Socialism is to economics what “alternative remedies” are to modern medicine. It never works – in fact, it very often causes, or at least exascerbates, the very things it claims to cure.
You might say that, while alternative remedies (anti-vax, homeopathy, “natural” supplements, chiropractics, accupuncture, “preemptive” diets, reiki, magnets, mind-over-matter, aroma therapy, and pastors who lie to you about your life-threatening illness in the name of Jesus) have made very little inroads into the halls of medicine, well-studied “economists” have been flirting with socialism for decades. But you’d be misunderstanding the situation.
For one thing, alternative “remedies” and “perspectives” are in fact beginning to make inroads, even into what used to be reliable academic circles – which is exactly what you would expect in a culture so privileged and seemingly beyond the reach of any of the kinds of real, existential sufferings that humans normally have to grapple with: delusion. It happens to most people when they are faced with so much wealth and power that there don’t seem to be any more real stakes, or serious consequences anymore – just questions about things like “which multi-ten thousand dollar car should I buy for myself, and which one should I buy for my spouse? Which district should I live in so that my kids can get the exact brand of free education that tickles my fancy – the one that hands out free laptops to every student, or the one that provides free food and high-speed internet access *at home* to students whose parents claim they can’t afford it? (Just kidding – every public school district in America does both of those things).
And for another, no serious economist wants anything to do with socialism. You might find a professor here or there at university – almost never an actual *economics* professor – touting the benefits of “a little socialism in your capitalism,” as if we would be better for having just a dash of arsenic in our tea. And there might be people writing books called things like “Capital” or “The Earth is Flat” (the real name of a real, very popular book that promotes Socialism), claiming to be economists – but almost none of them really are. And real economists – the ones who research markets for a living. Who really, deeply understand how communities become prosperous, ABSOLUTELY reject the idea of communal ownership, excessive regulation and wealth redistribution. The things ALL socialist politicians lobby for: rent control. Salary caps. A wealth tax. Siezing the assets of corporations over a certain size on behalf of “the people.” Every student of economics rejects outright. The political science, sociology, and economics departments at Universities are SEPARATE – and they are separate for a reason. Most economists DESPISE those other, COMPETING disciplines.
Socialists *do* refer to themselves as “economists” quite often; but alternative remedies pedalers also used to refer to themselves as “doctors,” until a law was passed against it. (Unfortunately, many socialists STILL refer to themselves as “doctors.”) But they absolutely DO still refer to their scams as “medicine,” and to themselves as “medical professionals.” They may not be licensed, and they may not be educated, and they may not believe in the same fundamental underpinnings of reality (or in the existence of any shared reality at all) that you and I do, but they are happy to refer to themselves as “experts.” Sound familiar?
But enough time spent on that point of seeming dissimilarity. Here’s a point of similarity: like alternative “medicine,” one of the primary reasons you should believe in Socialism seems to be that the actually effective solution – capitalism, “doesn’t work.” “My aunt went to the doctor and she got worse.” “My cousin did chemo and he still died of cancer.” “100% of people who take aspirin eventually die from it.” If you wait long enough, everyone eventually dies, and modern medicine never seems to be able to prevent it. You don’t conclude, from that, that modern medicine is a ruse concocted by the wealthy and the powerful in order to keep the rest of us down. (Okay, well actually… some people DO conclude that.)
And the same goes for modern medicine. Like free markets (or as free as possible, anyway), modern medicine really does make people’s lives better. “But there are some people who don’t have access to it. It’s socially stratifying,” is a statement that’s made about both – and a tacit acknowledgement that it really does improve people’s lives. Populations that DO have access to vaccines, viral treatments, antibiotics, surgeries, breathing machines, and kidney dialysis live longer, experience less pain, and think more clearly – there is a cascade of ancillary benefits from good health, including better academic performance and greater degrees of prosperity – not just for individuals, but for the whole population.
(And by the way, no one has done nearly as much to help marginalized and underprivileged communities get access to scientific cures and modern medical technology as Jews and people who call themselves Christians; all of the major eastern religions are still practicing “survival of the fittest”, ie, “the strong live off of the suffering of the weak,” and radical terrorists have, unfortunately and for the most part ingeniously coopted, in order to fund their violent extremism, the internal “alms giving” structures built by other Muslim communities over the centuries. Meanwhile, “atheist,” aka, secular humanist communities, are mostly communist dictatorships, where the medical institutions are plagued by corruption and where old people and children die standing in line for hospital, outside on the street, waiting for their rations of dilluted aspirin, or are simply executed by death panels. It’s almost like the Judeo-Christian West invented everything that has made life tolerable over the last 200 years… but that’s a topic for a separate post. 😉 )
And just like populations with access to modern medicine have better health outcomes, communities where people are able to buy and sell goods and services in a free system of exchange are more prosperous – not just at the individual level, but collectively.
