A Working Hypothesis on Socialism

I do not understand how any 21st Century person, of sound mind and reasonable education, can be a socialist.  We have run the experiments, the data are in, we have the results, we know the answer:  socialism fails 100% of the time.  And yet, not only do we still have socialists, but socialism seems to be gaining in popularity.  It boggles the mind.

My thoughts tended to circle around two ideas:

1. How deep does the ignorance have to go, and 
2. How deep is the desire for power at any price?

I now think it is something else.  I think the question revolves around two other ideas, just as depressing, really, but less sinister:

1. The human desire to get something for nothing, and
2. A society that is too complicated for too many people.

First, the human desire to get something for nothing is very nearly irresistible.  As with sex, only the power of religion can contain it.  Not every religion.  I have in mind primarily Protestantism, and I hope a couple of my friends are right that Judaism works as well.  But, as the force of religion wanes in our society, the power of socialism waxes.  I think the waning of religion is one important explanation for the growing popularity of socialism.  And the strategy of politicians to promise something for nothing, always a danger, has become dominant.

On the second point, I am personally aware of many cases in which intelligent, educated people are shockingly ignorant of basic facts about the world we live in, but it was a conversation with my son about a year ago, on healthcare, that crystallized my thinking on this point.

Forgive me for saying that my son is a pretty smart guy who took his graduate degree in biomedical engineering at the University of Pennsylvania.  UPenn is a first class school, especially strong in the life sciences and business (Wharton is there), so he was surround by ideas on healthcare, and he paid attention.

One day, we were chatting about American healthcare.  I admitted to him that I---a college educated man---do not understand how the system works.  His simple and astonishing response was, "nobody does."  Friends, that is a hell of a statement and, almost instantly, all my other thoughts, about our complicated society, rallied to his comment like soldiers rallying around the flag.

Capitalism is the central organizing idea of our society, yet it is more misunderstood by more people than almost any other socially important idea.  Socialism is very easy to understand.  The analogy I like to use, in comparing capitalism to socialism, is the flat vs the round theories on the shape of the earth.

A flat earth is easy to understand:  you can see it and feel it.  Most of us live as if the earth is flat.  Frankly, it does not make any difference, to most people, which theory is correct, so they rightly ignore the whole subject.

On the other hand, 2,500 years ago, a few people knew the earth is round.  And they knew this not merely as a competing superstition, but as fact.  In a simple and lovely exercise in spherical geometry, involving shadows at the bottoms of wells, Greek mathematicians not only proved the earth is round, but they  worked out the circumference of the earth within 10% of the modern figure, I seem to recall.  Not many people, then or now, can understand the mathematical argument.

Ah, but who needs a mathematical argument, these days, when you can see the round earth in pictures taken from space?  Too true.  But recognize the fantastical scientific and engineering infrastructure required to take those pictures.  So my point still stands, very much so:  in one way or another, it is a far more difficult intellectual challenge to understand a round earth than a flat one.  And, space pictures or no, lots of modern, young Americans are still not sure.

Just the same with capitalism and socialism.  Socialism is easy to understand:  let's just get together and fix the problem.  Are there poor people?  Give them money.  Are there sick people?  Give them doctors.  There is an apocryphal conversation between F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway:

Fitzgerald:  The rich are different from you and me.
Hemingway:  Yes, they have more money.

suggesting that Hemingway cut through Fitzgerald's effete complexification.  Socialism just can't be more obvious.  And yet, everybody fails at implementing it.  Everybody.

On the other hand, capitalism, the theory that every person pursues his own self-interest, is a byword for selfishness.  How can you help your neighbor by being selfish?  Adam Smith, the founder of modern economics, had to conjure an "invisible hand" for explanation,

"Every individual... neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it... he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention."

What?

You can see a flat earth, it's the round earth that sounds like superstition.  You can understand people working together to solve problems, we do it all the time.  It's the "invisible hand" that sounds like superstition.  Like religion, actually.  The same religion that warns you never to possess things you did not earn by the labor of your own hands.

Capitalism requires a difficult explanation.  Just try reading Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" or
F.A. Hayek's remarkable work, "The Road to Serfdom".  I think most people are no more able to read Smith than to understand the Greek argument in spherical geometry.

The American nation was founded by a small intellectual elite who could read Adam Smith, and understand a geometric argument.  Benjamin Franklin met Smith twice and conducted an extensive correspondence with him.  Their respect and admiration was mutual.

So, it comes down to this.  That small intellectual elite: George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, James Monroe, and Benjamin Franklin, created a society in their image.  The rest of us are more or less uncomfortable guests.  Most of us do not understand capitalism, do not understand healthcare, do not understand compound interest, or how to use a credit card responsibly.

