Tenets

Posted by Michael at 10/30/2008 7:23 AM
Categories: Philosophy Arguments
I'm going to take a turn for the abstract for a moment. Normally I try to keep the material here very real-world specific, but since it's pretty clear Obama's going to win anyway, I figure I can move this blog in a direction less directed towards a course of action and more towards a discourse of values.

As a socialist/communist/Marxist/collectivist/whatever, let's make a critical examination of your core beliefs. (You guys like encouraging others to critical introspection, right? Seriously, though, I'm not here to insult. I'm here to analyze.)

The Theory

At the heart of Enlightenment philosophy is the assertion that all human beings are of inherently equal value. Marxism (and all theories derived therefrom) takes this idea and couples it to the notion that equally-valued people should live equally-valued lives, and highlights financial disparity as a clear illustration that, despite having inherently equal value as human beings, some people live much, much better than others. 

(Little-known fact: By some accounts, as described here, Karl Marx actually invented the word "capitalism" to describe the system of economics as he saw it, so that he could describe something different. Before Karl Marx, there was no "capitalism". There was just, "You buy stuff that I sell at a mutually agreeable price.")

Now, Karl Marx considered himself more a prognosticator than an advocate. He forecast that eventually the world's poor would take arms against the rich and achieve victory by their sheer numbers. He predicted that they would seize the assets of the upper classes and redistribute them in a manner more consistent with financial equity, and would erect a bottom-up system of government that would prevent the kind of transaction that caused disparity to arise in the first place - including, but not limited to, the wholesale abolition of the notion that anybody "owns" anything. Marx didn't explicitly describe how such a system of government would work - i.e. he didn't write a constitution or outline a specific system of checks and balances. Nor did he seek to organize any such movement himself; he simply saw the rise of such a movement as inevitable.

The Practice

The principles of Marxism necessitate the construction of complex government institutions. 

The economic disparity that Marx finds so offensive largely arises naturally from the normal everyday individual transactions of a free market. All other things being equal, some people make lots of money selling their goods and services (or making bets on others' ability to do so), while others don't. 

Thus, in order to prevent some people from making more money than others, a Marxist society would have to have some way to prevent free transactions from taking place. For example, it cannot permit a celebrity hairstylist and a willing customer to trade $400 for a haircut, even if both the stylist is willing to do it and the customer is willing to pay it. 

As such, implementations of Marxism have largely involved complex bureaucracies to dictate the prices and availabilities of goods and services, and highly intrusive enforcement agencies to ensure that all transactions adhere to the bureaucracies' mandates.

If I understand correctly, many modern-day self-described Communists/Marxists consider such implementations to be flawed, claiming that every real-world attempt at creating a Communist nation has failed because it's "impure" or corrupted. Yet, because implementation of Marxist philosophy mandates regulation of otherwise private transactions, don't these "corruptions" derive directly from Marxism's most fundamental principles? After all, if I'm a master hairstylist, I can ask someone to pay $400 for a haircut and they'll pay it, because to somebody it's worth it. Sure, most people might consider it an outlandish price, but none of those people are involved in this transaction. It's between the stylist and the customer, period: your money for my time and labor. Yet in a Marxist system, these "most people" must intervene and forbid the transaction from occurring - by force, if necessary - because it is through a large number of such transactions that the hairstylist grows wealthy.

I mean, if there's another way and there's something I'm not getting, by all means tell me where I'm wrong... but do me a favor and think about it first, 'k?

In case you think I'm speaking in the abstract, let me describe exactly what this intervention looks like. In almost all cases, it takes the form of a combination of regulation, tax policy, and flat-out police action. In the case of our master hairstylist, in most states he already needs to buy an operating license (whose terms and conditions are set by the state legislature) in order to run a hairstyling business. It would be very easy for a state to pass an addendum to the license agreement stating that no stylist may charge more than $50 for a haircut. At that point, the stylist could theoretically keep selling $400 haircuts to willing customers under the table, but if he's caught he'd face fines and/or jail time. 

