American socialism has long functioned under the principle that a strong central government, lavishly funded by the middle and upper classes, should influence the economy in the name of “social justice,” and provide benefits to the lower class. The power and cost of the government have steadily increased – surging under the previous two Presidents, and exploding under the current one. Its financing has shifted to deficit spending and direct control through mandates and regulation, since endless tax increases became politically painful.
I believe this system is very close to total collapse. If nothing else triggers it, the explosive bankruptcy of Social Security and Medicare will. The half-life of American socialism may now be measured in years, rather than decades. If we let it run its course and crash, its death throes will be unspeakably painful.
I don’t think our fate is sealed. Several quarters of weak economic performance have not erased the incredible potential of American industry. Technological development will bring new markets. The populace may seem lethargic now, but I think we’ll be surprised how fast the private sector leaps to its feet, once the government boot has been taken off its neck. What can we do, to begin turning things around?
Our challenge is not merely to win a few elections, or pass a bill here and there. We have to change the direction of a culture that has trended leftward, toward collectivism, through several generations. We have to move the center back to the center. This will require leadership, which we should seek out in the elections to come… but it also demands our involvement as individuals. A recent poll showed 36% of Americans, and 53% of Democrats, had a positive opinion of socialism. Our task is to understand why. This moment demands more than a critique of socialism, which is nothing less than a challenge to freedom, and requires an answer. Only by expressing the philosophy of conservatism, in powerful and memorable terms, can we win the popular support necessary to implement concrete proposals. This is a foundation to be laid in countless conversations, both online and around water coolers.
The appeal of socialism comes from more than just using money taken from the wealthy to buy the votes of the poor. It is also an expression of rage, from those who believe capitalism has treated them unfairly. Too many people seem quite willing to put up with a reduction in their modest standard of living, as long as they believe some faceless “fat cats” are getting soaked. Those who follow the bitter politics of envy should understand that every system of ordering human affairs produces both the rich and the poor. In our current situation, what cats are fatter than the political elite? As of 2008, two-thirds of our Senators were millionaires, and all of them enjoy lavish perks, incredible benefits, and gold-plated retirements, including plush lobbying and consulting jobs… when they’re unlucky enough to fall through the few holes in a 90% incumbent re-election safety net. Many of our representatives, like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, live like royalty by abusing their power. Every nickel of a politician’s fortune comes directly from your pocket, without your willing consent to purchase products or services.
The lens of socialist envy is rather selective about which targets to focus upon. Its political allies are never presented to the public as object of hatred. Neither are those with enough popularity to insulate them from criticism, such as entertainers and professional athletes. Anyone who supports the Left out of hatred for the evil rich would benefit from considering a list of the fabulously wealthy people they have not been instructed to hate.
If there will always be people who grow rich and powerful through their ambitions, it’s much more sensible to embrace a free-market system, where ambition produces value. Government pursues its ambitions at the expense of its duties. Look at the miserable performance of the Obama Administration on national defense. It has no energy to spare for thankless tasks which promise no rewards of increased power and control. The more our President and Congress pursue their desires, the worse they become at meeting the simple obligations required of them by the Constitution.
Socialism is an object of romance from its devotees. It invites them to join an epic tale of mighty statesmen solving the problems of society with noble laws, and encourages them to turn their back on the small-minded pursuit of filthy money. The Left loves to talk about the pursuit of dreams as the highest human aspiration… and since everything it proposes is presented as a dream, how can any high-minded person raise grubby practical objections? In matters affecting the millions of lives, and the disposition of trillions of dollars, we cannot afford romantic notions. Only hard, cold logic is acceptable.
The truth is that money is not an evil toxic sludge, whose stain the Left works to scour from our souls. Money is the mechanism that allows you to spend your time doing what you’re best at – which produces wealth, the same way a lever amplifies muscle to move great weights. You spend the money you earn each day on a range of products you couldn’t possibly create for yourself. You probably couldn’t create a decent pair of shoes in the hours it takes you to earn enough money to purchase them. You definitely couldn’t cobble a computer system together from nothing but raw materials, in the time it takes you to earn a thousand dollars and buy one. This is the genesis of wealth: the freedom enjoyed by people when the value of their time can be measured and traded through currency.
Through the combination of progressive taxation and payroll withholding, socialism established the principle that government has the right to set the value of your time, along with first claim on it, taking your income before you even see it… and refunding the excess without interest, when it takes too much. Of course this reduces wealth and prosperity. Capitalism is the right to design your own dreams, and you’re much better at it than a gang of politicians scribbling incomprehensible legislation in a distant capitol. The behavioral freedoms socialists like to tout as indulgences are matters of the fleeting moment. The freedom to control your labor and property allow you to build your future. True prosperity is measured in things to come. Nothing is growing in a still photograph of a flower.
