build a 21st Century economy…” Except that assumes that people on the left first know what it takes to build a 21’st century economy, and second that paying something you described as “fair” will produce that idealized outcome. That’s socialism all right, but conceding to such demands does not bring about the outcome you imagine. In fact, it is not possible to imagine the outcomes that markets will produce. See F.A. Hayek.
And, finally, you wrote, “there is quite a bit of common ground between the left and libertarians.”
Perhaps it could be said that both socialists and Libertarian’s value justice. We differ in that socialists value something more than justice and Libertarian’s do not. What comes after is just window dressing.
Roger D. McKinney
Aug 18 2018 at 10:07pm
A few socialists tried that approach back in the 1960s and 70s. They bought small plots of land and tried to be self sufficient. Trouble was they smoked too much weed and couldn’t keep up the hard work.
Few socialists will take that approach because their real motive is envy, not communal living. See Helmut Schoeks’s Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior. Also read Jonathon Haidt’s The Righteous Mind. Socialists are about tearing down, not building up.
Jim
Aug 20 2018 at 3:31am
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