This is why the chaos of liberty needs to be replaced with cadres of government experts empowered to guarantee fairness and equality, by planning economic production, regulating finance, redistributing wealth, and engaging in every imaginable type of social engineering.īut before looking at whether these socialist goals are achievable or even desirable, let’s consider a few hypothetical scenarios typical of modern socialism - including socialism right here in the United States.
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Old-fashioned individual rights and free markets inevitably lead to inequalities and discrimination, argue socialist sympathizers. Socialism is usually sold in the name of fairness and equality. Put otherwise: If you believe that individual liberty is a nice idea in theory but won’t work in practice, you’re sympathetic to socialism.
This, the central thesis of modern socialism, has come to replace in many people’s minds the belief in the power and superiority of liberty that most Americans used to embrace. But all of them share one cardinal feature: the belief that the role of government is to plan, manage, control, and regulate all aspects of human activity, since personal liberty cannot be trusted to promote social order and equality. There are different flavors of socialism, to be sure communism, Marxism, and progressivism are all socialist movements, which is why “communist” regimes such as the former Soviet Union (the USSR, or Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) always describe themselves as socialist. Most modern governments, from Canada to the European Union to Latin America to East Asia, already do all of these things, and so it is not a stretch to say that most modern governments are socialist, at least to some extent.
In particular, socialism is often offered as a solution by those wanting government to provide housing, food, employment, medical care, and education, as well as to tightly manage market activity via environmental, financial, labor, and price controls and regulations. “Socialism” conjures up images of a modern utopia, a world where inequality, discrimination, and poverty are things of the past, and where finely tuned government will use its powers exclusively to promote well-being and cure longstanding social ills. What is socialism? To increasing numbers of young Americans, “socialism” has come to mean a society where everything is made fair by the government, and all human needs are provided to the poor, the ill, the unemployed, and anyone else living in difficult circumstances. And nowhere is it more widespread than in the type of government called “socialism.” It is what usually happens when government engages in what is called “social engineering”: Good intentions lead to bad results. While it is unclear how accurate this story might be, the “cobra effect” is a well-known consequence of misplaced good intentions. Delhi ended up with a larger cobra population than ever. Dismayed, the British government retracted the cobra bounty - whereupon large numbers of captive cobras were released since they were no longer of any economic value. Spurred on by the opportunity to make money, the locals had taken to raising large numbers of cobras in captivity, in order to kill them and collect the bounty.
Eventually, the authorities discovered why this was the case. Strangely, while the government doled out a fortune in bounties, the local cobra population showed no signs of decreasing. They began offering sizable bounties for dead snakes, and before long, the authorities were deluged with cobra carcasses. The British colonial government decided to create a strong incentive for the locals to get rid of cobras. Because Hindus both fear and revere cobras, many Indians are reluctant to kill them. Let’s begin by illustrating a point using a short story: During the long-ago days of the British Empire in India, British authorities became concerned over the large numbers of venomous cobras infesting the city of Delhi.
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