It’s Socialism
posted at 10:23 am on March 21, 2010 by Mitch Berg
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While arguing with liberals – friends and otherwise – about Obamacare, I’ve noticed that while most of them are very poorly-informed about much of what is actually in whatever bills are currently in contention, many of them are crystal-clear on at least one key chanting point:
“It’s not socialism!”
And they’re more or less correct, at the moment, if and only if you observe exactly one, excessively restrictive dictionary definition of “socialism”.
But, in practical, real-world terms, there really are two definitions.
I will try to explain these definitions with real-world examples. However, as the real-world examples use a few historical terms that tend, shall we say, to inflame conversation and serve as red blankets before bulls, I’ll change the names of those terms to keep things on an even keel and focus on the actual policy and mechanical differences between the two definitions.
Example 1:
Promising that they will make life easier and more tenable to the people, the Bommunist party abolishes private enterprise and makes all businesses state-owned.
These state-owned businesses, answerable only to centralized state planning agencies – operating in what economists call a “command economy” – are utterly divorced from the free market, and produce entirely based on political imperatives from above, rather than market demands from all around them. Also, absent any of the discipline of the free market, productivity plummets. Eventually, the system becomes unable to sustain any sort of economic activity.
Example 2:
Promising to make life easier and more tenable for the people, the National Bocialist Party (*) also realizes unfettered free enterprise is a threat to its control – but has learned something from ten years of watching the Bommunist Party flounder and fail.
So the National Bocialists decide to keep the “best” (for their purposes) of the free market – the expertise and disclipline of capitalist businesses and their owners – but put them under centralized control scarcely less complete than that of the Bommunists. The ideal, of course, was to keep the outward appearances of capitalism and avoid the worst failures of full government ownership – but to make it essentially impossible for industry to do anything other than what government mandated.
(Data on the National Bocialist system fades out after about 12 years, but preliminary results weren’t all that encouraging for anything other than artificial bubbles in things government needed in huge numbers quickly, like – again, hypothetically – Banzers, Bukas and Boo Boats).
Again – the Bommunists and the National Bocialists are completely hypothetical, and any similarities to political parties that existed in the real world is purely concidental.
Except for their economics.
So is Obamacare socialist?
As it is being considered today? How is Obamacare, with its thin, unconvincing veener of “marketiness”, different from the (utterly hypothetical) Example 2, above?
Cross-posted at Shot In The Dark.
(*) Why, no – it’s not a completely original idea…
Blowback
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I don’t get it. What are the two definitions? And, what is the source of those definitions?
It seems to me that you describe Communism in “Example 1″, and Socialism (or maybe Fascism) in “Example 2″.
Socialism is not a political, governmental, or economic system. It is a political, governmental, and economic PROCESS — the path from Free Market and a Free Society to a Communist Market and Totalitarian Society, via the magic of wealth redistribution (a.k.a. theft)
And before someone expounds on the difference between Communism and Fascism, let me say this: they’re fundamentally the same thing. Private Property (and therefore the Free Market) are abolished in both.
Eyas on March 21, 2010 at 10:43 AM
What do you mean “Source of the definitions?” Like, a dictionary?
The lack of fundamental difference between (let’s eschew inflammation) Bommunism and Bocialism was written about at great length by Paul Johnson in Modern Times; as you note in your last paragraph, totalitarians like Lenin, Hitler, Stalin and Mao essentially used superficially different means to the same goal.
The point was that for purposes of the vitality of the free market, Obamacare will be a socialist system even without “single payer” or a “public option”; they’re all superficially different means to the same goal.
Mitch_Berg on March 21, 2010 at 11:25 AM
Yeah, but it is collectivism. It’s the very definition of collectivism, even without the “public option.”
The individual insurance mandate and the avowed intention for the federal government to guarantee that everyone is “insured” — by an abstract accounting definition — makes this legislation textbook collectivism.
