Liberal Socialism is Another False

Utopia
It's really just the existing interventionist-welfare state.

by Richard M. Ebeling

Very often bad and failed ideas do not die, they simply reappear during periods of
supposed social and political crisis in slightly different intellectual garb, and offer
solutions that would merely help to bring about some of the very types of crises for
which they once again claim to have the answers. Socialism in its various
progressive mutations represents one of the leading so-called solutions of our time.

The Marxian-style socialism of the nineteenth

and the first half of the twentieth centuries is

now long pass.

The latest manifestation of this appeared on August 24, 2017 in the New Republic in
an online article by John B. Judis on, The Socialism America Needs Now. He is
heartened by the wide appeal, especially among younger voters, that Bernie Sanders
received during the 2016 presidential contest. He thinks that this may herald a rebirth
and a renewed possibility for a socialist alternative to the current American political
and economic system.
Having traveled over the decades from the 1970s to the present from a radical,
revolutionary socialist to a more moderate one today, Mr. Judis admits that the
Marxian-style socialism of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries
is now long pass. The embarrassing experience of socialism-in-practice in the form
Lenin and Stalin created in the Soviet Union or by Chairman Mao in China will not
fly anymore.

From Soviet Central Planning to Liberal Socialism

Central planning seemed not to work too well, and the communist variation on the
socialist theme also had a tendency to be authoritarian with some drawbacks for
human life and liberty. (He tactfully avoids mentioning that Marxist-inspired regimes
in the twentieth century murdered well over a 100 million people with some
estimates suggesting the number might have been closer to 150 million or more in the
name of building the bright, beautiful socialist future. (See my article, The Human
Cost of Socialism in Power.)
 He turns his mind and ideal to the democratic socialist parties and regimes in

Western Europe in the post-World War II era, or as Mr. Judis prefers to call it -

following John Maynard Keynes -liberal socialism. What makes this form of

socialism liberal? It is the belief that there can be socialism with a human

face. In other words, a form of economic socialism that leaves in place

democratic politics with a respect for a broad range of personal and civil

liberties. Virtually all socialists condemned and

called for the abolition of private ownership of

means of production.

We have heard this all so many times before. While Mr. Judis wishes to suggest that
there is no real or definitive definition of socialism (any more than there are of
liberalism or democracy), the fact is that throughout the nineteenth century and
well into the twentieth, virtually all socialists condemned and called for the abolition
of private ownership of means of production, and imagined in its place some form of
socialist central planning directed by government in the name of the people.
Mr. Judis actually more or less admits this, and that the only great debate among
socialists and communists in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries was over how
the socialist utopia would be brought about, whether through violent revolution or
through the democratic ballot box. The Russian Marxists led by Vladimir Lenin
insisted that only revolution and a dictatorship of the proletariat could bring the
workers to power and assure their permanent triumph over the exploitive capitalist
class. The German democratic socialists opted for democratic means to power and
rejected the dictatorship of Lenin and later Stalin.

But it is nonetheless the case that well into the post-World War II period this was a
dispute over political means and not ideological ends, which remained for both
branches of the socialist movement the abolition of capitalism and the imposition of
socialist central planning. Communists wanted to bring about this transformation of
society in one fell swoop through violent means and imposed dictatorship. The
German Social Democrats and the Fabian socialists in Great Britain proposed
democratic means, with socialism coming more gradually and through incremental
extensions of government control and planning over more and more parts of society.
But for both, the end result would be the same: centralized government direction of
economic affairs and social change.

As the 1950s turned into the 1960s and 1970s, more and more democratic socialists
in Western Europe grudgingly accepted the fact that comprehensive socialist central
planning was a failure as practiced in the Moscow-dominated Soviet bloc countries;
and it brought little of the prosperity that government planning promised to provide as
an escape from poverty in the third world countries of Asia, Africa and Latin
America.

The collectivist dream and delusion springs

eternal.


Plus, the tyranny and brutality of Soviet-style socialism made it ethically difficult to
defend. So the democratic socialists turned to the interventionist-welfare state to
achieve their social justice ends without nationalizing all the means of production or
centrally planning all economic activity in society. (See my article, Barack Obama
and the Meaning of Socialism.)

Social Justice Tourism

But those communist regimes were not so repulsive that democratic socialists in the
West would not continue to give moral indulgence and wishful hopes that somehow
Marxian socialism would finally work and fulfill its promise in, Maos China,
Castros Cuba, or Ho Chi Minhs Vietnam, or in the Sandinistas Nicaragua, or any
other failed utopia we can find in recent history. The collectivist dream and delusion
springs eternal. After all, even a rude, crude, and rough Marxist regime isnt the
United States please, almost anything other than capitalist America!

