The Path to Where?
The Cossack: Where Free People Reign
Oklahoma City is not an awful place: it boasts of Bricktown, a large section of the city with restaurants and bars, as well as music events. Like any growing city, it has crime. The city has a small homeless population. There are a few traffic accidents on the freeway and traffic jams during the early morning rush. Nearby Edmund to the north has a number of larger and nicer homes; it is a few miles from downtown. To the south is Norman, a college town with a middle and professorial class. Oklahoma City is a nice place, it just isn’t a great place. It has plenty of jobs, decent infrastructure, but it certainly has its fair share of problems. The oil companies downtown are quite large and there are many millionaires, a budding middle class and a significant poor class. There are some homeless enclaves downtown, sections of the city have prostitution and other vices. Oklahoma has its share of murders and other violent crimes, as well as traffic gridlock.
Soon, you meet a person who tells you about a wonderful place. It has a gorgeous ecology, plenty of food and animals. There are waterfalls and natural springs. Everyone who lives there has dignity and equality. People naturally help out those who need it and most rarely need it. This place is called Maui and is a place on the other side of the world. It is clearly a utopia, a place where every person gets to focus on his or her own strengths: art, literary pursuits, computers, designing new pharmaceuticals, engineering new structures. Everyone is happy to engage in their own life, while simultaneously lifting up the community. There is no money, nor class distinctions. Discrimination is a distant memory.
You consider what this person is telling you, it sounds wonderful. Maui is certainly better than Oklahoma City, you think to yourself. It is clear that you need to research this place called Maui and determine the route there. The problem is that, in this fictional scenario, there are only automobiles, no planes or ships. Choosing the correct route matters.
You start researching the route to Maui. During this process, you come across a city called Long Beach, which sits on the cusp of the Pacific Ocean. It lies on the most direct route to this wonderful utopia called Maui; maybe you could stop over, get some gas, food and, perhaps some sleep.
You research this city and find out that the city is a horrible dictatorship. The government leader is not elected, and keeps power through large, well paid police force that eliminates dissent. Food supplies are prioritized to the government workers first, including the large paramilitary police units, while the citizens get next to nothing. You utilize your Tor web browser and look on the dark web to find the truth about Long Beach, since open internet conversations about Long Beach are under constant scrutiny from the police. You find that Long Beach is a dystopian place; people who disagree with the local government simply disappear. Sometimes their family is sent to the many political camps that resemble prisons. The whole place seems to be in between a totalitarian state and a slight civil war: food is scarce, murders by the government are a normal occurrence, political power and resource control is centralized. Inflation is so high that people use currency to light their way, as the electrical grid has collapsed long ago.
There is a wide difference between Oklahoma City, Long Beach and Maui. Yet, you are tempted to agree with your friend that you both should take the trip to Maui in your car. The only route to Maui from Oklahoma City is through Long Beach, so you and your friend start driving . . .
“From he with the greatest ability, to he with the greatest need”
There are many growing organizations in the United States that have come to embrace some form of Marxism: Communism or Socialism. Many of these organizations are full of disenchanted youth, often college educated. A few have been commenting on social media about the benefits of socialism, particularly on Twitter.
Socialism requires income redistribution: high minimum wages, massive taxes, union protections. If taken further, Socialists, particularly Democratic Socialists, want collectivization: everyone owns the means of production. Further yet, would be the elimination of class distinction and no need for currency. What a great opportunity for everyone. A large welfare state, coupled with high wages for those who choose to work provides the population with adequate baseline resources. People would flourish, the government would “even up” the system by reversing the natural state of the market, mostly driven by the Pareto Principle.
My read on socialists is that they desire to build a near utopia for the maximum number of people. Detractors of socialism tell us that it has been tried, but always fails. I choose to take socialists at their word, however, and assume that their theory might work. I choose not to argue with socialists about what they believe because I don’t have any evidence that socialism is impossible.
The problem for socialists is that it isn’t particularly clear that, given government incentives, any capitalist country could make the transition to it. The main problems with moving towards socialism from capitalism:
The government has incentives for rapidly expanding the size of their organization and the scope of what they control.
The type of leaders who ascend to power are those who relish it and reluctant to relinquish it.
Any transition from capitalism to any form of socialism requires government force to move from a freedom based economy to a fairness based one.
Once a new government agency is built, initially well intentioned bureaucrats enjoy making a difference and it often clear to them that they could help more people if only the bureaucracy is larger. A larger organization gives one a larger income, benefits package and pensions. In order to escalate his income, a bureaucrat leader would have to get more budget and staff. Therefore, the incentive to grow the government from within is palpable.
If you look at the countries that traditional tried socialism - China, Soviet Union, Cuba, Vietnam, North Korea for example, the leaders who sold people on socialism expanded their power to stay in office. Stalin’s purges between 1937 and 1939 was a successful attempt at ensuring that senior members of the Party and of the military would either completely loyal to Stalin’s administration.
In western democracies, we see a similar, yet less bloody picture. Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR). ran for 4 terms as president, causing the opposition Republican Party to push through term limits on the president. Why did he do this? Presidents love power and frequently want to see their policies through to an end that, in effect, never comes. There are always state enemies, internal crises, economic meltdowns, etc. Leaders will do what they can to ensure they remain in power.
Finally, the challenge for transitioning beyond dictatorship to socialism as socialists define it is the installation of force. Leaders who maintain power do so through the promise of social order. Rather than transitioning to socialism, most leaders stop at dictatorship because it is the only way to stay in power indefinitely. In so far as socialism is good for society (according to socialists), dictatorship is good for the leader. Any logical leader following his own interest chooses dictatorship over socialism, establishing “social order” as a proxy for a socialist utopia. In Russia, the 1917 Revolution created a dictatorship that was later exploited by Stalin. Many of the original believers in utopia, such as Trotsky, were eliminated as were deemed a threat to Stalin’s power.
It strikes me that the overall problem with the socialist utopia problem is not that it isn’t theoretically possible under some construct; the problem is that when we load up the car and head for Maui, we’ll end up in Long Beach and permanently.
Let me know what you think by leaving a comment. I am always trying to improve my writing and my ideas, your feedback helps me get better.