By Kevin D. Williamson
Wednesday, August 03, 2016
A lefty correspondent who believes that I have been
unfair to Senator Bernie Sanders — specifically, that I have given insufficient
attention to the “democratic” part of his so-called democratic socialism —
writes: “You should write about those millions of souls trapped in the
Canadian, Icelandic, Danish, and other democratic-socialist gulags.”
But, of course, there are no Canadian and Danish gulags.
Then again, Canada and Denmark are not socialist countries. This is a truth the
Left, and some of the Right, insists on refusing to learn.
Canada in most meaningful ways enjoys a more free-market
economy than does the United States, which is why our friends at the Heritage
Foundation rank it several steps higher on their economic-liberty index.
Denmark has a very free-market economy, too, though it is ranked one step
behind the United States; Iceland is ranked ahead of Japan and enjoys a
dramatically more free economy than is the Western European norm, ranked at No.
20 as opposed to No. 75 France and No. 86 Italy.
The reasons for these disparities are pretty obvious: The
Nordic countries have relatively high taxes and big welfare states, but they
also have free trade, relatively liberal regulatory regimes, transparent and
effective public institutions, etc. The United States gets dinged for crony
capitalism and overly complex regulation. As
Nima Sanandaji points out, four of the five Nordic countries have
center-right governments, with the social democrats holding power only in
Sweden. But even Sweden has undergone decades of reform in what would be
understood in the United States as a generally conservative direction, as
indeed did Canada a few decades ago.
Welfare states are welfare states and socialism is
socialism, and, in spite of the Bernie Sanders gang and the Right’s talk-radio
ranters, they are not the same thing. Welfare states use taxes and transfer
payments to enable higher levels of consumption among certain groups, usually
vulnerable ones: the poor, the sick, the elderly, children. Welfare states are
not synonymous with big government: Singapore, for example, offers surprisingly
generous housing and health-care benefits despite having a public sector that
is (as measured by spending) about half the size of our own and a little more
than a third the size of France’s. Switzerland has a fairly typical portfolio
of welfare benefits (including a health-care system that is approximately what
Obamacare was intended to look like, if Obamacare hadn’t been written and
enacted by fools) with a public sector that is smaller than our own. You can
view the data and make your own comparisons here.
Socialism, as I have written at some length, is a
different beast entirely. Like the welfare state, it involves the public
provision of non-public goods, but it achieves this in a different way. Rather
than levying taxes and distributing checks or vouchers, the socialist
government owns and operates the means of production, or, in the corporatist
variant, puts the means of production under political discipline effectively
indistinguishable from government ownership of them. The easiest example to
illustrate the difference here is in American education: The Right advocates a
welfare-state approach, with government funding education costs through taxes
which are passed on to families with school-age children in the form of
vouchers, which can be used at a variety of different kinds of institutions
serving a variety of different kinds of needs; the Left, in contrast, advocates
the truly socialist model, with government owning and operating the relevant
economic assets (public schools) which function as a monopoly. The fact that
you can send your children elsewhere does not make them less of a monopoly:
Stop paying your school taxes and they’ll still send men with guns to your
house to force the money out of you, to seize your home, or to cage you until
you comply.
Violence is always at the end of the socialist
enterprise, as the poor people of Venezuela are discovering. Our friends on the
Left assured us for many years that Boss Hugo and his epigones in the regime of
Nicolás Maduro were democratic socialists, not the mean Stalinist type, and the
praises of that so-called democratic-socialist regime were sung by everyone
from Democratic congressmen such as Chaka Fattah of Philadelphia to progressive
celebrities such as Sean Penn.
The democratic socialists in Venezuela have just
introduced slavery into their workers’ paradise.
The Chávistas, like Hillary Rodham Clinton and Donald
Trump, believe that international trade isn’t the open and mutually beneficial
exchange of goods and services between people operating in open international
markets but a nefarious scheme in which domestic workers are exploited and
ripped off by ruthless foreigners who want to . . . sell them useful and
desirable goods at low prices. (Never mind that for the moment.) Like the “Buy
American!” gang here and the juche-practicing
Norks, the Chávistas advocate a form of autarky, a system under which a country
produces what it needs and consumes what it produces with minimal international
trade, under the theory that such international trade impoverishes people.