Do not imagine, however, that lack of understanding is restricted to the "lower" classes.  E.g., there were several strange reasons for the housing crisis of 2008.  Three of them were

1. several million people bought houses they could not afford, 
2. financial institutions traded in securities they did not understand, and
3. a federal agency, the Federal Reserve Bank, that did not understand the market it was supposedly regulating.  

From high school dropouts to economics PhD's, the complexities of their personal and professional lives, in 21st century America, simply eluded their grasp.  For them, for most of us, socialism will come as a physical relief.  We will be poorer but more peaceful in spirit.

There is a passage in "The Fellowship of the Ring" that predicts our fate.  The Lady Galadriel is queen of the Sylvan Elves.  Her great powers derived from the Ring of Power in her possession, one of nine.  All nine Rings of Power were slaves to the One Ring, a ring of great evil.

Galadriel understood the One Ring had to be destroyed.  And, when the One Ring is destroyed,

"...then our power is diminished, and Lothlórien will fade, and the tides of Time will sweep it away. We must depart into the West, or dwindle to a rustic folk of dell and cave, slowly to forget and to be forgotten."

The Paradox of Socialism

For a long time, I had been contemplating a long essay on the paradox of socialism.  And then, it came to me.

Like the Laws of Thermodynamics, capitalism is difficult to understand but it is always true and you can see it working.

Like the idea of the flat earth, socialism is easy to understand but it is not true and you can see it failing.

Over and over, people choose that which is easy to understand and they reject the plain evidence of their "lying eyes".

Socialism is a testament to the power of propaganda and ideology over reality.

The real mystery is how a market-based liberal democracy arose in the first place.  That it lasted this long is astonishing.  How much longer?  I am not optimistic.  It's not even that capitalists are bad at propaganda while socialists are very good at it.  Capitalists aren't even fighting the propaganda war.  They seem to think that only facts and logic are required.

They could not be more wrong.

The New York Times to The Defense

This is how the "New York Times" runs interference for communism.  Hugo Chavez was not a "leftist populist", whatever that is.  He was a plain vanilla, garden variety communist, like Bernie Sanders.

Chavez admired the murderer Che Guevara, he believed "the military should act in the interests of the working classes when the ruling classes were perceived as corrupt" (the ruling classes are always "perceived" corrupt, unless they are communists), and he founded the "Fifth Republic Movement" political party which merged with the "United Socialist Party of Venezuela", which Chavez also led.  Hugo Chavez was friends with Fidel Castro and other communists in Latin America, and he despised Augusto Pinochet and the United States.

Finally, consider what Chavez actually did while in power.  He nationalized "key" industries and created "participatory democratic Communal Councils".  Oh, what's that?  Participatory democratic Communal Councils are soviets.  Soviets, or workers councils, are just good, old fashion Trotskyism.

Honestly, you really don't have to go through the weeds of socialist theory, and the historical record on Hugo Chavez and Venezuela.  All you have to know is that Venezuela, one of the world's largest exporters of oil, suffers from chronic shortages of gasoline and electric power, in addition to shortages of all other kinds, like food and medicine.  Shortages are the hallmark of socialism.  Socialism fabricates shortages.

Of course, other political economies can suffer shortages from time to time.  Shortages can arise naturally from floods, droughts, earthquakes, pestilence, or whatever "acts of god".  There was, for example, the famous Irish potato famine, caused by the potato blight.  Only socialist countries manufacture shortages.

For example, between 1958 and 1962, about 50 MILLION Chinese STARVED TO DEATH in the greatest MAN MADE famine known to history.  No drought, no flood, no earthquake, no pestilence, no infestations, nothing.  They died of socialism.  Starting in the late 19th century, colonial Rhodesia was the breadbasket of Africa.  Robert Mugabe transformed post-colonial Rhodesia into communist Zimbabwe and turned a "breadbasket into a basket case".  One could go on.  And on, and on, and on.

Socialism manufactures shortages from the large and consequential, like shortages of food and medicines, to the sort of minor shortages that just grind down your will to live, like shortages of fresh fruit, toilet paper, sugar, soap, etc.

Any time you hear of shortages, absent some "act of god" the most reasonable assumption is that socialism is at work.  For a domestic example, there was no housing shortage in New York City or any other major American city, until price controls were imposed on rents.  Today, New Yorkers have the pleasure of paying inflated prices for inferior housing, if they can find housing.  This is the inevitable result of price controls, a standard socialist practice.

When Hugo Chavez assumed power in 1999, I predicted shortages.  Of course, I did not know exactly when or exactly how, but I knew shortages were coming.  And so it is.  Venezuela was no paradise before Hugo Chavez, and the people were desperate to improve their lives.  Too bad for them, they got communism, instead.

The New York Times knows all this.  So, why do they try to misdirect their readers ("Oh, look!  A leftist populist!")?  Because, dear reader, they are communists.  They will misdirect you on Venezuela and they will misdirect you on Bernie Sanders, Barack Obama, and on any other person and on any other subject to further the cause of the Revolution.