The orgy of deficit spending we’ve witnessed over the past year is an explicit judgment that America doesn’t have a future. Its unborn children will be handed the bill for the needs of today, plus a back-breaking load of interest. Allowing the national debt to equal our annual gross domestic product, as in President Obama’s staggering 2010 budget, means accepting the insult that America is too weak to stand without support from its grandchildren.
Follow the premise of socialism to its conclusion, and ask yourself why the government shouldn’t achieve 100% employment by conscripting every single citizen, and eliminate “social injustice” by providing for all of their needs. Why shouldn’t your income be paid in coupons, earmarked by the wise and benevolent State for food, medicine, housing, and leisure? The answer is that a command economy can’t produce value, allocate resources, or nourish the ambitions of its people with a fraction of capitalism’s vigor or efficiency. The value of government scrip could never equal the value of a dollar. Instead of helping its people realize their potential, a socialist government must invest an increasing amount of its energy into compelling their obedience. What capitalism hails as innovation, socialism punishes as impertinence.
To put this philosophy into action, we must return what government has taken to the private sector. We can begin by cracking down on outright fraud and waste. Citizens Against Government Waste has sniffed out over $19 billion in pure pork – money seized from some citizens to buy the votes of others. Medicare oozes $60 billion in fraud and waste. The Cato Institute recently created a web site dedicated to downsizing the government, which lists many more examples of redundant government programs and expensive incompetence. We should also insist, in a unified voice that shakes every seat in the House and Senate, that not one more dime of American taxpayer money will be sacrificed to the “climate change” fraud, and demand its domestic accomplices be prosecuted. The money recovered from cracking down on government waste should be immediately returned to the taxpayers, since it was seized under false pretenses.
We have to do more than just whip Big Government into fighting shape. We must begin devolving the functions of the federal government to the states. We don’t need rivers of tax money pouring into Washington, then trickling back to the states, polluted with frozen chunks of mandate. Let the states handle the financing for these functions… and let state politicians directly face those whose taxes pay for them. The national Congress places too much money in the hands of representatives most taxpayers will never have a chance to vote against.
Government-controlled industries should be privatized, beginning with education, which wastes a staggering amount of money on tragically poor performance… empowering a massive, politically-active union with interests hostile to most of the Americans who involuntarily supply its funding. Industries the government has painfully failed at running, such as Amtrak, should be handed off to private-sector businessmen who can make them work – or put them out of their misery. Ridiculous extravagances like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, whose services were already privatized years ago, should be eliminated at once. Sorry, liberals, but if we need to rack up a $14 trillion national debt, we certainly can’t afford to fund NPR and PBS any more. A government characterized by uncontrolled deficit spending has lost all moral and reasoned claims to run any business that could be tackled by the private sector. It shouldn’t be allowed to pour tax dollars into statist live-action role playing games like Americorps, either. Privatization is the only way to prevent the collapse of the unsustainable Social Security and Medicare entitlements.
Expensive corporate welfare programs should be eliminated, especially after the odious concept of tax-nourished companies becoming “too big to fail” has deformed our economy. An example of such a program is the $90 billion Advanced Technology Program, a sad attempt to emulate the Japanese model of government-sponsored corporate development, which already crashed and burned a decade ago. There’s no point in talking about privatizing industries when so many companies are stumbling around on the end of umbilical cords that lead back to the federal treasury.
In the longer term, we should scrap the bloated tax code shackling our productivity with thousands of incentives and penalties, and move to a flat tax – collected openly with regular tax statements, instead of allowing the IRS to pick workers’ pockets with payroll deductions. Taxing people at different rates based on their income level is immoral, as Constitutional rights should not dissipate with wealth. It also puts far too much money in the hands of politicians, and allows them to collect it with a club.
Are these radical ideas? They’re far more consistent with Hope and Change than anything proposed by the man who has no ideas beyond giving us more of the same, at triple the price. It’s long past time to try something truly different from the wheezy old machine we’ve been fueling with tax money for the past hundred years. Liberty is a radical concept… but it’s also a very old and traditional one for Americans. It has also defeated collectivism every single time they have been matched against each other. The answer to socialism is that government cannot solve any of the problems our society faces. Only free people have the strength and creativity to find those solutions.
Cross-posted at Hot Air.
I have long thought that merely eliminating payroll tax withholding and requiring every person to send in a monthly or quarterly payment would kick off a tax revolution in no more than one or two payment cycles.
