The Garden of the Blind

Socialism is all the rage these days. It’s come a long way from the bloody days of socialist revolts, and become the kinder, gentler way to coddle a populace.

I’m an opponent of socialism. I don’t think that it works. The inherent flaw of socialism is that it takes motivation away from its beneficiaries. Anywhere that you see socialism in action, you can see it sapping away at the wills of the people it is supposed to help.

The essential goal of socialism is to provide some minimum standard of living for all people under it. This is typically carried out through some sort of monetary compensation for people who are unable to attain that level, although it often includes various “benefits package” kinds of programs, such as health care.

Consider the effect of socialism on a single individual. Let as assume that the socialist program provides that all people will have an income of at least $15,000 per year. If our individual can only earn $12,000 in a year, then he could go work and then also collect $3,000 in supplemental income from the government, but by doing so, he gets the same compensation as someone who does nothing. Since the marginal return for his work is $0, he chooses to stop working and enjoy the extra time. The $12,000 that he would have earned now becomes an extra burden on the system.

Under the same system, another individual is capable of earning $18,000 in a year. After 10 months of work, she has earned $15,000, and during those last two months, she makes the remaining $3,000 of her total income. Then, she stops to think about it and realizes that she is working full time to increase her income by only $3,000 per year. She considers the increase too small to justify the work, and decides to quit her job and live on the $15,000.

In both cases, the people have insufficient economic incentive to work. While other factors, such as pride or a sense of responsibility, might encourage people like these to work, they are not driven to make a contribution to society. It then falls on the strained backs of others to carry the additional burden of supporting these.

Even under socialism, some individuals are encouraged to excel. A person who can earn $50,000 a year under our hypothetical system still gets $35,000 marginal return on his efforts, and can reasonably hope to improve that amount by working hard to get ahead. Even if a large portion of this income goes to support social programs, there is still marginal gain for additional effort, and so there is economic incentive to try to improve.

Note that I do not assume that all people are created equal. Some people are inherently better able to make a living than others. When I suggest that working harder can improve one’s financial situation, that doesn’t imply that the $12,000 person is lazier than the $50,000 person. While the former individual can most likely make some improvement through better work, it is unlikely that he will reach the same incomes of the latter person.

From a marginal return perspective, socialism is flawed, but yet it is rapidly becoming the de facto social policy in the western world. I believe that this is driven by another factor. Policy makers benefit from creating socialist programs. They earn the support of the beneficiaries, who still have voting power, and who have some rather vocal lobbying groups behind them. The power of the lobbying groups come from the second policymaker motivation, which is tenderheartedness. It sounds kinder to be giving help to the downtrodden, and failure to do so is easily portrayed as cruelty and heartlessness.

This perception is not entirely wrong. The problem is that socialism does not help its intended beneficiaries. It would be like feeling good for giving a kid candy, only to have the child silently choke on it as soon as you walked away. There has to be a better way to help people without giving a handout or significantly degrading the system for others. This has proven to be nearly impossible. The best programs either would require excessive (and expensive) management and oversight, or would be prone to abuse (or both). This is why church charity programs have been so relatively successful. They tend to not give out money (indeed, they rarely have much to give), but rather provide other forms of aid, often all carried out by dedicated volunteers who are rarely truly compensated for their work.

A good system would provide limited financial support, and only for relatively short periods of time. It would focus on training, both vocational and personal (such as how to manage finances). It would try to limit the scope of exceptions, to avoid the kind of policy creep that can occur as individual exceptions are made and then expanded to broader groups. In this digital age, it should make use of computer database tracking to help reduce the need for intense human oversight, while still keeping some personal interaction and human involvement to help detect fraud and other problems. Time and dollar restrictions should be in place and followed in order to limit participation and encourage people to work to graduation from the system. There should not be too many quotas, and the ones used should be limited to areas that are difficult to improve without following the system properly.

I don’t know if a system that meets those criteria can even exist. I only believe that the current system is broken, both in this country, and to a far greater degree in other places where socialism has already taken a much greater hold (read: Europe).

I have lived in a socialist land, and I can assure you that the people were not better for it. I saw people working for just enough weeks each year to collect unemployment benefits (which were better than welfare) and then promptly quitting, handing the job off to someone else to do the same. I saw people go to the emergency room for a checkup, because it was easier than trying to make an appointment with a particular doctor. I actually went to an emergency room after being in a car accident, and having to wait for long periods of time (often an hour or more) between the brief moments when the doctor would poke his head in. The fact that their health care is provided free to their citizens does not make it better than ours. Rather, they have waiting lists for anything scheduled (which is why it’s quicker to go to the emergency room for a checkup, even if you have to wait for hundreds of other people and even some actual emergencies), and the quality of your care, once you get it, isn’t any better than here. However, they continue to support their national health care system because they see it as the egalitarian thing to do.