Without the individual mandate and the insurance accounting for everyone who fogs a mirror north of the Rio Grande, even the “public option” would be more of an entitlement and door-opener to socialism. It would all be fiscally insane, but it wouldn’t be Stalinist, it would just be shabby and European fellow-travelerist.
The individual mandate and the insurance accounting — presumably, the health insurance obligation would very soon be conferred at birth, possibly even before the SSN — make this legislation classic collectivism. It’s exactly what we spent the Cold War trying to fend off, beat back, and push as far as possible from our shores.
J.E. Dyer on March 21, 2010 at 11:26 AM
No, it’s abominable, but it’s not “exactly” what we spent the Cold War etc.
It’s in English mostly, for one thing. It embraces 1/6 – 1/5 of the economy, not the entirety of the economy. It promises to fine people for non-compliance, and does nothing to people who are publicly critical to the point of advocating and organizing non-compliance, it doesn’t put them in the Gulag or a Concentration Camp. As far as I know it also doesn’t happen to be building gigantic tank armies and swallowing up neighboring countries.
Many of our strongest allies throughout both struggles were a lot more socialist than Obamacare makes us – obviously there was something else we were fighting.
Ø-care is a very ill-conceived adventure in social democratic innovation, involving violations of freedom on a new level, and I hope it’s overturned, rescinded, gutted, replaced, etc., but, if it’s “socialism,” then so are Social Security, Medicare, the income tax, and numerous other features of modern life in the US of A, and that were fully in place when we fought the Nazis and resisted the Communists.
CK MacLeod on March 21, 2010 at 11:53 AM
CKM — in principle, it is exactly what we opposed in the Cold War.
What makes it so is the individual mandate, the purpose of which is to bring everyone into a government-enforced health care collective.
The principle is the same, regardless of how much of the economy is initially affected. That is a statement of simple logic, not a statement of political expectations.
Political expectations, while a separate issue, also indicate a similar trend, however. Logically, if the principle of federal-government-enforced participation in a non-liability “insurance” scheme is accepted, then there is no inherent brake on applying that principle to other areas. Obvious ones come to mind: “combatting climate change,” for example, or a “national pre-K requirement” for children.
Your identification of SS and Medicare as “socialism” is something people on the right have been saying for decades. It’s not shocking to equate SS and Medicare with socialism. The arguments mounted against them were precisely that they were socialism — or (these arguments were made side by side, not in a mutually exclusive sense) that they would soften up our political landscape to simply succumb to socialism gradually.
It can be argued that technically, SS and Medicare aren’t “socialism” in the sense of representing government direction of national industries and resources. So rather than getting bogged down in that distinction, it’s more useful, in my view, to identify where they are (a) fiscally unsustainable, and (b) collectivist.
Which they are. I know you think it’s hyperbolic to identify things for what they are in principle, because you assume that that means the writer wants to scale the barricades and start shooting. I know that’s not possible or desirable.
But everything their critics predicted about SS and Medicare has come true. We can’t afford them, they do discourage individual thrift, and the principle on which they were enacted is leading us ever further down the path of state-compelled collectivism. The fact that we keep having to fight this battle over collectivizing health care is one testament to that.
If the federal government can compel you to get an SSN if you want to work, and can compel you to contribute to SS and Medicare; if the federal government “ought” to know how much you earn so it can tax you on a percentage of it; why shouldn’t the federal government compel you to cede more of your earnings to a government-mandated health care collective? What is the hard wall dividing us, in our current condition of de facto collectivism, from the expansion of collectivism to more and more areas of our individual and aggregate economic life?
J.E. Dyer on March 21, 2010 at 12:41 PM
JED – there is no HARD WALL, no permanent guarantee, no purity, and there cannot be one. There hasn’t been one since the big black monolith taught the first monkey how to break one bone with another bone. The Federal government has the power to wipe out human civilization on Earth already, and has the power to compel by force and threats of imprisonment agreement with any number of laws that large numbers of us consider violations of basic freedom.
