"Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word, equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude." --- Alexis de TocquevilleI ran across this quote by de Tocqueville and thought it summed up my thinking on the matter pretty well. You may recall the post I wrote earlier on the differences between the values of the USA and France. In that post, although I did not identify American values as "democracy" and french values as "socialist" I believe that the two nations are good representations of the two groups de Tocqueville referred to. So here, I shall be more explicit. Though there seem to be a number of people in the US who despise capitalism and would much rather have mama government govern every aspect of our lives and punish those evil business people for being successful, I don't think that that's a very good track to go down. As we've seen in Europe and the US to an extent, socialism doesn't work. And for a good reason. Socialism punishes those who do well and rewards those who do poorly. As we all know, in general, things that the government punishes it gets less of and things that the government rewards it gets more of. Thus, since socialism rewards poverty and punishes the wealthy, socialism generates more impoverished people. Why go to work when you can live off the government? As time progresses, and more people chose to poverty, there are less wealthy people to pay taxes with which to fund the growing number of "poor" and the government itself becomes deeply in debt. At this point it must either ask a richer nation to subsidize its poverty or it must default on its loans and go bankrupt. Sound familiar? Of course, when the richer governments bail out the smaller ones, they only kick the can down the road and allow everyone to get deeper in debt, making the problem worse.
While equality of result may sound appealing to lazy bums like the ones "occupying wall street" (the ones protesting, of course) all it produces is equal bondage and poverty (except for the government, which grows good and fat off of the people). In other words, there can either be a large difference in income and resources, along with an equal chance to be one of the rich people, or there can be an entire society of people worse off than the poorest capitalist. I don't know which one is "fairest" (obviously I've argued for equal opportunity a number of times here) but I know which society I'd rather live in. In fact, I'm such an extremist that I like the idea that people who work hard are rewarded well and people who don't work hard aren't. Imagine that I even like having responsibility for my own actions! I'm so 19th century.
While I agree with you about Socialism being a very deadly philosophy that creates poverty and propagates over-regulation, I wouldn't necessarily say that "things that the government punishes it gets less of and things that the government rewards it gets more of."
ReplyDeleteI agree that a positive incentive (if you do a, b, and c, I will give you a cookie) usually works fairly well. However, a negative incentive (if you DON'T do a, b, and c, then I will burn down your house and every cookie inside of it) does not always work in the way intended. In fact, the American government puts negative incentives on many activities (drug-dealing, general criminal behavior, being a right-winger with an opinion, etc.) but negative incentives in these cases don't serve to really suppress the activity which the government wants to suppress. There are still drug-dealers, and they're finding new ways to get around the DEA and other federal agencies set up to catch them. Criminality is still high, with a prison population that is disturbingly large. And, despite the government's ardent desire to the contrary, there are still conservatives with opinions. The government has put many negative incentives on these conservatives (Conservatives can't get into good colleges, conservatives are all labelled as bigoted and racist, the schools undermine conservative teaching, etc) but despite all that, conservatives have become much more vocal in the past few years than ever before.
Perhaps that statement was a little strong, but I still hold that punishing criminal behavior has resulted in less crime than there otherwise would be (I never said that negative incentive would necessarily eliminate anything). As to Classical Liberalism's increased vocalism despite social pressures, I would first say that I don't necessarily attribute college acceptance or name-calling solely or even primarily to the government and second that the public schools bias against Classical Liberalism is less of a negative incentive and more of an attempt to control the minds of up-coming generation, which has so far met with only mediocre success thanks to pesky things like conservative parents and the internet that expose helpless children to the corrosive calamity of conservatism. The public schools (as far as I can tell) do not tangibly punish Classical Liberals as much as they merely ignore and belittle them. A strategy which may be easily thwarted by other authority figures in a child's life. Granted, government's use of positive and negative incentive is hardly omnipotent, but I still maintain that it typically has some of the intended affect, which is all I intended to say in the first place. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to clarify.
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