We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Samizdata quote of the day The old argument about the science of socialism was that it would be more efficient than capitalism and markets. Eliminate all that waste of competition and plan what is to be produced, by whom, where, and we’ll all have more stuff. We’ll be richer in short.
Then we went and tested the contention to destruction and 1989 showed that it was incorrect.
Oh well, not the first nor the last scientific or political proposition shown to be wrong. What’s much more interesting is that the justification for the same policies has changed in this modern age. For all too many people still insist we should be doing those same things, they just trot out different reasons as to why we should. Some that it would be fairer that way, others even going so far as to insist that we shouldn’t have economic growth therefore planning and socialism.
– Tim Worstall
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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And this is known as learning from experience. Over the last century humanity (hat tip to socialists) really has discovered one of the few unarguable truths of economics that lead directly to policy prescription. If you want to avoid prosperity, we know how to do it.
(para)”socialism.., more efficient than capitalism and markets.”
What? Is it supposed to be metric, and use Celsius, or something?
Deleted, off topic, get stuffed.
Small matter how it is hypothetically presented, the overwhelming evidence is that Socialism is the modern reboot of Feudalism. The great numbers of the population will have their best interests looked after by self titled experts who lead lives that would have shamed Louis XIV. Christiane LaGarde comes to mind for some inexplicable reason. Perhaps most important is that those normals out there be kept in their place, to paraphrase the French General of a century ago, They shall not rise! and most certainly not by their own merit. After all if any of the common people were to attain success and abundance through their own skill and labor it could only reflect poorly their betters. They can sell it any way they should like, the destination remains the same.
I’m not quite sure where the specific year 1989 came from. In “Free to Choose” (1980) Milton Friedman noted that the old idea that socialism would improve productivity had by then been replaced by its opposite in the public domain. As regards the UK, he was spot on. Even BBC programmes (“Not the Nine’O’Clock News”, “Week Ending”, etc.) regularly had jokes suggesting that a government-run industry meant an inefficient, loss-making industry. The old socialists did indeed swear that eliminating wasteful competition would cause production totals to soar, but insofar as that notion was still alive and well at the start of the 70s, it died outside the hard left during that decade.
The fairness claim was always part of socialism and it of course is still pushed hard today.
The green idea that socialists don’t want to produce as much as capitalism, let alone more, is a massive change from standard old socialism (see e.g. Orwell’s “The Road to Wigan Pier”). It has always been obvious that a certain kind of socialist would rather be handing out equalised handfuls of crumbs than dine at a feast where the top table ate even better. But for Labour’s deputy leader actually publicly to say so will, I hope, do at least a little of the harm it should to socialism’s electoral prospects.
Cesare (February 24, 2018 at 3:04 pm), I assume you are thinking of Konstantin Leontiev’s remark:
After collectivisation was imposed on the peasants, even the fearsome NKVD apparatus could not prevent the universal spread of the joke that the initials for one of the collective farm bureaucracies actually stood for a Russian phrase meaning ‘Second Serfdom’.
[NOTE: thanks to Laird for enabling me to correct my previous misattribution of the quote. (I had misremembered it as being said by Dostoevsky, with whom Leontiev had literary interactions on the subject of socialism.)]
“High taxes and spending are part of the solution, he said”
This is a deeply stupid man, probably uneducable.
Niall, according to Wikipedia (yes, I know: consider the source) “Socialism is the feudalism of the future” is a quote from Konstantin Leontiev, not Dostoyevsky. I don’t know anything about him, but judging from the Wikipedia squib perhaps I should.
Nothing is necessarily wrong with Wikipedia as a source: it is secondary, as long as there is a footnote containing a reference – which in this case is Robert Conquest.
You know there are several things at the root of the failure of socialism, but I wanted to touch on one that isn’t discussed much.
We are all very familiar with the concept of “economies of scale”. If you make an electronic gizmo or a new drug the more you make the lower the marginal cost, because the NRE can be spread over more units, and that includes the fact that you can increase the NRE (for example by building automation) to reduce the marginal cost and if your volume is high enough this is justified.
However, there is an equally important factor in play, the diseconomies of scale. As organizations grow larger the cost of making a decision grows exponentially, primarily because the cost of communication grows exponentially, but also for a number of other reasons (such as increasing the distance between decision and outcome leading to things like empire building, jobsworth behavior and so forth.) Moreover, the larger your staff the harder it is to maintain average staff quality. And there are a whole other bunch of diseconomies of scale.
If the government is making all the decisions then you absolutely maximize the diseconomies of scale and the whole thing collapses in a heap.