No – right up in the top post and initial replies we hear a rehearsal of the familiar Beck-ism: Once we agree to let the government issue driver’s licenses, we’re on the way to the death camps. This isn’t argument by principle, it’s argument by instantaneously disprovable paranoia, in which the whole world is a slippery slope, and anything is everything (or whatever you need it to be for rhetorical purposes).
If socialism generalizes upward – so that O-care approximately equals Communism, or puts us on the icy and gravel-strewn road to Camp 37 – then it generalizes downward as well, and we’re already well along that road, we always will be, have been forever, and, incidentally, the vast majority of the American electorate is on board, and ready to defend its milestones to the death.
It often seems that the only true believers in teleological progressivism and dialectical materialism are far right conservatives.
CK MacLeod on March 21, 2010 at 1:10 PM
CK Mcleod,
Beck is a huckster, and it looks like you’re reading a lot more into my post than I am.
I’m saying that socialism – government control of the economy – has many mechanisms that all lead, eventually, to the same policy.
Any further embroidery is nonsense; drivers licenses don’t necessarily devolved into death camps; Norway and Sweden and the UK and Japan are places where people live OK, more or less…
…at the pleasure of government. Which is the rub for a lot of us.
No more, no less.
Mitch_Berg on March 21, 2010 at 1:35 PM
No, they don’t – that is, they haven’t yet, and seem more likely to destroy the systems that embrace them than lead to totalitarianism. For now, all we know for sure is that they lead to as many different policies, or results, as there are governments.
Socialism isn’t Communism or Nazism, and insisting that it’s the “same” or inevitably leads to the “same” is either obviously false, or relies on such a broad definition and system of equivalences that it’s a useless observation. In the sense that you’re using the terms, we already live “at the pleasure of government.” That’s the very nature and irreducible potential of all government – the harnessing of the power of the many against any one or few.
In the meantime, all of the crucial and very real specifics are lost, and conservatives or any opponents of Ø-care risk making themselves look like the ideologues of the far left constantly flinging around the buzzwords that you say you want to resist, even while transparently invoking them.
CK MacLeod on March 21, 2010 at 3:26 PM
Who said anything about driver’s licenses, CKM? I’m sure there were people who thought that was excessive statism, but I’m equally sure you’re capable of distinguishing between government licensing and government control of the people’s earnings. The principles at work are different ones, and no one has to be a Beck-head to see or acknowledge them.
Stop adding excess to my argument. There is validity in the charge that SS and Medicare are forms of collectivism. They have, in fact, set the principle that government can positively direct the use of a percentage of people’s earnings. That principle didn’t exist in American politics or law before SS.
Now that it does exist, the limitations on the federal government that were understood, for more than 100 years, to be imposed by the 9th and 10th amendments are less and less likely to act as a bulwark against Washington expanding its positive direction of the use of our earnings.
It’s hardly extremist to posit that the intention of the 9th and 10th amendments was to prevent just such encroachments as the federal government directing how people should use their incomes. The Founders might have been less categorical about what the states should or shouldn’t do in that regard (although the concept of SS and Medicare withholding couldn’t emerge until after a percentage-based income tax was instituted). But they explicitly designed the federal government to discourage the emergence of just the sort of universal rent-seeking enterprises Obamacare represents.
Your insistence that there can never be a “hard wall” may or may not be true. The Framers tried to give us one, but it has been largely abandoned through disuse. That doesn’t mean it was a bad idea or that the condition we’re in now is just something the Framers didn’t foresee and couldn’t provide for. In fact, they foresaw it in everything but its technological particulars, because governments have never ceased to behave the way ours is behaving at this moment.
I urge you to explain what’s wrong with this proposition: that allowing the federal government to direct the use of 13% of our income up to X amount establishes the principle that the federal government can direct the use of a percentage of our income.