People often make the argument that capitalism is unequal because not everyone has access to it. “Capitalist” societies allegedly exploit underprivileged ones, meaning that capitalism is built on top of a foundation of colonial oppression. It’s an illusion – “even the free market is really just a thin veneer of freedom on top of what actually just amounts to another system of oppression.” But this is a fundamental misunderstanding of economics – again, something a first-year student could correct you on. Economic prosperity rquires a critical mass of individual prosperity – without people to pay for the goods and services, no one who provides those goods and services can earn any money. Without access to competitive wages – usually in exchange for work done to provide valuable goods and services – no one can afford to pay for the goods and services. Like imaginary numbers, vaccines, and the theory of relativity, it isn’t intuitive. As difficult as it is to understand, and as much as it defies “folk wisdom,” the richer anyone gets, the richer everyone gets, in a virtuous cycle of universal mutual benefit – at least, that’s the way it works in capitalist economies. It *never* works that way under socialism. (But as difficult as it is for most people to comprehend, even just a little bit of careful thinking should reveal it to you. 😉 This is why wealthy *people* are so interested in helping everyone else become as wealthy as possible. The more money you and I have, the more people there are who can afford to buy a Tesla. And wealthy *countries* think the same way – the more countries there are who can afford to buy our goods and services, the wealthier we will be. You might argue that we can just take goods and services away from other countries by force, but if you carefully examine the economic relationships we have with all of our trading partners, the relationships we have with free and democratic countries are significantly more economically profitable than the ones we have with the countries we are “oppressing” (by waging war on them, but again… subject for another day) – which creates an natural, existential incentive for us to provide more military and other types of support to our free and democratic trading partners. In other words, that kind of military collaboration is a matter of economic interest; it was never really about exporting a particular ideology or being the “world’s police,” nor should it be.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t avoid hospitals and doctors “because medicine doesn’t work.” In fact, modern medicine DOES work. It doesn’t follow that because some people aren’t cured or because everyone eventually dies, that “medicine doesn’t work.” No one ever said that we were going to put an end to all death and disease. All we ever wanted to do was help makes things a little better. And we get better at it every year. New and innovative cures are always being “discovered” – although it would be more accurate to say that they are being “invented.” We work *within the framework of medicine* to constantly innovate and improve life conditions for as many people as possible. That’s something that could never happen at the pace we’ve seen for the last 200 years, if we decided to abandon modern medicine altogether, just because it hasn’t completely eliminated the problem yet.
Similarly, it’s not reasonable to say that capitalism doesn’t work because “some people are still poor.” Capitalist communities become more prosperous over time – from their most privileged to their least privileged members. Of course some people are still poor. Socialism works in the opposite direction. Just like with alternative “medicine” – people who choose the alternatives consistently get sicker and eventually die from it. So much preventable suffering and death lies at the feet of “alternatives,” when, if they had only gone to the doctor… and the same is true of socialism. Everywhere it is tried, every time a community chooses it as a solution for *any problem at all* in lieu of a free market solution, things in that area get worse.
Unfortunately socialists don’t know how to build things, only how to tear down what’s already there. They aren’t nearly as keen to manage/live in the ruins of civilization as they are to ruin it in the first place. Which is why you don’t see any of them fleeing the hellish imperialist white supremacist capitalism of the US to utopian outposts of enlightened North Korea, or Cambodia or Cuba… or California. Instead they spread to free and prosperous communities like a cancer (which might be part of why, while capitalist countries sometimes build walls to keep people out… Socialist countries end up building walls to keep them in). Always consuming and destroying, and never building anything beautiful in its place. Taken in by the same empty promise that Satan makes every time – because it works every time: “This is the heir; come, let us kill him, that the inheritance may be ours.”
Again, I’m not talking about reasonable public health and safety regulations, monopoly busting, a limited-scope, wisely-implemented social safety net, or democratic control over resources like water or electricity that can’t possibly have more than one owner. I’m talking about price controls. Labor unions. City-run grocery stores. Housing projects. Any industry you see that’s been regulated to death like communications or the airline industry. And yes, I’m even going to include public education.
