Socialism really only makes sense if you think that economies are like pies and fairness is all about deciding who gets what slice of that pie… it is the belief that economics is a zero sum game, or that the size of the pie remains the same and all that ‘society’ (meaning state) can do is cut it more fairly.
As this is of course a demonstrable absurdity, given that producing new services and products and opening up new markets actually increases the size of the ‘pie’, it follows that wealth destroying socialist notions of ‘fairness’ are also demonstrable absurdities. This is the ‘fixed wealth fallacy’ that we have often mentioned on this blog… the reality is that me getting richer does not make you any poorer.
Thus it is refreshing to see that Brendan O’Neill, a writer for what used to be called ‘Living Marxism’ and is now called Sp!ked, is also rejecting the fixed wealth fallacy. Making Americans consume less cosmetics or buy less pet food will not make people less poor in the Sudan or anywhere else.
As a result, given that worthy blogger Brendan describes himself as ‘anti-capitalist’, I can only assume that what he is actually ‘anti’ is the sort of statist corporatist capitalism that all libertarians also abominate. It sounds like Brendan is well on the way to being against trade tariffs that discriminate against the third world and against the notion that states trade with each other (in reality people and companies trade with each other)… in short, Brendan seems to heading towards the logical consequence of rejecting the fixed wealth fallacy: laissez faire capitalism.
What say you, Brendan?