(They have never heard of Singapore, Hong Kong, or the United Kingdom,
apparently.) So the Chávez and Maduro regimes enacted various kinds of controls
on foodstuffs and other essential goods that sought to control prices and
restrict international trade. Soon, the shelves of the grocery stores were
empty, and Venezuelans couldn’t even buy a roll of toilet paper.
The food shortage is especially severe right now, so the
Maduro government has just passed a decree empowering itself to conscript
workers — public-sector or private — into the state’s collectively run farming,
food-processing, and food-distribution businesses. The pattern here will be
familiar to those familiar with the history of socialism in Russia and China.
Faced with the obvious evidence, Jesse Singal of The New Yorker performs a whole
Beethoven sonata of whistling past the graveyard: “It would be a bit of an
oversimplification to blame the catastrophe only on socialism qua socialism. Rather . . . it’s
Maduro’s particular brand of
socialism, which fuses bad economic ideas with a distinctive brand of strongman
bullying, and which was handed down to him by Venezuela’s deceased former
president Hugo Chávez, that is largely to blame.”
That’s right: It’s not the socialism, it’s just that
socialism has never been done right.
Weird thing: That feckless and authoritarian kind of
socialism is the only kind of socialism anybody has ever seen or heard of
outside of a college dorm room. Either socialism is the unluckiest political
idea in the history of political ideas and it just happens to have coincided
with government by monsters, caudillos, and incompetents every place it has
been tried, or there is in fact something wrong with socialism qua socialism.
Why is it that the big-government Danish welfare state,
the small-government Swiss welfare state, the frequently illiberal Singaporean
welfare state, and the nice-guy Canadian welfare state all seem to work, each
in its own way, while socialist experiments — including the so-called
democratic-socialist experiments of places such as Venezuela — go speeding down
F. A. Hayek’s road to serfdom?
The critical difference is that entrepreneurship and
markets are allowed to work in a welfare state — and to work especially well in
welfare states characterized by public sectors that, while they may be larger
or smaller, are transparent, honest, and effective. The U.S. food-stamp program
has its defects, to be sure, but it’s a great deal more effective than was
Soviet collective farming and state-run groceries. A dynamic capitalist economy
such as Switzerland’s or Singapore’s or Canada’s can carry a lot of welfare
state.
But it cannot really carry all that much socialism. The
great American socialist experiment — the government school monopoly — is a
shocking failure. The government’s attempt to operate a socialist pension
system is collapsing and will never pay out its promised benefits at their real
present value. For years, American farming was hobbled by federal attempts to
manage agricultural markets, with tons and tons of so-called surplus grain left
to rot in the name of rational economic planning, converting a period of
agricultural abundance that would have merited its own religious myth if it had
happened 4,000 years ago into a national economic catastrophe.
When one of our so-called progressives looks at a Nordic
welfare state, what he always says he wants to replicate here is the relatively
high taxes and relatively large public sector. It’s never Sweden’s free-trade
policies, Denmark’s corporate-tax rate (which is far lower than our own), or
Finland’s choice- and accountability-driven education system. When the American
Left expresses its envy of Western Europe, it’s never Switzerland’s minimum
wage ($0.00) it wants to reproduce, only bigger and more rapacious government.
But the relatively large Danish public sector does different things than does
the U.S. public sector, and it does them differently. A larger U.S. public
sector would be a great deal like the current U.S. public sector — ineffective,
captive to politics, corrupt — but bigger.
If you want to see what so-called democratic socialism
looks like, turn your eyes south to Venezuela and its new slave-labor camps.
What’s happening in Canada and Denmark is something else — something that is
much more in tune with the approach and priorities of the
free-market/free-trade Right, or at least what’s left of it.
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