Rich Karlgaard Follows Up on Why Socialism Isn’t Dead
It’s because a lot of people hate capitalism. But why?
Karlgaard, whose column title was inspired by a TCS Daily column by Lee Harris that I commented on a few weeks ago, reviews the record (requires subscription) and then attempts to make sense of things (difficult, given the thought processes involved):
The milder forms of it have yielded economic stagnation where and whenever tried: England in the 1970s; France today. The more impatient strains–”socialism in a hurry,” as Lenin reputedly called communism–did nothing but plunder economies and destroy lives. Their fine leaders ordered the deaths of more than 100 million people–Lenin and Stalin (40 million), Mao (60 million) and Pol Pot (2 million), not to mention that syphilitic dictator of the German National Socialist Party, Adolf Hitler (11 million directly, another 35 million through the war he started).
By all rights socialism should be dead, sealed in a steel vault and buried in Hell. Yet the disease lives. You might even say it’s spreading when you look at the ascent of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Evo Morales in Bolivia, Ken Livingstone in London and the “progressive” American Net-based left (which says Hillary Rodham Clinton is too far right). What accounts for socialism’s reappearance? To discover the answer, we must ask another question. Why do so many people around the world hate its opposite–free-market capitalism?
….. No matter how you look at it–from business starts to job growth to salaries to share prices–the American form of free-market capitalism delivers the goods. But you’ll never convince socialists and their fellow travelers on the trendy Left that anything good has occurred. Or that freedom–in the form of reduced regulation and taxes–is responsible.
There’s the bottom line: Socialists can’t accept the notion that millions of people making billions of individual (and in the socalists’ view, mostly “selfish”) decisions every day can possibly achieve results superior to those that can be attained by allowing “intellectually superior” elites to run things. The hubris that these elites can essentially do all the thinking for these millions, substitute their judgment, and make those billions of decisions for them, is breathtaking, but it persists nonetheless. It leads to nothing but frustration (and as history has shown, much worse) when those darned people won’t all do what they’re supposed to do.
Karlgaard’s piece concludes with a great point in the one area where Harris’s piece fell short — the existence of role models:
Harris says free-market capitalism needs a “transformative myth of its own” to fight the myth of revolutionary socialism. But don’t we have that? I thought that’s what entrepreneurial heroes were all about. Bill Gates and the Google boys are still heroes to millions of Chinese and Indians, if not to the French or Bolivians. That’s why, though I share Harris’ concern about socialism’s odd new vitality, I think capitalism will win the battle for men’s minds.
Heroes go at least all the way back to great inventors like Edison and great industrial minds like Henry Ford. If they’re not known, it’s because no one is telling their stories. That needs to change.
Here are a few, for starters: Sam Walton, Clay Mathile (Iams Company), Alfred Sloan, Tom Monaghan, and Charles Koch.
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UPDATE: New York Nonsensical — The hiatusized EU Rota sends me news about the Socialism 2006 conference in New York City June 22-25. He appears to be interested in going if the “Capitalism and Sexuality” session (go to 11:30 a.m. - 1:00 p.m. on Tuesday) has breakout modules. Well, there IS a lunch break right after that, and you don’t HAVE to go to lunch ….. but I would advise EU that the pickings appear to be better with pro-democracy babes, especially this one.