Please don’t waste my time with pointing out that we have a separate income tax. We do, and although there’s a related principle at work in the collecting of the revenue, there’s also a key difference. We pay income tax to defray the expenses of government, NOT so that government can manage the outcomes in our lives for us. We pay into SS and Medicare specifically so that government can manage outcomes in our lives. We would be forced to purchase health insurance for the same purpose. If the total of SS, Medicare withholding, and health insurance premiums or fines came to 20% of our incomes, what that would represent is us earning the money, and the federal government directing how 20% of it is used.
Obviously nothing has stopped the federal government from trying to move past 13% to 20%. What would stop it from moving past 20% to 50%, or higher?
J.E. Dyer on March 21, 2010 at 4:46 PM
No, they don’t – that is, they haven’t yet, and seem more likely to destroy the systems that embrace them than lead to totalitarianism.
For purposes of my post, it’s a distinction without a difference.
You’re dragging my post into some wicked mission creep. I wasn’t going there, and you certainly needn’t either.
And what JE said on pretty much every count.
Mitch_Berg on March 21, 2010 at 5:04 PM
The excess comes from insisting on false equivalence and totalizing distinctions. “Promote the general welfare,” “provide for the common defense,” and “ensure the blessings of liberty” also all speak to incipient “collectivism.”
It’s my understanding that the first direction of a percentage of people’s earnings, on a national level, was undertaken by Honest Abe to finance the Civil War. After that, there were were repeated attempts to collect national income taxes or similar assessments (wealth surtaxes and inheritance taxes) until the Supreme Court’s Pollock decision eventually required passage of your favorite amendment, a bi- or actually tri-partisan decision.
From the very earliest days of the republic, struggles over federal taxing powers, in the form of excise taxes and tariffs, nearly tore the country apart – in the form of the The Whiskey Rebellion and the Nullification Crisis, to name two, the latter in many ways a dry run for the Civil War, and also a rehearsal of the same things we’re arguing about today in regard to the meaning of states’ rights vs. federal overreaching.
Any percentage would establish that principle. In another sense, that principle is inherent in the existence of government…
…I know you have some notion in mind here of SS & M gripping us in some excessively and unwantedly intimate or forward-looking way, but, again, in the broad sense that’s what government does, whether it’s Og with his big rock designating who’s going to lead the bison-hunting party or Ø-care sending out IRS agents to bother you about purchasing coverage and threatening to fine you if you don’t.
I hope that the individual mandate is declared unconstitutional, but compelling purchase is where I think the quantum leap may lie, not in extraction of a percentage of income by force of law because the collective via the government knows better.
Nothing but politics, same as before.
CK MacLeod on March 21, 2010 at 5:32 PM
Well then, you can form a party… campaign against medicare, social security, and have the government shut down the programs that keep GM, AIG, and other failures in business.
lexhamfox on March 21, 2010 at 11:24 PM
Now who’s totalizing?
We obviously come at this from two different perspectives. I don’t concur that government, if it’s in a proper relation to the people, grips us in an excessively and unwantedly intimate or forward-looking way. The tendency of government is to mission-creep itself into doing that over time — because government is just other people to whom we’ve handed a gun, and authorized to point it at our heads.
But the Founders’ very energizing idea, the core of their concept, was that man is endowed by his Creator with unalienable rights (“natural rights”), and that the state, to be in its proper relation to the citizen, needs to be circumscribed so that its tendency to encroach on those rights will be held in check. This, right here, is the distinctly “American” political idea.
Viewing government as something that ought to expand with the advance of time is not only a break with the quintessentially American political idea, it’s banal as heck. Government’s natural, inherent tendency is to grow, because people’s natural tendency is to want to supervise and control each other. It takes no intellectual muscle to write up manifestos and treatises justifying bigger government. Add the power impulse to the bureaucratic urge, and human life unchecked writes the manifesto for us. Modern state collectivism is much more like monarchical Europe or the Confucian bureaucracy of imperial China (or, for that matter, the administrative satrapies of ancient Persia) than any of these manifestations are like the man-and-state concept of the American Founders.