People would at first jump for joy at seeing the extra cash in their “take-home” pay and then pitch a fit as they sat down to write the check.
But that would be inconvenient, and God knows, we don’t want to inconvenience the American people.
Yup. The academic/government class thought the taxes, regulations and lawsuits placed on business and productive people could grow to infinity. They may finally have killed the goose. If you form an LLC in New Jersey the nj.gov web page has the laws and regs you are responsible for knowing and following. The page is covered by hyperlinks, each hyperlink goes to another agency or department that thas dozens of pages covered with hyperlinks. There are probably ten or twenty thounsand pages you are responsible for knowing. That for a single person LLC. For some tax forms there is a penalty of $100 per month for failure to file even if zero dollars tax is due and NJ agrees you owe no tax.
Montesquieu tells us in The Spirit of the Laws that the problem with a large republic (larger than a Greek polis) is that the interests of more populated parts of the republic will eventually come to dominate those of less populated areas, leading to either dissolution or transition to one of the other forms of government (aristocracy or monarchy). He tells us that the one way to avoid this fate is to form a confederated republic, where a federal government holds limited power over a number of smaller republics, but that this won’t work in a larger context than Switzerland, his example of such a government. Hamilton in Federalist No. 9 agrees with the thrust of Montesquieu’s argument, but disagrees with him on the size issue; he argues, based on colonial history, that republics the size of the colonies can exist, and that a confederated republic can contain them. The Civil War dealt this model a mortal wound, and the New Deal more or less finished it off. I would argue that the only thing that has allowed us to stagger along for this long without being torn apart by the conflicts of regional interest is the titanic wealth of the country, augmented for fifty years by titanic debt. Now the bill is coming due. Can we really overcome the tendency toward centralization that has defined politics over the last century and devolve responsibility and authority back to the states, as the Founders believed to be critically necessary in order to maintain a republican form of government? History certainly argues against it; while examples of states that have moved from republican to authoritarian governments abound, examples of the reverse are scant. Where the retrograde movement has happened (the interregnum of republican rule between the overthrow of the Medici by Savonarola and their restoration by the papacy comes to mind), it has usually been temporary. The question is whether we have moved far enough down the road to statism to have reached the point of no return. I wish I knew the answer . . .
I have viewed source deductions as a loaded gun nestled against a business owners head, with the explicit warning ‘steal this money from your employees paycheque or we will blow your brains out’, since I was a sub-contractor to 2 companies in the 80′s, one of which had its brains (figuratively speaking of course, the tax dept. sent them a bill for the taxes their subcontractors had not yet paid on services billed to the company; the very next day the bank holding the demand note loans to the business called their loans, and the day after that they were bankrupt) blown out by the tax man, and another which fought and lost to the demands of that same tax department that my money be stolen at source.
“This is the genesis of wealth: the freedom enjoyed by people when the value of their time can be measured and traded through currency.”
Brilliant. This is why money had to be torn away from a hard standard, such as an ounce of gold.
You fight socialism with the constitution. We need explicit constitutional amendments that enshrine our free market and limited government principles. The Interstate Commerce Clause needs to be limited by amendment, the budget needs to be limited by amendment, and we need to secure our nations borders and clarify a sensible immigration policy by constitutional amendment. Otherwise, you can have an election cycle that gets these current fools out of power, but wait two or three election cycles to find bigger fools who have learned all the lessons that these current fools are dealing with (think Obama and the lessons he learned from Bill Clinton’s failures). We will never be fully free until we mount up real constitutional reforms to our government to enshrine these principles to secure our nation for generations to come as our founding fathers did for us. As Glenn Beck has intimated, we need to ReFound our Nation on free market and limited government principles.
Socialism will be ended by the country becoming socialist. That is, the 36% who think life will be better under a socialist democracy will see their lives turned upside down once the economic engine is completely gutted, and their is no money left to fund social programs. These socialists forget that Capitalism provides the oxygen for the weeds of socialism and anti-American free speech. Once capitalism is gone, the oxygen is snuffed and the real panic sets in.
I am afraid the American public is too junked out on media and culture. They are fully plugged into it and addicted. They react, for example, to a politician’s prospective platform (Hope an Change) as a reality – as if the idea itself is a roof that will float in the air unsupported by pillars. Words and images don’t create our realities, action and integrity do – volition in real space. Yet it seems the media heads confuse rhetoric with reality by favoring the rhetoric as reality. As if they were watching TV.
The one sad thing about East Germany being gone is that there is no living example left to remind the Hope and CHangers as well as the young idiot zombie generation of the realities of socialism.
