How does socialism contravene freedom?

Great Debates
1

It has long been a conservative talking point that capitalism promotes freedom, while socialism kills it.

I don’t get it. It seems to me that the complete opposite is true. Publicly owned roads promote geographic mobility and economic commerce. They practically maximize these things. Imagine how constrained people would be if a road trip had to be planned around where the cheapest tolls are located and which roads are the most navigable at any moment in time (what, you think lackadaisical road owners are going to care about potholes?)

Publicly owned and operated schools make it possible (however difficult) for people to rise above the station of their birth, thereby promoting socioeconomic mobility. The business sector benefits by having an educated workforce and customer base. Without public schools, most people would not be able to afford freedom, let alone have an expectation for it.

I believe socialized medicine and housing would increase freedom in the exact same way. By freeing healthcare from employers, workers are freer to choose wherever and however they want to work. Employers would have more options to choose from when it comes to employee compensation. People would be freer from worry and stress and would be more likely take more risks–some stupid but some advantageous, like dropping out of the corporate rat race so they can care for children at home. Right now, healthcare costs are keeping people from enjoying that kind of freedom.

I suppose one can argue that capitalism increases freedom by allowing for many options to choose from. But while it is nice having 150 salad dressing brands to choose from, having that many options for healthcare is scary. If I get an undesirable brand of salad dressing, I can throw out the jar and immediately go back to the store for another one. No harm, no foul. But if I (or my employer) picks up an undesirable brand of healthcare coverage, I’m stuck with it for a year and I’m potentially out thousands of dollars (or even more). And oh yeah, it might kill me or someone I love. Where is the freedom in that?

Can someone explain how capitalism creates a freer society than socialism?

2

In general, I think it rests on Americans not having any idea of what “socialism” is and getting a lot of different terms confused.

For example, what you seem to be referring to with the public control issues is degrees of statism. Many people also get social democracy confused with democratic socialism.

(I don’t think there can be any doubt that universal healthcare increases population freedom massively.)

3

Americans do not identify things which work as being socialism.

4

The implied model for the argument OP is questioning is one where “socialism” means that a single state/public authority controls all economic activity by dictat, rather than leaving individual entrepreneurs freedom to innovate and to expand or contract supply in response to market forces. “Actually existing” socialism of that sort has usually entailed restrictions on individual choices to a point usually found unacceptable by most of the people, since it tends to be slow to innovate and respond to changing circumstances, and in the worst cases tends to the undemocratic as those invested in the single state/public authority resist any threats to their position and status.

But the points OP makes are a valid defence of social democracy, as the fostering by public/community action of “freedom to” as well as “freedom from”. But of course, how in detail you choose to apply its principles is always debatable - some restrictions on individual freedom may or may not be generally acceptable for the common benefit.

5

The real issue - as pertains to the United States, at least - continues to be a downstream consequence of the cold war.

In the 50 year stare down between the USA and USSR it became a part of American culture that communism was evil and freedom-denying. This was, under Stalin and the USSR, undeniably true. And that’s where we stayed for decades. But a part of that was conflating Soviet-style communism with all forms of socialism. This provided existing power structures in the USA with useful things such as an easy enemy - them commies - and an excuse for unbridled capitalism. Anything that prevented economic expansion and the concentration of power in the hands of fewer and fewer people could be labeled as ‘unAmerican’ and therefore demonized.

We are slowly coming out of this mindset. But there are still cold warriors out there who desire an enemy to help focus the body politic. So efforts to introduce democratic socialism or even group-oriented policies such as medicare, social security and the expansion of such (even minimum wage) can still get pushed back against in the name of ‘evils of socialism’.

So I’m not certain it’s possible to have a rational discussion in the American political theater about socialism right now. But it’s coming.

6

Monstro, a basic flaw in your OP is the assumption that everyone wants geographical and social mobility, unstressed and educated workers, and so forth.

Certainly, the lower and middle classes desire these things, but if you look back to the early industrial revolution you will find many examples of “owners” who restricted the mobility, finances, education, and access to medicine of thousands of employees. From paying workers only in script that could only be redeemed at company-owned stores to discarding employees who became injured or ill, and other long-term practices like debt-slavery where the debtors are paid such low wages it is impossible for them to free themselves, to share-cropping, child labor, and on and on… There is a certain category of individuals who want to be on top and want freedom to travel only for themselves, keeping the [del]serfs[/del] [del]peasants[/del] employees on lockdown is a feature, not a bug.

7

We have a socialist police force, firefighting, court system, military, small segments of journalism and broadcasting, and much, much more. I’m sure there are ways in which socialism can contravene freedom, but there are plenty of ways in which it does not, and plenty of ways in which it could enhance freedom.

8

And after a generation of pointing to the capitalist democracies of Scandinavia as examples of the evils of socialism, said cold warriors seem really shocked when Millennials don’t think of socialism as all that bad.

