Scenes from an almost-debate.
Scenes from an almost-debate
P rofessor Richard Wolff of UMass–Amherst seems to be a courteous man, so I will put this question as courteously as I can: Rounded off to the nearest 100 million, how many people have to be put to death under socialism before the world’s most murderous school of economics runs out of second chances?
Last week, Professor Wolff debated Arthur Brooks, formerly the president of the American Enterprise Institute and now a professor at Harvard, on the resolution: “Socialism is preferable to capitalism as an economic system that promotes freedom, equality, and prosperity.” The debate was hosted by the Abigail Adams Institute, which is “dedicated to providing supplementary humanistic education to the Harvard intellectual community.” Here, that worthy mission was not accomplished. I do not deny that socialism is an important subject for the consideration of students at Harvard and elsewhere, but to put “socialism or no?” forward as a contest between two propositions on equal intellectual footing is akin to hosting an earnest debate on whether the Earth is flat.
Because Professor Brooks holds Professor Wolff in such obviously high regard, I am inclined to give the old red the benefit of the doubt. But it is difficult. His case for socialism, at least as presented in this debate, is a familiar admixture of crude half-truths, moralistic posturing, and dorm-room utopianism. It is not clear whether this is an instance of Professor Wolff’s being intellectually lazy or assuming — not without some reason — that Harvard undergraduates are. He argues for the creation of business enterprises in which decisions are made on a majority-rule basis, as though that sort of thing had never been tried and found to fail. (I do love the idea of Pfizer’s vaccine researchers and Chad down in human resources having an equal say about whether to pursue an mRNA vaccine or a protein-subunit approach. Everybody believes in majority rule until there’s a sufficiently high price for being wrong.) Completely ignoring the important epistemic critique of socialist decision-making put forward by Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek, Professor Wolff insists that socialist goals can be realized by the simple combination of central planning and labor: “We decide what we want to produce,” he says, emphasizing the majority-rule model, and then “put people to work.”
Put people to work is a refrain with a long and bloody history in the socialist enterprise. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote some books about it, if you’re interested in learning more. No, I don’t think gulags and mass starvation and misery and repression are what Professor Wolff wants. I don’t think they are what most socialists want — but they are what socialism reliably produces. That isn’t bad luck — it is the nature of the system.
At this point, we can expect a chorus of “Real Socialism Has Never Been Tried.”
Professor Wolff’s variation on that theme is to insist that there is no such thing as socialism but many socialisms — and the ones that have murdered and immiserated all those millions of people aren’t the ones he has in mind. Ah, but of course. The one he wants to try is imposing “democracy” on businesses, meaning the effective abolition of property rights. He believes that it is unjust that profit accrues to capital-holders, as though workers did not have the option of exchanging a portion of their wages for capital — a choice many of them make and subsequently grow wealthy from.
Wolff insists that capitalist economies are “unstable” because they go through occasional periods of recession, as though there were not examples of cyclical phenomena to be found across the spectrum of human social activities. I’m especially perplexed by his insistence that “this crazy downturn we’re living through now” illustrates the brittleness of capitalism: We had a worldwide epidemic that forced genuinely unprecedented restrictions on the U.S. economy, and, as a result, we experienced — this is amazing — only two quarters of contraction before resuming growth. The overwhelming majority of Americans right now say their financial situation now is either unchanged from or an improvement over their financial situation before the epidemic, during which vast enterprises reorganized themselves in a remarkably short period of time while pharmaceutical companies brought three vaccines to market with impressive speed. It would be difficult to think of a better example of the innovation and flexibility of capitalist economies.
The U.S. economy hasn’t been in recession since the second quarter of last year — would it be too much to ask a professor of economics to look at the GDP chart?
Professor Wolff has written a celebrated book about socialism. And when asked for an economic success story, he points to Germany, home of Mercedes-Benz and Adidas, one of the most thoroughly capitalistic countries ever to have existed.
“But the Germans have free college,” Professor Wolff says. That isn’t quite true in any case — though there is no tuition as such at state schools, there are fees — but it also is a fact that Germany enrolls about half as much of its population in college as the United States does, controlling admissions with entrance exams and other credentials. I would very much like to see Professor Wolff and his allies trying to sell “College is almost free, but most of you can’t go” to idealistic young American leftists.
He insists that young Americans are being crushed by student-loan debt “that they can never hope to repay,” when in fact the average student debt is about as big a burden as buying a reasonably well-appointed Toyota Camry, something young Americans manage to do with some regularity — without the benefit of federally subsidized interest rates and a very long repayment schedule.
The average monthly student-loan payment is $393. Pardon me if I don’t sing a number from Les Misérables.
Professor Wolff is right that we have several kinds of socialism. We have the kind of socialism under which millions were starved and murdered in the former Soviet Union, the kind of socialism under which millions have been starved and murdered in the so-called People’s Republic of China, the kind of socialism under which smaller numbers have been starved and murdered in Cuba, the kind of socialism in which people are this very day being less ambitiously starved and murdered in Venezuela . . . and, at the other end of the spectrum, the kind of socialism that Sweden abandoned in the 1970s for a free-market economy with a welfare state that is large and expensive relative to that of the United States.
A reporter friend of mine used to tell the story of a sexual compulsive who was wheeled into the emergency room of a Nebraska hospital nearly dead from blood loss after having cut off his penis in a fit of religiously inspired self-loathing. He was an E.R. regular, and a doctor who recognized him exclaimed: “Jesus Christ, Eddie, why didn’t you cut off your hand?”
Crazy, right?
Now imagine doing that over and over again every few years and thinking that, somehow, it will be different this time.