With respect, I must point out that this is not “far rightism” as that category has been experienced in the US for the last 60-odd years. This is conservatism of the kind expounded by Bill Buckley and the writers for National Review from the 1950s to the early 1990s.
I understand that many people in 2010 are only just hearing some of these concepts for the first time from Glenn Beck. I think Beck has some crackpot ideas myself, but there are some things he gets right as well. He usually has a better understanding of the actual concepts believed and promoted by the Founders, in the period 1776 to 1826 or so (when Jefferson and Adams died), than anything ANYONE under 60 today learned in school.
I deduce that you didn’t experience this body of thought as reenergized American conservatism, in the period from about Goldwater to the 1994 election. But I did, and so did many others. This is the body of thought adhered to by people who supported Goldwater in ’64, Reagan in ’76 (you may not have even watched or cared about the ’76 GOP convention, but the Reagan “run” on Gerald Ford for the nomination, which came down to a floor vote in a way rarely seen in modern politics, was a watershed political event), and Reagan in ’80.
You might enjoy reading a history of the modern conservative movement; M. Stanton Evans has a good one, although I can’t think of the title right now. I’ll dig it up. I can also really recommend Russell Kirk’s history of conservative thought. Michael Novak’s Spirit of Democratic Capitalism is another worthwhile read. If you haven’t read Hayek’s Road to Serfdom or James Burnham’s Suicide of the West, they are shorter, very readable, and each functions as an excellent primer in mainstream, legacy conservative thought.
J.E. Dyer on March 22, 2010 at 11:23 AM
JED, I find that reply rather condescending, in addition to being non-responsive to the argument.
I could give you a reading list, too, and might suggest that you consider re-reading The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, since Novak’s approach is imbued throughout with a pragmatic understanding of the American system. Its pragmatism and willingness to integrate imperfection is what he argues makes it superior to ideological approaches to governance. I am of course familiar with the history and literature you invoke, and I recently took the time to refresh and deepen my recollection by reading Steven Hayward’s two-volume magnum opus THE AGE OF REAGAN, which examines many elements of this discussion in exhaustive and informative detail. You might want to give it a try.
I brought up “far right conservatism” in the context of the argument that any particular government action you dislike can usefully – either in the political or the intellectual sense – be identified with totalitarianism, and as a step down the path to the Gulag/Concentration Camp. That kind of thinking doesn’t have much, in my opinion, to do with “re-energized American conservatism”: It’s closer to Bircherism or Paulism, and is often accompanied by revanchist visions of utopian constitutional purity, a state of affairs that, of course, cannot be restored because it never existed.
The answer to utopian fantasy divorced from the world inevitably comes across as a bit “banal,” I guess.
If the American government “expanded” at a radically slower rate than America itself, it would still be a much grander and greatly transformed enterprise compared to what it was when the country was founded. The USA in 2010 is a profoundly different country than it was in 1787. To deny this obvious fact is to deny just about the whole world. Since WW2, we have always had more people (usually by multiples) employed in defense of our magnificently amplified nation than there were people in the country nation – men, women, children, slaves, natives – when it was founded.
The Founders founded a nation with a view to forming a state. The Framers framed a state. Some, like Hamilton, who of course wrote the majority of the Federalist papers, envisioned and sought to build a much stronger central government – standing army, central bank, etc. – than others supported, but in any event the opponents of the Constitution, the Anti-Federalists, were not in the main the ones calling for an even more powerful central government. The Federalists were the statists and the crypto-progressives in that debate.
I’m not going to quibble with that description or attempt to characterize it by ideology: Even as written, it recognizes the need for a state, with all of its latent powers – and offers no precise indication of what that “proper relation to the citizen” will look like. That relation varies hugely with circumstances – for instance, during wartime or other emergency, when the state may make, and has made, demands far beyond Obamacare, that did lead in many ways to vast expansion of the state in all dimensions, but which has not, not yet anyway, led inexorably to the extinction of freedom.
