barry burton

Socialism?

That all people are selfish and only motivated by self interest is an undeniable truth. Some people generally prefer quantity to true quality, something that I think is an extension of a more general inability to weigh future consequences to be as important as present gratification.

Taken together, this is presents the following: all people seek to optimize their happiness, but some are only concerned with their immediate happiness, while other people are willing to endure present hardships in return for greater future happiness.

The problem with Socialism is that ignores the second group of people, forcing all people to fit into the first group. However, it is the second group that drives innovation and progress within society. Without them, society stagnates. A society in which hard work is not rewarded can never prosper.

Sometimes inequality of wealth is the result of the differences between these two groups of people. Socialism assumes this is always the case. However, the ability to work towards long term goals is not the cause of the most egregious differences in the distribution of wealth. The greatest differences in wealth always come from exploitation — from exploiting a system or exploiting the planet or exploiting people.

While Socialism stamps out the beneficial use of unequally distributed wealth (giving people a reason to work harder), it actually encourages the more devious cause by creating more loopholes. People don’t generally think of the US government as being Socialist because it implements few, if any, policies which remove the incentive of hard work. The US government does, however, enforce quite a few Socialist laws which make exploitation easier. These laws are generally designed to prop up industries and ideas which are no longer feasible, but end up forming a framework in which less than honest individuals can unfairly amplify the results of their work, so as to greatly change the distribution of wealth in a way that hard work alone would never reach.

Subsidizing farmers means that their status quo is always preserved so they have no reason to innovate. So Americans can get lots of crappy worthless food filled with corn syrup because the government pays for such a big percentage of corn production. The big packaged food companies get rich because the government has created an artificial demand for their nutritionally worthless but monetarily cheap products.

Subsidizing highways and American automakers means that transportation by car appears to be far cheaper than it actually is. This leads to unnaturally low adoption of mass transit. Failing to enforce to the true cost of items is just as bad. The burning of fossil fuels exacts a huge price from the environment, but this cost is not reflected in the cost of operating an automobile.

Likewise, pesticides transfer the cost of farming from the farmer to the earth. We become accustomed to prices for food that are simply too low to be fair. On the jilted end of this deal is the chemical-logged earth in the future, and the people of the future who are harmed by the tainted nature of everything that comes from this ground. Finally, power generation and other heavy industries spew tons of participants and gases into the atmosphere. We think of this as free, but it’s simply not. The air, the ground, these things are finite resources. To treat them as infinite and able to continually absorb our cheapness is not sustainable.

This doesn’t even begin to look at smaller examples of unsustainability — wasting materials in unnecessary packaging, creating cheaper products which won’t last and are so thrown ‘away’.

The last and worst form of exploitation is of people. Much of the products used by the industrialized world are made by underpaid workers in developing countries who are forced to work for not only low wages but also often under hazardous conditions.

So, a better society would leave inequality in the present alone. This inequality is primarily driven by some people working harder than others. The promise of this inequality is what causes some members of society to drive society as whole forward.

A better society would seek to limit long term inequality, but not directly. It would do so indirectly by avoiding any laws which artificially change costs (ie. no subsidization) and would enact laws to ensure that long term costs are reflected in what must be payed today (ie. pollution and exploitation would incur steep taxation).

With these changes, the market value of items would more closely track their true cost. Organic food would be cheaper than conventionally grown food, which harms the environment as part of its production. Some industries, once no longer propped up by subsidies, would be seen for the unviable train-wrecks that they really are, and would recede into oblivion (or at least the small scale fringe of society). The opportunities for exploitation would be dramatically reduced. Being evil would not be nearly as profitable, and while there would be difference between the rich and poor, the magnitude of the difference would much less than it is today. I would contend that to reduce the difference between rich and poor more than this would actually be bad, because it would mean unhinging a person’s effort from their reward, which is precisely why traditional Socialism fails.

There are a number of reasons why anything remotely like these changes will never happen. First, it requires thinking of the world as a whole. It requires that the ground and the people on another continent be thought of as part of one’s own society. As long as these people are outside of one’s society, they can be exploited, treated as being worth less than members of one’s society. Second it requires letting go of the status quo. If the unsubsidized automobile is no longer a viable industry, it means moving from the automobile to new forms of transportation. Third, it requires letting go of the American dream. If the true cost of items means that the average person can no longer afford a house in the suburbs and enough food to make them fat, then people will have to change to different styles of housing and / or resign themselves to only enough food to nourish themselves. People aren’t ready for any of these things.

I’m not a fan of telling others what to do. Everyone should be free to make their own choices. They just shouldn’t be allowed to make choices that negatively impact others without reaping the consequences themselves. That this is so easy is the real injustice of our society.