“Socialism is the Big Lie of the twentieth century. While it promised prosperity, equality, and security, it delivered poverty, misery, and tyranny. Equality was achieved only in the sense that everyone was equal in his or her misery.
COMMUNITY Activists in the Extreme
In the same way that a Ponzi scheme or chain letter initially succeeds but eventually collapses, socialism may show early signs of success. But any accomplishments quickly fade as the fundamental deficiencies of central planning emerge. It is the initial illusion of success that gives government intervention its pernicious, seductive appeal. In the long run, socialism has always proven to be a formula for tyranny and misery.
A pyramid scheme is ultimately unsustainable because it is based on faulty principles. Likewise, collectivism is unsustainable in the long run because it is a flawed theory. Socialism does not work because it is not consistent with fundamental principles of human behavior. The failure of socialism in countries around the world can be traced to one critical defect: it is a system that ignores incentives.”
Read the piece by Mark Perry and then read the comments of more recent times.
Not to disagree, but, there are two incentives which Socialism not only does not ignore, but relies upon inherent in bad human behavior.
Greed(or is it Lust) and Sloth
One group wants power and control, the other wants to be taken care of. A match made in hell.
Comment by Jeff Stone — May 9, 2009 @ 11:59 AM |
Socialist ideology was the result of the general ignorance that prevailed a century ago about how societies & economies work and function. Its formulae are simplistic, it fails to address key issues like motivation, etc. The same can be said of many other ideologies (which I won’t list here, merely in order to avoid acrimony).
To object to all government intervention in the economy because Mao Tse Tung killed 30 million Chinese by starvation (1958) is laying it on a bit thick. Nowadays we know of hundreds of cases that show how the state can effectively perform certain interventions in the economy, either sectoral or overall, without necessarily restricting liberty or eliminating the market. Examples: Taiwan, Japan, Chile [sic], Korea, etc. Bibliography: Dani Rodrik: One Economics, Many Recipes: Globalization, Institutions, and Economic Growth (Princeton University Press 2007).
In this book, Rodrik shows that the bleak either/or choice proposed by dogmatic conservatives and dogmatic socialists is merely the result of dogma. The Washington Consensus is a marvelous list of recommendations. But putting it into effect can take several decades. Rodrik describes a number of practical quick fixes that were successfully applied in many countries that simulate market effects without having to painfully restructure the whole system according to free-market principles. They were all solutions based on specific local conditions that exist either nowhere else or in few other places.
Hayek pointed out the administrative costs of bureaucratic control, that Marxists had assumed would be zero. How about the costs of establishing a free market system? You need courthouses, jails, law schools, trained staff, etc. The free market only works if contracts are enforceable. So you need a huge investment in government to enable a free-market system to operate.
Now that I’m on the subject: although the US made huge investments in providing the mechanisms to make contracts enforceable, many contracts in the US are unenforceable because the business people involved are crooks, who manage to evade whatever controls exist. In Robert Reich’s book Reason he explains that Enron, Bear Sterns, Arthur Andersen and other criminal capitalist gangs are not the exception but the rule. The financial system is corrupt to the core. Some get caught but others don’t.
I myself recently wrote a brief essay called “On Being Exploited by a Crooked Free-Enterprise System”, narrating how my credit was wrecked by a gang of swindlers (called WaMu) and the US banking system reflexively & unquestioningly supports the efforts of the criminal gang to collect from me the proceeds of their crimes, and even thwarts my attempts to obtain redress!
That is NOT WHAT HAYEK HAD IN MIND. He was for free enterprise, but NOT FOR FREE ENTERPRISES RUN BY CROOKS, which is what we have now, among other things as a result of excessive deregulation.
How come you free-market fans never have anything to say about cracking down on business crime?
I submitted a criminal complaint to the FBI weeks ago. Still no reply.
Comment by Carl Stoll — May 12, 2009 @ 11:16 AM |