For the New York Times as for every communist revolutionary, "The issue is never the issue.  The issue is always the Revolution."

Happy Socialist Thanksgiving

The New York Times' Thanksgiving Day report on Venezuela, "Hungry Venezuelans Flee in Boats to Escape Economic Collapse".  Of course, the headline should read, "Hungry Venezuelans Flee in Boats to Escape Socialism."

Now, where have we seen this, before?  Oh, I remember, this Floating Truck is an image, one of thousands, of Cubans desperate to escape their Workers Paradise, abandoning free health care and everything.

As I have written before, more than a few times, the great mystery in my mind is how anyone can be a socialist today.  Several friends recently provided some insight.

I had long assumed that modern Westerners simply were ignorant of the horrors of the Iron Curtain.  Frankly, I still suspect this.  Oh, they may have some sense that all was not well under communism (shortages of Xboxes and whatnot), but I still doubt they know the Chinese were eating babies during "The Great Leap Forward".  And no, that is not a joke.  Not a joke.  Not a joke.  The Chinese were eating babies when 50 MMMillion people starved to death.  Just as Cubans were starving before reforms.  Just as Venezuelans are starving now.

Socialism fabricates shortages.  For some reason, this a big joke when people have to queue up, for hours, for toilet paper.  It's a lot less funny when there is no food in the stores and no medicine in the hospitals.

It turns out that my socialistically-inclined friends do not see a connection between policies and results.  Two of my friends specifically asserted that they see no analogy between the proposed policies of the Democrats, especially people like Barack and Bernie Sanders, and what had transpired behind the Iron Curtain or what is transpiring in Venezuela today.  It cannot happen here, they say, and I do not know why.  Is it the air we breath?  The water we drink?  Does the sun shine differently in the U.S.?  The socialists do not believe in American Exceptionalism, and yet they do.  For some magical reason, the same policies that have yielded destruction there, will work out gloriously here.  We are exceptional after all.

Another friend outright dismissed socialism as the cause of Venezuela's agony.  Corruption, she says, is the explanation.  Her explanation sent chills down my spine, and let me say why.

It has been long explained that the essential element of the scientific method is model building.  You build a model of how the world works, and you make predictions based on that model, and the better the predictions the better the model.  This is a plainly inadequate description of the scientific method.  Everybody builds models of the world.  Religions build models of the world, and there is the Christian model, the Hindu model, the Muslim model, etc.

It was Karl Popper who explained that the key ingredient in model building is falsifiability.  That is, are there certain phenomena that, if observed, would cause you to reject your model of the world?   Scientific models have it, religious models do not.  Since religion begins with faith---belief based on inadequate evidence---naturally there are no criteria of falsifiability.  With rare exception, there is nothing you can tell a True Believer to make him stop believing.

On the other hand, there is the famous example of Albert Einstein who, when he published his theory of General Relativity, was first in the line of skeptics.  Einstein asserted that he could not believe his own theory until certain tests were performed.  Those tests were performed, and only then did Einstein believe.  Many other tests were performed, and Relativity Theory went on to become one of the most thoroughly tested theories of the Cosmos.

So, does socialism look more like science or more like religion?  Socialism looks more like religion, and we have the evidence to prove that.

Deep down in the marrow of their bones, socialists Know how to organize society for the Greater Good.  And they have had 100 years (the centennial of the Russian Revolution is next year) and several billion people to prove it.  Each time they implemented socialism, it did not work out well.  In fact, it worked out very badly, indeed.  In fact, it failed catastrophically.  So, when things failed to work out as their model of the world predicted, the socialists had a choice:  they could revise or reject their theory, or they could suppose that some especially evil-minded individuals---Enemies of the People---were conspiring to sabotage socialism.  For a socialist, rejecting socialism is never an option.

Well!  If you are working against the welfare of millions of your fellow citizens, you are a very evil person committing a very heinous crime.  You deserve death.  And the socialists started killing, and killing, and killing.  That is why Lenin murdered more people in his first six months in power than the Tsars killed in the previous 100 years, why Stalin murdered more Russians during peace-time than Hitler murdered during wartime, why Mao murdered more Chinese during peace-time than the Japanese murdered during wartime, why Pol Pot murdered a quarter of the entire Cambodian population, etc., etc., etc.

That is why Venezuelans are launching themselves into dangerous waters in dangerous boats.  And that is why my dear friend's comment, that "It's the corruption, stupid," sent chills down my spine.  We have seen this all before.

Socialism is the problem.  And if you do not see the connection between socialism and death, then you are the problem.