The answer to socialism is courage, hard work and respect, because socialism appeals to cowardice, lazyness, and vengeance.
Must Read: Doctor Zero “The Answer To Socialism”…
I just came across this fabulous new Dr. Zero essay via Hot Air. [...] The truth is that money is not an evil toxic sludge, whose stain the Left works to scour from our souls. Money is the mechanism that……
[...] Answer to Socialism Doctor Zero has published another tour de force today, entitled “The Answer to Socialism.” With the nation’s financial systems teetering on the brink of collapse (as we have [...]
The reason people think socialism is so great is cause the Hollywood people and music people promote some utopian place brought about by the democrats. Little do they know that when the place arrives….all the wealth and freedom they currently enjoy and have will go away.
Then I read an article by George Will about how to correct the Social Security and Medicare problem. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/05/AR2010020503475.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns
This was a very stupid and simple idea. They propose two tax brackets 10% for couples making at or below $100K and 25% for anything over.
Read the article and do some math…..see how you and your spouse do when you make $100K one year and the following year you and your spouse make $105K.
So we need well thought out plans, not some simple 5 paragraph essay.
These programs should never have been allowed to grow and encompass the people it has.
I read in one of the replies that talked about people “pitching a fit” after buying a product with a national sales tax applied. Well, in my opinion, we would “jump for joy”, after seeing the extra cash in our paychecks with the “extra” money from the withholding in there. We now can go to the store and buy something. However NOW you can see what the govt. is truly charging us. You can now ask yourself, do you need that new widgit from China? Do you want to spend your money on some POS that you NEED or WANT. They are entirely different things and I, IMHO, feel we have lost sight of this. A national sales tax encourages, what I feel, we all need. A good life lesson in how to SAVE.
GOD BLESS AMERICA!!!!
The free market (Laissez-faire Capitalism) did not cause this crisis, the government (CRONY Capitalism/Socialism/Communism) did.
The free market did not create Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Ginnie Mae and Sallie Mae, the government did.
The free market did not pass laws that force banks to lend to those who do not qualify for a loan, the government did.
The free market did not take us off the gold standard, the government did.
The free market did not dump trillions of dollars of cheap money into the system causing the largest asset bubble in history, the government did.
The free market did not create multiple multi-trillion-dollar unfunded entitlement programs, the government did.
The free market did not write a 60,000+ page tax code that punishes work, rewards sloth and buys the votes of special interest groups, the government did.
The free market did not destroy our public school system and graduate (or fail to graduate) generations of civically and financially illiterate citizens, the government did.
The free market did not drive our jobs overseas and kill our entrepreneurial spirit with over-taxation, over-regulation and frivolous lawsuits, the government did.
The free market did not ban drilling for oil, vilify coal and block the building of nuclear power plants in the United States, thereby transferring hundred of billions of dollars of American wealth and many thousands of energy-industry jobs to foreign countries, the government did.
This crisis is the result of a giant social engineering experiment and vote-buying scheme gone tragically wrong.
The free market does not try to engineer society or buy votes, the government does.
The government caused this crisis, the free market did not.
The government cannot fix the crisis, the free market can.
[...] http://www.doczero.org/2010/02/the-answer-to-socialism/ [...]
[...] Here is a good link, The Answer to Socialism: http://www.doczero.org/2010/02/the-answer-to-socialism/ [...]
http://pajamasmedia.com/rogerkimball/2010/02/07/sadists-who-were-trying-to-be-nice/
Good essay on PJM. Matches up with your thoughts above as well, Doc.
Well said Doc. The longer we let government manage anything through tax confiscation and regulatory coercion, services that the private sector can provide more efficiently through fair and open competition, the more we delay fiscal sustainability. We stay on this track and eventually the amendment outlawing slavery will come into play. Last I heard nearly half of all income is used up in the form of taxes, fees, licenses, permits etc.
“The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.”
[...] American Socialism is ‘a sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now probably being ripped out and used to roll a big fat spliff in the Oval Office, Sparky‘: We have to do more than just whip Big Government into fighting shape. We must begin [...]
Dear Dr.
Thank you for such a clearly written piece. I am glad you have provided some sensible points for me to work into conversations with my intolerant liberal in-laws. You make your points very well and without undue malice or ridiculous, incendiary rhetoric. I have been an admirer of your work for a few months and look forward to visiting your site again.
Sincerely,
Brandy Holiday
I suspect that those who admire socialism do so because they are in one of the beneficiary classes. Even the conservative taxpayer supports socialism as far as things like roads, fire departments, garbage collection and police are concerned. Any attempt to unseat socialism’s hold on people’s minds must eventually deal with that.