“But some people are still poor” isn’t a good enough reason to ignore all that. Capitalism is a technology for improving people’s lives, not a permanent solution to the human condition. And for improving people’s lives, it is unbeatable. In fact, you know what? I’m not even going to call it Capitalism anymore – I’m just going to call it “economics.”
Because, just like with modern medicine, economics is a scientific discipline. The longer we do it, the more we learn and the more “cures” we “discover.” Economists and entrepreneurs are always inventing new and innovative cures for poverty. The fact that some people don’t have access to those cures should NEVER stop us from creating them. The more people we CAN help, the better.
When an entrepreneur earns money, he can pay employees. He is forced to provide his goods or services at a price that someone, somewhere can actually afford to pay – which means giving me access to something I might not have been able to afford otherwise.
And that’s not even addressing the benefits individuals get who have just a few dollars to invest in other people’s economic success via … well, let’s call it what it is: “collective ownership.” You see, stock trading is the real version of the thing that socialism promises. In a free economy, everyone is equal, because I don’t tell you what you can and can’t do with your money, and you don’t tell me what I can and can’t do with the goods and services you sell me. I can benefit directly from the economic success of others, either by going to work for them, buying stock in their company, or by just benefiting from competition over low prices.
Even without affirmative action, free markets trend toward racial and gender equality over time. That flies in the face of “common knowledge,” but the reality of “Jim Crow” and racial segregation is that they were *sets of laws*, *superimposed* on the free market in order to *prevent* the natural progression of black people toward freedom. The Civil Rights movement was mostly about *removing impediments to free trade and free association* – it had very little to do with trying to force people to think and feel differently on the inside – which means it was the exact opposite of what it has become today.
So that’s another similarity – socialism, like junk science – well, socialism *is* junk science, so instead lets go back to using the term “alternative remedies” – socialism, as an alternative remedy to rigorous economic theory… er, wait. That doesn’t help either. So let’s call alternative remedies “science denial” – the rejection of 500 years of rigorous academic scholarship… but no… because that description applies to socialism, too.
Economic pseudo-science, like medical pseudo-science, promises you everything that its legitimate counterpart actually provides. Economic equality (because your boss can’t tell you what to do or say or think when you’re not on the clock – he is just another guy when you meet him on the street), collective ownership (in the form of stocks and bonds), widespread access to resources (by means of price competition). And none of it would be possible without private property.
Under socialism and other “might makes right” structures, whoever has the most power owns everything; so power becomes the only real currency. I am incentivized to hold onto whatever I can get for myself, *at everyone else’s expense.* There’s no difference between the struggle for access to resources – arable land, living space, water, and even human labor – and the struggle for power and supremacy over others. If you can coerce it, steal it, or kill someone who has it, then you are the winner. A community that effectively preserves private property rights ensures that in order to take something away from you, I first have to offer you something that you value at least as much. And of course that doesn’t work in a community where one person owns everything – but that isn’t a free market anymore. Pointing out that situations where one person owns everything – ie, non-free, non-markets – are oppressive an unequal, isn’t a valid criticism of free markets. If anything, it’s an argument in their favor.
And the final similarity is that almost everyone “exposing” the evils of the main stream (whether that’s modern medicine or capitalism), or trying to convince you to add even a small amount of pseudoscience into your diet “just to balance things out,” is there to sell you something. “Modern medicine is a conspiracy. Buy my supplements.” “Capitalism is failing in the West. Vote for me.” “Wall street is under the control of Jewish aristocrats. Sign a petition to convince the government to pay me a life-long salary for my ‘non-profit’ enterprise.” “You are an oppressed wage slave. Let’s institute a new tax/issue a new, tax-funded governemnt bond, to pay for you to get a ‘free’ education… that someone besides the people using it is going to be ‘politely asked’ to pay for… and then captured by men with guns and thrown into a cage for ‘tax evasion’ if they refuse.”
And again, to be clear: I’m not against taxes, or even a social safety net. What I’m opposed to is giving “the people” – aka, the government – absolute power over everyone else’s property. Because at the end of the day, the only people who don’t own anything* are slaves, and the only people who are promoting socialism today – the same people who have always promoted it – are people who want to enslave you. There are no sophisticated-sounding, pseudo-economic slogans or “theories” that can ever change that.
* property isn’t just real estate. It includes everything from a pen you bought from the store to the phone in your pocket.
Upon reviewing this post I noticed a few typos, and decided to leave them in, as evidence that I wrote it without any assistance from AI.