For Socialists, It Doesn't Matter if Socialism "Works." What Matters Is Power.
Other than stripping the ethics, morality, and all humanity from human action; whether it “works” can never be resolved, just deliberated ad infinitum, making it ideal mainstream media fodder. Under any legitimate scrutiny, it collapses under its own haughty intellectual weight because there’s something missing at its foundation; fundamental principles that can be ascertained as self-evidently true or not.
To go after socialism, you must aim for its fundamental principles. And what are some of those?
Rooted in collectivism – no individual is of material importance, only society as a whole. Any number of individual needs, preferences, and lives can and should be sacrificed for the good of the collective.
Absence of a market – production and trade operate by the will of central planners, not economic actors. What gets made, in what quantity, and for what use is not determined by consumer demand or the profit motive, but by top-down calculations. Based on what? Such questions will not be tolerated. Now, get in the bread line! Which brings us to…
Necessitates a totalitarian state – This centralization of economy requires such thorough micromanagement of human action that monitoring, espionage, harassment, and stiff penalties for violators (for starters) must become features of the landscape. Some adherents claim that state control, and the state itself, will one day become unnecessary under socialism, once the people fall in line (read are beaten into submission). But, like the arrival of universal abundance, that day never seems to come. More on this momentarily…
This argument may not be perfect, but notice the differences between this and where we started. These premises are axiomatically integral to socialism. No experience, experimentation, or research is required to bear them out. No statistical data is going to come along and change them. These aren’t ends, which cannot be conclusively known at the outset of any initiative (if they ever can at all). These are means, which are known, instantly and to a certainty, as they effectively become the material conditions of life in the given society. Economics is a journey, not a destination, so those someday promises of wealth and statelessness in exchange for your present suffering mean nothing from the man prodding you with the rifle.
Now a REAL debate begins.
The socialist must be prepared to defend all of the items above, at least. Any claim against the necessity of these factors can be gleefully met with, “then that’s not real socialism!” If they prefer their ideologies a la carte, by plucking the “good bits” of socialism and discarding the gulags and mass graves; then they’re arguing for something else entirely, a mixed economy, the polluting of the market with some degree of the above tenets.
Do the Horsemen’s graphs and data have any validity? Sure, as persuasive support. But they cannot BE your argument. That must come from First Principles, e.g. freedom, property, and individual sovereignty. These are all that matter. To subordinate them to numbers and stats is to discount them entirely.
So, when it comes to socialism; stop saying it doesn’t work, stop calling it a perfect idea on paper that falters in implementation, and stop dignifying its adherents with “noble intentions.” Give it its intellectual due, then you can call it what it is; an evil concept on its face that has no place among the human species.
https://mises.org/mises-wire/socialists-it-doesnt-matter-if-socialism-works-what-matters-power