Even today, the enlightened progressive can take a tour of Castros Cuba with the
leftist magazine, The Nation. Dont miss out! This November 2017 you can go
with The Nation and, their advertisement promises, learn about the Cuban
Revolution from experts at some of its most pivotal locations, including the Moncada
Barracks, the site of the first armed assault by Fidel Castro and his band of rebels on
July 26, 1953.
 The progressive political pilgrim to the collectivist promised land will be

spending his or her days meeting with prominent Cuban professors,

government officials, including urban planners and health care workers.

Dont miss out on your chance to visit one of the remaining socialist utopias

before global capitalism succeeds in taking it away. Che

arbitrarily sent hundreds to their deaths,

sometimes literally by his own hand.

No doubt, these social justice tourists will not be taken to La Cabana prison, where
Che Guevara was assigned by Castro the role of state prosecutor against enemies of
the people, following Fidels triumphant entrance into Havana and seizure of power
in January 1959. In the role as unrestrained judge and jury, Che arbitrarily sent
hundreds to their deaths, sometimes literally by his own hand.

Nor are they likely to have quoted to them Ches words that, My ideological training
means that I am one of those people who believe that the solution to the worlds
problems is to be found behind the Iron Curtain. And that I cant be the friend of
anyone who doesnt share my ideas. Or that Che was the one who in 1960 instituted
communist Cubas system of forced labor camps. This would not fit in with the heroic
face of Che on the t-shirts that, no doubt, some of these progressive travelers to
utopia would be wearing. After all, Fidel and Che did it all for the people, and, well,
they did have good intentions.

Of course, while such political pilgrims are pleased to visit these places and bask in
the moral satisfaction that the few remaining communist regimes in the world are still
trying to make that better world, even if with the heavy hand of dictatorship,
censorship of art, music and political views, the imprisonment of political opponents,
and torture and execution of enemies of the people (all of which they still mostly
turn a blind eye to), they prefer to live in their own Western countries and dream the
liberal socialist dream, as clearly Mr. Judis is doing.

Liberal Socialism as the Regulatory and Redistributive State

What, precisely, is this democratic or liberal socialism to which Mr. Judis hopes a
younger generation of Americans will turn in the years ahead? It turns out to be the
same utopia of the interventionist-welfare state that Western countries have been
following since the end of the Second World War, though, admittedly, to different
degrees in different places around the world.

Mr. Judis wants the government to intensively and pervasively regulate, command,
restrict and direct various aspects of the private enterprises in society, while ensuring
that American society can still take advantage of the self-interested incentives and
innovations that can improve the material conditions of life. But the direction, form,
and extent to which private enterprisers shall be allowed to do those productive and
innovative things with their businesses will be confined to and constrained within
those avenues that serve the higher and non-market values and purposes of
society.
 Matching the regulatory and interventionist

state must be the redistributive welfare state.

Matching the regulatory and interventionist state must be the redistributive welfare
state. The excessive and unnecessary income and wealth of the businessmen and
private sector investors of America must be taxed - heavily - to assure greater material
egalitarianism, and to fund all the social services and government-provided safety
nets, which would bring immeasurable benefit to ordinary Americans. A good
watchword is economic security something that is very lacking to all except the
wealthiest Americans.

At this point, it might be wondered what, then, marks off Mr. Judis liberal
socialism from the already existing modern American liberal interventionist-
welfare state? It turns out that it is all a matter of intentions and the intended
recipients. In Mr. Judis view, mainstream modern American liberals have lost their
way; they too frequently sleep with the enemy (think Bill and Hillary Clinton) in the
form of excessively collaborating with businessmen and bankers to the latters
benefit; American liberals and progressives have stopped sufficiently emphasizing
economic justice for middle America with their increasingly primary focus on
identity politics.
Liberal Socialism and Democratic Politics Without Romance

Also, unlike the communists and many radical socialists and some progressives, Mr.
Judis calls for moving towards his notion of a better socialist future through a more
active participation in the Democratic Party. The task is to nudge and shove
mainstream modern American liberals in the Democratic Party further to the socialist
left, which in many of their hearts these people already know is right. And to use the
Democratic Party as the vehicle to propagandize and persuade more in society that
socialism is good and just and the best for them.

In other words, Mr. Judis calls for using the methods of the earlier German
Democratic Socialists and the British Fabians, only do so in a way that does not seem
to be as threatening or undermining of all the institutions of existing society as those
earlier groups often did with their call for the total abolition of capitalism.

What is sometimes called crony capitalism is

just Paretos bourgeois socialism.

Mr. Judis liberal socialism is really just the existing interventionist-welfare state
placed democratically in the right elected hands, so those manning and
managing the machinery of government will do what he wants political authority to
do, rather than what it is currently being done by Republicans and the current
Democratic Party establishments.

A way for Mr. Judis to more easily defend his desire and ideal is to suggest that the
existing political-economic system in America today is a free market, neo-liberal
capitalism, rather than what the Italian economist, Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923) once
more accurately labeled it: bourgeois socialism. That is, a system of government
regulation, redistribution, favors and privileges that benefits many in the private
enterprise sectors of society rather than a more proletarian socialism that simply
would take from the rich to give to the workers and the poor.