So, when I talk about "the people" involving themselves in private financial transactions and intervening with the use of force, I'm not talking about a torch-and-pitchfork mob raiding the hair salon and demanding that the stylist give them everything in the till. I'm talking about that same mob, sans pitchforks, going to a ballot box where they vote in a set of legislators who create a set of laws that will cause the local police to raid the hair salon, and levy a fine against the stylist (if he's lucky). It's a little bit more indirect, but at the end of the day, if I shoot a freethrow, the scoreboard doesn't care whether I get nothing but net or whether my ball bounces off the backboard and spins around the hoop for a while before going in. Both the cause and the effect are the same: the people prevent the stylist and his customers from engaging in transactions that don't concern or involve anybody else. 


The Problem

Financial disparity is a dubious metric of a society's dysfunction. As the old Winston Churchill quote goes, "The vice of capitalism is that there is an unequal share of blessings; the virtue of socialism is that there is an equal share of misery." Just because everybody's no better or worse off than anybody else, doesn't mean that everybody is doing well.

In fact, it is much easier to create poverty than to create wealth. It's easier for me to trash a house than to build one. It's easier for me to crap on a subway platform than for me to clean it up. It's easier for me to impregnate a bunch of girls and increase the population than it is for me to feed the resultant children. In a normal non-collectivist economy, I suffer more than others as a result of such actions, and as such there is a strong disincentive for me to engage in them. But in a society where one man's poverty is every man's poverty, in a society where everybody pays for the building of a house regardless of who lives in it (or what they did with their last one), each individual has no incentive for responsible behavior. Not only that, but they have an active disincentive (or, at best, a lack of incentive) to produce wealth, since they themselves gain no benefit from their own actions.

So from the point of view of engineering, from the point of view of basic math, this is a system that tends towards universal financial degradation. Each individual component of such a system gradually gets fewer and fewer resources at its disposal, no matter what its own efforts or abilities might be.

In short, there doesn't exist any economic system which can take a population that inherently cannot financially support itself, and make that population prosperous through the application of government policies. With a free market, you can at least have the few elements that can support themselves go ahead and do so, and those elements can create opportunities for others as they pull ahead. With a collectivist system, everybody just drags each other down into the same poverty-riddled pit.


The way I see it


Marxists and their ilk are the most materialistic people in the world. They don't think of themselves as such, but the very foundations of Marxism equate financial value with an individual's inherent value as a human being.

Personally, I don't base my judgment of people based on how much money they have. I base it on how they treat me, how they treat their friends and family, how they treat strangers (in pretty much that order).

And you know what? Most people are assholes. Really! It doesn't matter how much money they have. If they're rich, then they're rich assholes. If they're poor, they they're poor assholes. And frankly I feel safer and more secure around rich assholes than around poor ones - at least if an asshole has money of his own he'll be less inclined to abuse my friendship to break into my place and steal my TV.

So it doesn't make the slightest sense to me to use the force of government to enforce economic parity - a goal you can't even viably achieve because some retards out there will always take their redistribution-awarded profits and spend them all on crack (thus reducing the total amount of wealth in the system, thus forcing another round of redistribution. I mean, hey, why not smoke a little crack if the government is always going to level everyone out?). You might as well try to enforce parity of height, or hair color, or penis length, or neocortical serotonin levels.

What does make sense to me is recognizing that people differ in their ability to create wealth, just as surely as they differ in their athletic ability or their physical attractiveness or their intellect or their predisposition for aggression. And the best thing you can do is to let them do their thing, to back the hell off and let hairstylists cut people's hair and programmers write software and surgeons remove tumors under terms and conditions that both they and their customers agree to, without your interference. The transaction doesn't concern you, and you have no place to say or do anything about it. And yes, with enough such transactions, some of those hairstylists or programmers or surgeons are going to get rich. And you know what? There's not a damn thing wrong with that.











 
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