As I’ve argued, working out the the difference between “enough state” and “too much state” has been the subject of disagreement up to and including mortal strife from the very beginnings and before the beginnings. The Constitution doesn’t settle the debate, and can’t: It offers a framework for continually re-negotiating the terms of the American social-political contract. There is no abstract, eternally applicable answer to it all – there can only be continual re-submission of evolving and newly arising issues to a political process which is itself the subject of the discussion, and will continually evolve if it’s going to remain alive.
CK MacLeod on March 22, 2010 at 1:39 PM
Mitch,
Your friends are right. It’s NOT socialism – it’s straight up fascism.
Here’s an excerpt from “The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics” definition of Fascism. I strongly encourage you to read it. Before you dismiss it out-of-hand, you better consider the merits of the definition and just how neatly the features of the current health care agenda(s) fit it.
“…Where socialism sought totalitarian control of a ociety’s economic processes through direct state operation of the means of production, fascism sought that control indirectly, through domination of nominally private owners. Where socialism nationalized property explicitly, fascism did so implicitly, by requiring owners to use their property in the “national interest” that is, as the autocratic authority conceived it. (Nevertheless, a few industries were operated by the state.) Where socialism abolished all market relations outright, fascism left the appearance of market relations while planning all economic activities. Where socialism abolished money and prices, fascism controlled the monetary system and set all prices and wages politically. In doing all this, fascism denatured the marketplace. Entrepreneurship was abolished. State ministries, rather than consumers, determined what was produced and under what conditions….”
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Fascism.html
rspock on March 22, 2010 at 3:42 PM
To all you “collectivists”. Mussollini would have liked you. The notion that just because a few government functions are already “collectivized” is justification for this fascist version health care is false. Any government can be characterized as some sort of “collectivism”. The term used by itself is too broad.
“Mussolini distinguished fascism from liberal capitalism in his 1928 autobiography:
The citizen in the Fascist State is no longer a selfish individual who has the anti-social right of rebelling against any law of the Collectivity. The Fascist State with its corporative conception puts men and their possibilities into productive work and interprets for them the duties they have to fulfill. (p. 280)
{Gee, sounds like Health Care to me. “You must buy health insurance because we tell you to.}
Before his foray into imperialism in 1935, Mussolini was often praised by prominent Americans and Britons, including Winston Churchill, for his economic program.
Similarly, Adolf Hitler, whose National Socialist (Nazi) Party adapted fascism to Germany beginning in 1933, said:
‘The state should retain supervision and each property owner should consider himself appointed by the state. It is his duty not to use his property against the interests of others among his own people. This is the crucial matter. The Third Reich will always retain its right to control the owners of property.’ (Barkai 1990, pp. 26-27)
Both nations exhibited elaborate planning schemes for their economies in order to carry out the state’s objectives. Mussolini’s corporate state “consider[ed] private initiative in production the most effective instrument to protect national interests” (Basch 1937, p. 97). But the meaning of “initiative” differed significantly from its meaning in a market economy. Labor and management were organized into twenty-two industry and trade “corporations”, each with Fascist Party members as senior participants. The corporations were consolidated into a National Council of Corporations; however, the real decisions were made by state agencies such as the Instituto per la Ricosstruzione Industriale, which held shares in industrial, agricultural, and real estate enterprises, and the Instituto Mobiliare, which controlled the nation’s credit….”
Here’s the reference I’ve used.
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Fascism.html
rspock on March 22, 2010 at 3:55 PM
Ah, so 19 of the 20 in the G20 are evil socialist regimes on their way to totalitarianism because they have universal healthcare in one form or another.
Righhhhhhhht.
Dave Rywall on March 23, 2010 at 1:13 PM