Dr Zero,
I really liked your article on socialism. I don’t always agree with all of your articles, (Im an atheist-pro-choice-non-libertarian-fiscal conservative-pro palinista in the Tom Sowell tradition), but sometimes you write an article that deserves front page status nationwide. The latest Tea Party article really nailed it as well. Please keep up the good work, and keep writing!
Dennis, MN
More than a means to an end, I would submit that money is a material representation of one’s time at labor. It is a matter of fact, that not everyone’s time has the same value to other people, so not everyone can be paid the same.
Nevertheless, to force one man to pay another against his will is to rob that man of the amount of time it took for him to earn the money. It is to enslave the first man to the second for that period of time. It is to rob him of a piece of his life. It is truly evil. This the Thirteenth Amendment forbids, but since when has our nation’s legislature paid any attention to the Constitution?
@ Dana:
The Gold Standard only works when everyone in a trade blocks uses it. Its too easy to game currencies otherwise, Fat chance getting our trade partners onboard. Also if by some miracle we could get it or bimetalism (a gold and silver standard) universally applied it would require a very serious effort at remonetizing, there physically is not enough gold on Earth to use as currency for billions of people and have it around for other important uses.
I 100% agree that this cronyism needs to go and every bit of waste we can get be purged from the system. It still won’t be enough
the real conundrum we are facing is “how do get wealth distributed broadly” , with automation and outsourcing jobs are not going to do the trick. And the American dream is predicated on “work hard do well” Even if all the socialism vanished your wages will be arbitraged down A.S.A.P. It won’t help. Plus have you guys been to Home Depot lately ? Check out the automated checkout machines. Thats your jobless future staring you in the face.
You can bleat all day about the morality of money but a hungry man isn’t going to listen. Instead he is going to work the mechanisms of the state to take what you have. If you prevent that, unless you find some way to abrogate his or her right to bear arms, they abuse that right and take what you have directly.
Self defense is fine and good and while maybe you can stop a mugger or a break in if you are skilled and lucky, you can’t stop a rifle shot from the shadows or enjoy your life while worrying about your kids being kidnapped ala Mexico or watching for IED’s on the way to work (if you still have a job)
There are three ways to do this and if If you choose not to do any of the three , the consequences will be basically social collapse and violence. Best case scenario, a nation wide ghetto with chronic high unemployment and economic chaos as fewer people have money to buy anything
#1 Businesses need to voluntarily choose to be less efficient and hire lot of people so they buy from them. This necessitates closed trade loops. Call it Henry Ford’s law if you like. Don’t trade with tyrannies and states that do not care about the environment and most of all. have much lower wages then you.
#2 Social Democracy. The welfare state. I just don’t think thats a good fit for this country and it seems to invariably lead to some kind of tyranny (c.f. the once proud UK) Everybody gets to mediocre except the bureaucrats. Thanks no.
and of course there is another way
Libertarian author Charles “Bell Curve” Murray suggest the government simply give every adult citizen a check and be done with it. You can read about that idea here.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110008142
I’d go, everyone 18+ gets 1k a month and is taxed over that at a flat rate.
Health care is another, the only real socialism I’ll admit is on that issue as for most things it simply works better. Medicare and Tri-Care (Canadian and UK style health care respectivly) are decent so sayeth my senior and veteran friends
If thats distasteful, well hey I used to work in health insurance. We can always have “super groups” and bid the price down too.
@ Mad as HELL:
” A national sales tax encourages, what I feel, we all need. A good life lesson in how to SAVE.”
So, people who have been paying heavy taxes on their incomes all their lives, and managed to squirrel away a sufficient amount of savings to take care of themselves should now have that savings taxed when they spend it through a heavy sales tax on everything they buy?
I suggest that you, and others like you , who need a whip in the form of a sales tax to motivate you to save, pay this tax, while the rest of us skip it. OK?
DocZero,
Thank you for raising this issue.
There are four constitutional issues of critical importance today, 1. The 17th amendment (direct election of Senators) must be repealed. 2. The 16th amendment (income tax) must be repealed and replaced with an amendment allowing the fed govt to petition the states, per capita, for necessary income. The states would then raise and remit the income to the fed govt. No direct tax of individuals would per permitted. 3. Amendment of the interstate commerce clause converting it to a fed veto only (yes, I understand this would not completely solve the problem, so…). 4. A new amendment on federalism. There are a few good amendments in draft form and this is not a particularly onerous problem.
If the tea party movement is to make real change these are the changes necessary.
Mark Sherman
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