9

It depends what you mean by “socialism.”

Every country has a mix of socialist and capitalist policies. Many of the best countries today are “social democracies.” As the OP described, there is a lot to like about this. State sponsored, single payer medicine means people don’t have to go bankrupt paying their medical bills. Steep state investments in education allows everyone to maximize their potential learning without incurring huge debts. Guaranteed minimum income means people don’t go hungry. This all sounds a lot like “freedom” to me. And the key point is that these are specific socialist interventions WITHIN an otherwise capitalist system. Even heavily socialist countries like China saw their gains explode when they tempered socialism with a heaping spoonful of capitalism.

So why do people say socialism is bad? This is mostly because there were heavily socialist, aspiring communist countries like Mao’s China and Stalin’s Russia, which inflicted huge damage on their populations. In Stalinist Russia, for example, farmers were forced to give up their land, tools, and animals to collectivized farms. They were no longer working for themselves. They were working for the good of the state, and so they became de facto slaves. In a capitalist country, if you don’t show up for work you don’t get paid, and it sucks to be you. But in Stalin’s Russia, if you didn’t show up for work it was considered an act of treason against the state. (Because the entire rest of the state system depended on you doing your job.)

What’s worse, the state-managed industries were massively inefficient. The state might forecast a need for 500,000 widgets, but in reality they needed 750,000. So whole industries basically shut down because they lacked the correct parts and supplies. In a capitalist system, a widget shortage provides an incentive for new widget-makers to enter the market, which is not possible when your country only has one giant state-run widget factory.

Another tragic and depraved example came from Mao’s China. Mao thought that iron industries were important for the modernized economy. So he converted millions of farmers to become amateur iron workers. Nobody ever bothered to ask where they would find the raw materials, who would purchase the finished iron, or who would feed those iron workers now that they were no longer planting crops. Failing to meet your iron production quota was - again - considered a crime against the state.

The examples of stupid, wasteful, evil, and murderous socialist policies go on and on. Stalin and Mao both killed tens of millions of people (sometimes deliberately) in their attempt to dictate the state economy rather than let market forces drive it.

So the big question, then, is: “What the heck does that have to do with Bernie Sanders?” And the answer is: “Not much.”

Part of the reason America has so many problems today is that the example of countries like Russia, China, and Venezuela has made people allergic to the very idea of “socialism.” So when the Democrats wanted to mandate insurance standards and expand government control over health care through the ACA, the Republicans rightly pointed out that this was an example of socialism. But they wrongly conflated a minor socialist reform with Stalinist Russia, as if commissars would be forcing doctors to labor at gunpoint.

I’ve had conversations with people in which I point out that beloved programs like Social Security and Medicare are, in fact, socialist interventions. And I’ve had people argue till they were blue in the face that this was not true, because in their mind the word “Socialism” only applies to Stalinist Russia. It would be great if we could all agree on what these words actually mean.

10

So you don’t discuss it in terms of overarching theoretical concepts such as “socialism”. You discuss it in terms of efficacy in relation to social objectives all but the most selfish can respond to. So, for example, you point out how a universal public medical scares system ought to be able to reduce the drag on employment caused by the expectation on employers to get themselves involved in insurance, and reduce the burden of paperwork on the individual patient. As OP observes, you stress how it would make the labour market more flexible by increasing one sort of freedom for both employers and workers, and so on. Maybe it’s too nostalgic for some, but remember FDR’s Four Freedoms?

(By contrast, in the UK, they talked more moralistically of five great evils to be defeated by government-led action - want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness)

11

Not in a space less than a book, probably.

But “capitalism” vs “socialism” seems to be kind of a red herring. How many people, really, stand at either extreme of the binary? Most political discussions – and I think most people’s beliefs – rest somewhere on a sliding spectrum between individual decision-making and centralized-planning. And even most sensible policy suggestions to any given problem can have aspects that combine “capitalism” and “socialism”. Single payer? That’s government-financed insurance, but still with private provision of medical services.

One notch slides up, the other stays down. Most practical solutions to our problems aren’t going to come from some rigid ideological party line, all of one thing and none of the other. What works could potentially vary, and combine what’s good from both perspectives.

When I start grousing about the utopians who want to wave a magic political wand to solve our society’s every problem, I’m not necessarily grousing about their desired ends. I’m all on-board with the great liberal project of increasing freedom and alleviating suffering around the globe.

The problem is that most people have rather detailed economic policy prescriptions, without having put in even the most minimal effort to educate themselves. I don’t have definitive answers to how we should build roads, or educate children, or tax incomes, or provide health care, etc. etc. etc. These are complex issues – more complex than you make out in your OP, altho you seemed to be going for broader discussion. To take a ready example: We had a recent tax thread in GD. Discussion on the SDMB is higher than most other places, sure. But tax discussions here are not one tenth what would be required in order to have a sensible investigation of the real underlying issues. I don’t personally know exactly how tax policy should work, but I know some of the underlying stickiness that makes it a tough problem. There are some basic facts about the topic that are necessary for adult discussion. So far as I read, those facts just did not show up.

