Socialism – The Other White Meat

December 21, 2009 by Noisy Dove

We hear it all the time, “Socialism doesn’t work because there isn’t incentive.” That’s what I learned in 7^th grade. We learned about the transition after the Russian revolution. We learned how farmers produced less and less because, well, it just didn’t matter. Specifically I remember my text book describing how Russian men often became alcoholics and drank Kerosene when they ran out of Vodka.

This isn’t a strong argument though. You can counter this easily by claiming the only motivation most people need is the motivation to do their job well – To each according to his need and from each according to his ability. After all, who thinks about their daily earnings day-to-day and adjusts their efforts accordingly? Who really takes a job motivated only by its wage? And who doesn’t enjoy using his or her talents to improve the world around them?

Or you can claim incentive can be regulated into the system by bureaucracy, and that such regulation would be far more fair and humane.

Here’s the real problem with Socialism. Socialism is a system of distributing wealth. The antithesis of socialism is often thought to be Capitalism. Capitalism is not a system though – it’s an idea – the idea that people should be free. But for the sake of comparison, let’s call it a system. And as a system, Capitalism is a system for CREATING wealth and then distributing it.

The fist difference you’ll notice is that Socialism only distributes wealth, but doesn’t create it. So one might assume there’s an additional mechanism often found functioning along side Socialism that creates the wealth to be distributed. You’d be right. It’s capitalism. Sometimes it’s the black market. Sometimes it’s only among the ruling class.

At beast, a pure Socialist non-capitalist state will have only the mechanisms of wealth creation that were created by capitalism before the state turned over to socialism – no growth in other words. But historically what always happens is, the wealth of the Socialist state shrinks dramatically after the transition, and lots of people starve to death and die.

Modern examples of functioning Socialist states, like China, are functioning because they open certain areas of their economy to Capitalism, and China continues to convert further and further away from the Socialist idea.

Capitalism is simply freedom. And when people are free to create and innovate – truly amazing things appear. Of course, I’m defining freedom as an idea of equality and laws, not anarchy.

Socialism is a system of distributing wealth – which at the same time replaces the thing that creates wealth. In other words, it slaughters the chicken and plans to eat eggs for the rest of the week.

The concept remains valid at incremental levels. For example, Obama’s policies of redistributing wealth are essentially socialist mechanisms. (For those sensitive to the word, call it what you want. I’m not calling Obama a socialist. I’m just pointing out that his policies function as socialist mechanisms.) Obama sees America as an unfair place and would use these socialist mechanisms to correct the unfairness. The problem is – such mechanisms replace some Capitalism (freedom) with some socialism, which results in less overall wealth to distribute. Many people ignore or don’t accept this fact though and weald government power as if we can slaughter some of our chickens and continue producing the same number of eggs from.