Environmental Love At The Rio Olympics

When I told my dad, way back in the 20th century, that my wife and I were travelling to Rio de Janeiro, he remembered reading about Rio, in his Romanian high school, as the most beautiful city in the world.  And it was easy to see why.

The geological setting is magical.  The colonial architecture of the old city is charming.  Together they made for an exquisite city.  There was much else to love about the place.

Of course, by the time we got there, Rio had long outgrown its original boundaries.  People have to live, after all, and there was a lot of modern construction.  Not as charming as the colonial architecture, but not terrible.  That was some years ago.  So these days, with all the reportage on the Olympic Games, it is with some personal pain that I read about the filth of Rio,
Rio's Terrible Pollution
Sewage In The Water

I am saddened but not surprised.  You see, from January, 2003 to January 2011, the president of Brazil was Luiz Inacio "Lula" da Silva, a communist.  He was succeeded to the presidency by his former chief of staff, Dilma Rousseff, a communist.  It goes without saying that the economic miracle of Brazil, this past decade, was all smoke and mirrors that is now rapidly dissolving into poverty and social unrest.  But the issue for now is the horrific pollution.

"C'mon, Ed," you say, "socialists love the environment."  G-d save us from such love.  Some of the greatest environmental catastrophes of the modern world were precipitated by socialists.

Consider the Aral Sea.  Once-upon-a-time one of the four largest lakes in the world, grand irrigation schemes under the Soviet Union diverted the feeder rivers, and the eastern basin of the Aral Sea is now the Aralkum Desert,
Before and After Satellite Images
High And Dry
Then, Chernobyl.  And other disasters.

Looking elsewhere, here is to laugh:  that Left-wing rag, The Daily Kos reports that China suffers massive, Unrepairable ecological disasters.
Of course, there is more, much more,
7 of the 10 most air polluted cities in the world are in China
and so on.

When I hear of socialists taking power, I first tremble for the people, as with Venezuela most recently.  But if I give any thought to it, I know environmental disasters cannot be far behind.

The NY Times Comes Out of The Closet (again)

Socialists are exquisitely attuned to history.  When Donald Trump declared that his foreign and trade policies will be organized around the principle of "America First", the Left was quick to pounce, making the connection between Trump and the "notorious" America First Committee.  Started in 1940, the AFC was isolationist (anti-globalist, in modern parlance) and, by association with Charles Lindbergh, faintly racist and White Supremacist, if not actually sympathetic to the Nazi cause.  This was an arcane connection even I did not make, and I am more historically literate than the average American (a very low bar, so I am hardly bragging).  So, what are we to make of the NY Times editorial, "President Obama and the Long March"?

Does the phrase, "Long March", sound familiar to you?  It should.  Google "Long March" and the very first item to pop up, and rightly so, is the Wikipedia article about the heroic military retreat of the Red Army, under Mao Zedong.  Passing through some of the most difficult terrain in China, over the course of a year Mao took his army more than 9,0000 kilometers (about 5,400 miles) to evade the Kuomintang, leave China to the tender mercies of Imperial Japan, and remain intact to fight, not the Japanese of course, but the Nationalists after they had been severely weakened in their mortal struggle with Japan.  Rather than find common cause with the Nationalists to defend China, Mao sacrificed millions of his countrymen in order to enhance his ability to take over China after the Western powers defeated Japan (with no help from him).

For a generation afterwards, most of the power hierarchy of Maoist China was populated by the likes of Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping, comrades of Mao in that arduous enterprise.

The next time we encounter the phrase "Long March" is with Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937).  Gramsci developed the theory of "Cultural Hegemony", later aptly nicknamed "The Long March Through The Institutions".  Probably the most realistic and practical thinker among the socialists, Gramsci realized much earlier than his socialist friends that they will never win against society via a marxist-style, mano-a-mano Class Struggle.  Rather, the right strategy is that of the Glyptapanteles wasp, which lays her eggs inside the body of a paralyzed but still living caterpillar.  Over a brief time, the eggs hatch and the wasp larvae eat their way out of the caterpillar, leaving behind a dead husk.

In other words, forget about Class Struggle.  Rather, take over the schools, the universities, the government bureaucracies and other appointed positions of public service.  Inject yourself into the institutions and, in this way, gradually transmogrify society into socialism.

How real is the Democratic Party's connection to Antonio Gramsci?  Here is Anita Dunn, erstwhile communications director for Barack, telling us that one of her favorite political philosophers is the mass murder Mao Zedong.  Van Jones, Barack's erstwhile Green Jobs Tsar is a self-avowed communist.  For all his protestations to the contrary, Barack speaks in the lingo of socialism (redistribution, positive rights, radical transformation).  And, finally (but not exclusively), one of the most important figures in recent Democratic Party politics is the socialist Bernie Sanders.

Donald Trump's connection to the America First Committee is illusory.  Barack Obama's and the NY Times' connection to Karl Marx is not.