from the book: Shadow Dancing on the Grave of Hope:
"The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities." Ayn Rand
The debate between socialism, known as, “The Grand Plan which Controls Everything and is operated by Our Betters who Know How Everyone Should Live”, and Individual Striving, known as individuals making their own decisions, has been in consciousness for thousands of years. Believers in the Grand Plan need coercion and regulation so that people will Behave Properly while those who support Individual Striving require freedom from coercion and regulation. Socialism holds that the only rationale for existence is to be useful to Society while Society reciprocates by teaching the individual to be virtuous and altruistic. The belief that property should be held and operated in common has been in philosophical writing since early history when Plato suggested “Guardians” manage things and raise children in his hypothetical Republic and warned against “selfishness”. Socialism elevates the State, a hypothetical entity, to dominion over the individual, a real entity. The list of failures of this way of organizing society is endless, as is the enthusiasm which its adherents approach the latest version and expect to “get it right this time.” They show, in glowing detail, how their new “New Society” will be far superior to all others, especially those where pesky individualism produces greed and exploitation. Socialism concentrates on "freedom from" such things as poverty and poor housing. Its opposite, libertarianism requires "freedom to" do certain things such as freedom to engage in trade. Always curious is the notion that after all of the high flights of rhetoric and polysyllabic words, socialism always depends on the threat and delivery of brute force. Naturally, socialism is most popular in universities which live on government money and only need to produce hypothetical social orders which depend on control by the elite. In any public debate about socialism, the state enters the argument with “…an unearned aura of virtue”, (Walberg and Bast, p. 173) due to the assumption that state control and operation is the most efficient way to proceed in any enterprise. The varieties of socialism have ranged from Communism in the Soviet Union, through the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nazi), to the relatively benign, costly and disastrous nationalization of the British coal industry. The reverse process occurred when the British electricity system was privatized. Several layers of bureaucracy were removed and the producers became responsible directly to the consumers.
The best-known blueprints for these two visions of life come from Adam Smith’s, The Wealth of Nations and Karl Marx’s, Das Kapital. Smith’s book is a summary of successful and unsuccessful economic principles based on observation. Marx’s book is a blueprint of how things should work based on theory. Smith’s is a DOES analysis while Marx’s is an INTEND-IS analysis. The INTEND-IS analyses are always paramount in academia because academics need not be concerned with results and INTEND-IS is where one introduces the marvelous complexities beloved of academics.
Social science professions are like religion in the Middle Ages or, for that matter, cults in any age. The practitioners make others believe that their speciality alone controls the Only Road to Salvation. Those paid by the public purse support the belief in an officially sanctioned Road to Deliverance and Nirvana. All inequities will be eliminated when the destination is reached. This Shadow Dance has been going on as long as civilization. Add myth, hope and lies, and you have something which can’t work but which is kept going by faith, official sanction, and beliefs and wishes about what must be true.
Walberg, H.J., and Bast, J.L. (2003). Education and Capitalism: How Overcoming Our Fear of Markets and Economics Can Improve America’s Schools, Stanford, Stanford University Press.
Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
Cui Bono–Cherchez les Contingencies