This is evident in many large organizations. Often what happens is that the organization grows rapidly, innovating and maneuvering quickly, but they eventually reach a point where they can’t because of diseconomies of scale. At that point they stop innovating and simply start buying smaller companies from whence comes all their new products. Some companies try to offset this with splitting off separate independent organizations such as Skunkworks, or GoogleX, and with some limited success. Socialist governments do this too with some effect — think Shanghai.
Of course ultimately an organization optimizes for what its leadership cares about. So to claim socialist economies are not successful is not true. The re-election rate of politicians is well above 90%, so from that metric they are a booming success.
@Fraser Orr
Yes! So much yes.
But also “principal-agent problem” (repeat ad infinitum). Socialism claims to install agents who work entirely for the people (their principals)-then gives them the strongest possible incentives to screw the people over.
Someone who disfavors democracy might say that voting claims to install agents who work entirely for the people (their principals)-then gives them the strongest possible incentives to screw the people over.
Not me, of course, but . . . someone . . .
Don’t think the old-style socialists would have paid much attention to ‘combatting climate change’ either.
@bobby b
Someone who disfavors democracy might say that voting claims to install agents who work entirely for the people (their principals)-then gives them the strongest possible incentives to screw the people over.
And that’s why you have the 2nd Amendment…
Fraser: Excellent observation. Thanks.
There’s also the “Calculation Problem.” Socialism doesn’t just fail in practice, it also fails even in theory.
I don’t want some wanker telling me I can’t buy a helicopter hat,
Socialism is the feudalism of the future.
The underlying concept is sufficiently obvious, I would think, that it would have occured to such a large number of people that whoever first scribbled it down was largely irrelevant.
Any new constitution that comes into being in the western world must include as an irrevocable clause that socialism in all its forms is punishable be death. It is such a cancer on the minds of men and on the political system that almost any measures to prevent it are preferable to what will happen if it is allowed to take root in the people.
To be fair, if you don’t want growth, socialism will probably do the trick. Though it comes with all sorts of other maladies.
A bit harsh:
“Any new constitution that comes into being in the western world must include as an irrevocable clause that socialism in all its forms is punishable be death. It is such a cancer on the minds of men and on the political system that almost any measures to prevent it are preferable to what will happen if it is allowed to take root in the people.”
The Co Op is a socialist organisation – it’s owned by the customers, not capitalists.. OK, I don’t like their pasties all that much but the sausages are OK. Why should this be punished by death?
“I’m not quite sure where the specific year 1989 came from.”
Berlin Wall, Velvet Revolution etc etc….
IIUC the first amendment makes it lawful for US citizens to show verbal approval of socialism in the absence of a “clear and present danger” (i.e. that they’re about to impose it) and the second amendment makes it lawful for such citizens to keep and bear arms. It is an essential difference between our politics and PC politics that we recognise that there’s always downside to our upsides.
This is an interesting and useful (to me at least) example of how a given perspective guides interpretation. (That’s my gentle way of saying that in world terms Tim has a point and I was thinking parochially in my earlier comment, channeling the limited viewpoint of my much younger self.) In the UK under Thatcher it seemed like socialism went from being praised by some and feared by others to being a much-mocked, repeatedly-humiliated old fogey. As this was happening – almost as if they were listening to us, it could seem – communism in Russia appeared to lose its self-confidence. Their leaders spoke of glasnost, their TV started showing episodes of “Yes, Minister” translated into Russian, etc. When you saw things from this point of view, then the freeing of Poland and the fall of the wall, etc., were the icing on the cake, merely confirming what “everybody” already knew, delightful because they happened then, not decades later, but not adding fundamentally new information.
Roué le Jour (February 25, 2018 at 1:47 am), although you’re right that the idea – that socialism is in some ways a striking return to primitivism – is a thought common to many (see e.g. Conquest’s “We and They”), the person who first utters
earns the right to be credited. (In the slower-moving 1800s, the equivalent of a blog discussion would seem to be Dostoevsky making/printing a speech, Leontiev’s writing a essay that notes it, Dostoevsky reading the essay, etc.)
“Small matter how it is hypothetically presented, the overwhelming evidence is that Socialism is the modern reboot of Feudalism”
And this also answers Werner Sombart’s old question ‘why is there no socialism in the USA?’ The answer being that there was no feudal aristocracy. The degree to which countries adopted socialism tracks the historic level of entrenched aristocracies quite well.
Everything you need to know about socialism is revealed by playing a few rounds of Mancala.
No feudal aristocracy in the US? On the spectrum….
Indentured Servitude, apprenticeships, Coal company “patch” towns, company store credit, share cropping, “The Church”, Commonwealths, and to SOME degree, College and “health” industry.
But I’ll keep it in mind every day I get to “keep” my estate, as long as I keep paying local taxes in exchange for fire/ police/ infrastructure (water and roads) “assurances”.