What is sometimes called crony capitalism is just Paretos bourgeois socialism.

Pareto also understood with amazing clarity in the 1890s one of the insights of
modern Public Choice theory, that participatory democracy of the community as a
whole is a theoretical and practical illusion in a complex society. Politics in an
unrestrained democracy always becomes a contest among special interest groups
capable of gaining concentrated benefits from State intervention and redistribution at
the diffused expense of the rest of the society.

In democratic societies it takes the form of coalitions of special interest groups who
succeed in offering campaign contributions and votes to politicians desiring elected
political office, who then fulfill their campaign promises to those groups once in the
actual halls of political power.

The communist classless society had one of

the most intricate social webs of favoritism

and plunder ever.



In totalitarian societies, such as in the former Soviet Union, it took the form of
hierarchical positions within the Communist Party and within the central planning
bureaucracy, including the state enterprise managers, who had the decision-making
power over access to and use of the socialized means of production. Thus, the
communist classless society had one of the most intricate social webs of power,
privilege, favoritism and plunder ever seen in human society.

This politics without romance, to use Nobel Laureate, James M. Buchanans (1919-
2013) phrase, shows why the notion of the people owning, controlling, regulating
and overseeing the collective direction of an economy is pure illusion and deception
concerning the reality of how and why political power works the way it does.

What Mr. Judis and far too many who share his views about capitalism and some form
of socialism liberal or otherwise fail to understand is that any and all forms of
planning, regulation, and political redistribution in fact takes power and decision-
making out of the hands of the people about whom they express their concerns.

Real Participatory Liberation under Free Market Liberalism

It is the open, competitive market economy that, precisely, gives each and every
individual wide latitude and liberty over his own personal affairs. It is the market that
enables each of us to make his own choices concerning the profession, occupation, or
productive calling to pursue. It is the market that enables each and everyone of us to
have the freedom to make our own choices to earn an income and spend that income
as we consider best in terms of the values, beliefs, purposes and desires that we think
may bring meaning and happiness to our individual lives.

It is the free society that provides truly

participatory opportunities to form groupings

of almost any type.

It is the free society of individual liberty and voluntary association that provides truly
participatory opportunities to form groupings of almost any type to further the ends
outside of the narrower arena of market transactions to better our lives materially,
socially, culturally and spiritually. See my article, Individual Liberty and Civil
Society for more about this.

At this point no doubt, Mr. Judis would reasonably ask, but what about those who are
unable to provide for themselves, due to personal tragedy, unfortunate circumstances,
or simply bad luck? Is this not the reason why enlightened and decent societies had to
move leftward to establish and financially provide for those unable to personally
meet the essentials of everyday life and to have opportunities to fulfill their potentials
as a human being? Is not the welfare state of liberal socialism the inescapable
necessity of having a humane society?

The classical liberal responds that these very concerns can be far better and more
successfully solved and served through the voluntary institutions and associations of
civil society than to turn such tasks over to the government. In the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, before the modern welfare state, all such social problems
were handled with wide and positive effects by charities, philanthropies and for-profit
organizations in places such as Great Britain and the United States. That their
workings and successes are virtually unknown to most people in modern society
shows the extent to which their history and social nobility has gone down a memory
hole of collectivist misinterpretation and misunderstanding of what a society of liberty
did and could provide (for more about this, see my article, A World Without the
Welfare State).

Furthermore, the transfer of such welfare responsibility to the government reduces

each and every recipient to a ward of the State. It is politicians and bureaucrats who
decide the education your children will receive in government schools; they are the
ones who determine the retirement possibilities you will have, the healthcare to which
you will have access and its type, the wages and work conditions under which you
may be allowed to be employed or unemployed, and the forms and types of
associations you may enter into as well as the activities and membership you are
permitted.

Liberal socialism is not the path to liberation,

but of continuing servitude to the those with

political power.


The liberal socialism about which Mr. Judis dreams is not the path to liberation, but
of continuing servitude to those with political power and who have the presumption to
imagine that they know better how people are to care for their own lives than those
individuals (See my article, Democratic Socialism Means Loss of Liberty).

One would have thought that after more than seven decades of the interventionist-
welfare state as the political lefts liberal socialist alternative to Marxian socialist
central planning, it would be realized that it is just another constraining and corrupt
manifestation of the unworkability of any collectivist system of control and command.

Mr. Judis program for a socialist America also shows the intellectual bankruptcy of
those on the left. The revolutionary transformation of society, for which they yearn,
ends up being nothing more than the existing interventionist-welfare state, except with
the desire that people who agree with Mr. Judis should be at the helm of political
power rather than those with whom he disagrees.

Richard M. Ebeling
Richard M. Ebeling is BB&T Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Free Enterprise
Leadership at The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina. He was president of the
Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) from 2003 to 2008.