Socialism: Be Careful What You Wish For

Socialism: Be Careful What You Wish For

• The object of socialism is supposedly to increase economic equality by evening out the wealth in society among individuals and families. This is done by taking wealth from those with more than the average and redistributing it to those with less than the average. As wealth will not usually be voluntarily surrendered, the redistribution would have to be enforced by government agencies, backed by laws and administrative regulations. Socialism in practice, however, has usually resulted in members of the governments redistributing the wealth they seize to themselves and their associates. Even in the US government, at present, members of Congress do not bind themselves to observe the laws to which they bind the rest of the country. As Lee Atwater reportedly put it, "The dawgs don't like the dawg food."
  
  
• Equality of results severs the relationship between being able to enjoy the rewards of one's production and the confiscation of those rewards for distribution to others. The disconnect between work and reward undermines the motivation to work and to innovate. Why work or take risks when the profits, if one is successful, go to others? If you take away an incentive to work and produce, you end up taking away the producers.
  
  
• Socialism means turning over your freedom to your government, which claims that it knows how to spend your money better than you do. History has unfortunately proven this to be an economic and delivery-of-services death spiral, whether of sub-standard quality of public education in the US, or the delivery of health care to veterans. Now, President Donald J. Trump is finally trying to address the crisis that veterans' healthcare has become. How? By privatizing it.
  
  
• If justice is giving each person his or her due, then taking wealth from those who have earned it, in order to give it to those who have not earned it, is a practice dubious at best. It is human to envy those with more and better. However, it is doubtful that it is good social policy to base political policy on these sentiments: one historically ends up with worse and less.
  
  
  
  

Socialist governments must redistribute, come hell or high water, and the decline of production turns out to be hell and high water. If you take away an incentive to work and produce, you end up taking away the producers. Visitors to the Soviet Union remember trying to get the attention of a waiter in a restaurant: why should anyone help if there was no reward for helping? There is a health crisis now within Europe as doctors flee poorer member states in search of better pay in wealthier member states, and in the UK, fewer people are applying to medical school. This realization is why Margaret Thatcher is quoted as saying, "the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money."

Socialist governments have a monetary solution to that problem: they just print more money. That works for the moment, but from then on, inflation increases until all money becomes effectively worthless and one cannot buy any goods or services, if there were any to buy, which by then usually there aren't. Inflation in oil-rich Venezuela reached 80,000% in 2018, according to Forbes. Socialist "equality" becomes equal poverty and starvation for all, except perhaps a few in government.