In fairness, I’m not required to give up ANY of the windfall apples from my orchard, or produce from my Victory garden.
Yes – back in 1884 (“The Man Versus The State”) Herbert Spencer was still fighting collectivists who argued that socialism would be more efficient than capitalism, he tried to show them that “democratic socialism” would be just as inefficient and backward as Inca Peru (of course the raving lunatics of modern academia and the media rather like Inca Peru), but the argument really ended with the publication of “Socialism” and “Human Action” by Ludwig Von Mises – people who have actually read these works rarely pretend that socialism is efficient economically.
So, yes the argument has moved on. Now we are told that socialism would be good for the poor – a lie as can be seen (for example) by Belarus which has clung to collective ownership and where poverty is far more extreme than in next Poland or even Russia. Or we are told that socialism will be better for the environment – even though it was obvious even in the early 19th century that it was (for example) rivers without clear private ownership that got polluted (just as it is the forests without clear private ownership that get messed up – in so many countries), the denial of traditional Common Law Tort rights over the air was cited (for example by the late Michael Oakeshott) as one of the worst legal cases of the 19th century, with Justice Wesleydale citing the “public interest” in the development of industry over private rights in relation to the air.
This was not a “capitalist judgment” (as a “Vulgar Marxist” might claim) it was actually an ATTACK upon private rights.
The People’s Republic of China, where there is a lot private industry but no basic private rights to not be messed up, is not the way to go.
“But racism, sexism, homophobia………” the people who call themselves the “Social Justice Warriors” (SJWs) and whose opponents call “Snowflakes” (the education system and the “mainstream” media) are quite mistaken. Contrary to what they have been taught by the Frankfurt School of Marxism and French Postmodernism – collectivism is actually very BAD for ethnic minorities, women, sexual preference minorities (and so on).
“Critical Theory” (the way of thinking of the schools, universities, BBC, Hollywood – and so on) is actually very UNcritical – as it just ASSUMES that collectivism is better than capitalism for XYZ groups. It never even considers the possibility that the opposite (that collectivism is worse) is true.
I think CaptDMO has it right & Stephen K’s contention is not that compelling an answer. Indeed, there has been more than a few American forays into forms of mercantilism & control over the means of production that stray well into ‘hyphenated socialist’ territory.
CaptDMO, you missed the biggest historical US example:
“A Southern farm is the beau ideal of Communism; it is a joint concern, in which the slave consumes more than the master, of the coarse products, and is far happier, because although the concern may fail, he is always sure of a support”
– George Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South: or, The failure of free society
Competition and efficiency are entirely beside the point for me. If their claims about the efficiency of socialism were true, I’d still avoid it like the plague.
For me, the primary considerations are ownership and freedom. If there’s one thing Karl Marx got kinda-sorta right in his Communist Manifesto it’s the importance of ownership as a means of independence and dignity. (He spends the rest of that chapter delusional, IIRC). Ownership *is* important. A society where only a tiny minority of people own things and the rest are their hired help looks just as feudal as communism or the middle ages. You want to know where workers can own the means of production? Capitalist countries! In a communist society, I don’t even own myself – I have to follow orders on the most minute aspects of my life. It is explicitly chattel slavery of everyone to political overlords. I’ve been in the military. I’ve see (voluntary) communism up close and personal. It is not a way to live an entire life, and it really doesn’t work well.
I still hold out hope of starting my own business one of these days and working semi-independently. I am not really a social creature. I like to work alone, uninterrupted, on complicated things. (Crazy, reading old books about scientists and engineers and finding out that that temperament is *normal* and was accepted, not a *mental illness*!!) If the socialists (pathalogical team-ists and fish-schoolers to a man) don’t completely screw up my profession, I might be able to do so when I get myself sorted out and finish my current project.
Regarding public ownership, the Longrider blog hosted a commenter who believe that he had a stake in publicly owned companies. Even after it was pointed out to him that nationalised industries invariably lose huge amounts of money and that his stake consisted of Making up the shortfall through his taxes, he still regarded his stake as something to be valued.
Socialism is utter nonsense. There is no correlation between demand for material values and its price, if it’s even produced at all. It fails as a poltical system, a socialial system and an economic system.
“1989”? WTF? Ayn Rand was commenting/writing on the questionable motives of those who support the “ragged skeleton” of socialism, given it’s ubiquitous failures and attrocities, before I was even born, and that’s saying something.
Paul Marks wrote,
The Statists/Globalists are merely hornswaggling the Leftists to do their footsoldiery for them. It’s not that those hidden elite behind Dorothy’s Curtain don’t know…it’s that they don’t care.
Just as they don’t care that importing millions of GROWN MEN, Muslim son-of-a-bitch rapists undermines the Leftist’s values of equality for women, respect for gays and trans, and respect for freedom of religion and for tolerance and open-mindedness. Statists/Globalists care about only one thing, manipulating and controling others, including manipulating situations to where they will continue to be voted into power by utter blue-pilled “unwoke” sheep. It is NOT a coincedence that those the PCers hate the most are those least in favor of electing a government to take over our lives, and those the PCers love the most DO want to elect a government to take over our lives. That’s not an accident in the slightest, nor mere happenstance correlation. It’s by design.
I used to think that they were sincere but misguided. Later, I reluctantly came to the conclusion that they are evil. Now, I am seriously entertaining the possibility that they are in league with the devil.
@MadRocketSci
For me, the primary considerations are ownership and freedom. … You want to know where workers can own the means of production? Capitalist countries!
So I agree with your first point, but I want to bang my drum on something I mentioned here before. To call the system of “government not interfering in private transactions” with the name “Capitalism” is to give part of the ground already. It implies that it is about the movement of capital, and conjures up images of Scrooge McDuck sitting on his big pile of gold smoking a cigar.
Now to be clear, I am not opposed to sitting on a big pile of gold, or smoking a cigar, in fact I aspire to it. Nonetheless the system is NOT about that, not primarily anyway.
I consequently detest the word “capitalist”. It is to allow our opponents to paint us in the worst possible caricature, to allow them to win the point that we trod on the poor to get rich. To think that when we say “capitalist” we mean money and not freedom. And for others it sounds like some technical word that they don’t quite understand, but school left a bad taste in their mouth about it. Everyone understand what “free” means.
So I appeal to you all who share my viewpoint to dump that horrible word and replace it with the beautiful expression “free markets”. Free markets are about freedom, not about fat cats. “Free markets” are about two people making an exchange that favors them both not about slavery and oppression. “Free markets” set in contrast two people doing a mutually beneficial deal against a big government that wants to intervene “for their own good” but the “free market” allows people to determine their own terms of the deal.
“Free markets” are about freedom and mutually beneficial trade, and although “capital” plays a role in that, its role is only an accessory, a tool, to the ultimate goal of freedom and markets.
Please, I beg of you who love liberty, stop with that ugly word “Capitalism”. Let’s call it what it is: “freedom” and its glorious mechanism “free markets”.
I endorse Fraser Orr’s post, above, wholeheartedly.
Every company that I have ever founded has been started with minimal capital and a lot of sweat equity. Further, when they prospered they did so (and still do) by word of mouth, rather than duplicitous advertising*. Because when people engage in mutually beneficial trade, they find that they like it. Then they tell their friends where it happened, said friends want some of that and it snowballs.
* One of my businesses advertised, once. It was a disaster – we didn’t get a single client from it that we didn’t have to sue or threaten to sue, in order to get paid. The funny thing is, that business later evolved to become, in part, an ad agency. I’m not entirely sure whether or not that makes me a hypocrite.
Forgive my imprecise wording in the earlier comment, I of course meant socialism by coercion or law. Voluntary associations would of course be free to follow any code they liked.
Politics is downstream of ethics. People embrace socialism because they accept the underlying altruistic purpose of socialism – sacrifice for the common good.
After all, who could reject a society organised “For the many, not the few,” to quote Corbyn’s favourite slogan.
“Politics is downstream of ethics”
More or less true. But on a deeper and more fundamental level, people tend to get the government they deserve. In aggregate. Generally.
Not many people could reject such a society. Or at least not many people could reject such a society publicly and still earn many votes in their campaign to be elected. See, for example, the entire history of the USA Libertarian Party, which to my knowledge has hardly ever gotten a a member of their party elected as dog catcher in the “Land of the Free”.
Maybe the trick is to have a system of government in which what people think is presumed to not matter (even if it secretly does in an indirect and, ya know, subtle sense).
Or we could just keep trying to convince dumb people to vote intelligently. Since that’s worked so well.
Ah, Fraser.
I have long favoured the term “free enterprise” over the term “capitalism”.
And yes, the left seem to think that the businessman has a mountain of money, and the only reason that he doesn’t pay his workers more is meanness. The ignorance is staggering.
“…who could reject a society organised “For the many, not the few…”
Someone who has noticed that every society that has tried it has achieved the exact opposite I would have thought.
That’s why Ayn Rand made the excellent point that Capitalism is not merely an economic system as is commonly thought. Its a social system. Free trade, individual rights including property right, are a necessary prerequisite.
Aye, but it’s who they imagine doing the bulk of the sacrificing that’s the problem.
Funny thing about principles – they tend to have consequences, and that’s especially true of the principle of sacrifice. Comrade Corbyn is awfully keen on ‘investment.’