All of this goes much deeper than whether we need more “capitalism” or “socialism”. I don’t see how that binary is a helpful way of getting at what we care about.

12

Good responses so far. My impression is that it is easy to convince folk that socialism is essentially communism - and everyone over a certain age KNOWs communism is BAD. And every thinking individual knows that pure communism is unattainable (at least by our species.)

It is easy to label things with exclusive generalities, rather than the messier process of discussing the different ratios of various philosophies each system exhibits. And folk tend not to appreciate aspects of a society that they personally support and benefit from, that might not align with their personal self image. (Someone leaning left might not wish to admit how much they appreciate public safety resulting from authoritarian practices. Or some libertarian may not object to their Social Security benefits.)

IRT the OP, tho, I could imagine that as a country trends more and more Socialist, it might impair the ability of some of the most able to profit wildly in some portions of the economy. For example, more centralized medicine might reduce the craziest profits of some players in the healthcare industries. Personally, I’m not sure why the general public would think that a bad thing.

One of the best explanations of capitalism I ever heard was in a law school class 30-some years ago, when a fellow student said “Capitalism is essentially the ability of each individual or group to take the greatest advantage of each other individual or group to the greatest extent permissible under the law.” I’ve never understood why unbridled capitalism was considered such a good thing WRT such diverse situations/relationships.

13

Look, in the the US in my opinion, you tend to assume that there is a line running from socialism to capitalism. And that societies are somewhere on the line. More of one must mean less of the other.

In Scandinavia, we don’t generally perceive social spending by the government as a matter of socialism vs. capitalism. These two are separate dials, and can both be turned up high. In fact, normally they should be, because in practice you need a strongly capitalist economy to fund large-scale social spending. So in effect, more of what Americans call socialism means more capitalism too. And you know what ? Lots of investment in the middle class (that means social spending, what the US calls socialism) leads to an educated workforce with the freedom to start their own businesses… in fact more capitalism. So in US terms more socialism results in more capitalism. ( And if you do it right you get a lot of middle-class two-income couples which keeps individual taxes down. )

Viewed under the US paradigm, where capitalism and socialism are diametrically opposed concepts, this just does not process.

14

It does contravene freedom. A perfectly free being is answerable to no one. His only constraints are those imposed by nature and logic. A society by its nature takes away some of that freedom. My ‘primal man’ can not go about taking what he wants now. The structure of society dictates that some ‘things’ are no longer available to him, but in a perfectly capitalist world, the things that are ‘his’ are ‘his alone’ to dispense with as he pleases. He is ‘free’ to accumulate what he is able to accumulate and dispose of it in whatever way he chooses. The theory behind a socialist state is that those things that he accumulates are not truly ‘his.’ They or at least a portion of them belong to the community to be distributed as it pleases. This inarguably infringes upon the ‘freedom’ of the man. No longer can he take his 100 gold pieces that he earned or created and throw it in a volcano. Now, he can take 60 of them and do so, but the other 40 are no longer his and forcibly confiscated by society in the form of the state. This seems to me to be less ‘free.’

The question though isn’t whether it is less free, but rather how much freedom is appropriate to sacrifice for the good of society? Very few people would want a true anarchy answerable to no one. We acknowledge that sacrificing freedom for the good of the whole is not a bad thing. The disagreement is simply how much. No modern society that I can think of off hand is purely capitalist. We create regulations and taxation for the public good. The US isn’t funding its military through voluntary donations. Neither is any society purely socialist. Sweden isn’t seizing the means of production and doling out according to people’s needs. The question is simply, how much is appropriate. I think that arguably the US has too little government control. I don’t live in the Nordic Socialist Paradises, so maybe they have too much or maybe they’ve hit it spot on.

15

Well, it seems a bit ironic to me that folks are complaining that ‘Americans’ don’t understand socialism while seemingly not understanding it themselves. To break it down, Capitalism is purely an economic system. Socialism is a political and economic mishmash. Socialism wrt it’s economic aspects is, frankly, a disaster. It’s failed literally everywhere it’s been tried. Every time. So, if we are comparing apples to apples, Socialism’s economic elements contravene freedom since it makes all but the elite poor, while Capitalism is pretty much what’s given the world the current level of prosperity it enjoys…the greatest economic prosperity in history. Since Capitalism doesn’t have a political element, it’s hard to compare to Socialism’s economic elements, which I presume is what most people in this thread are thinking of when they are talking about ‘Socialism’. Capitalism needs to be coupled to a political system, so how it works is going to depend on the system it’s coupled to. In general, Capitalism pretty much makes ANY political system better…from the totalitarian Communist nations like China (who at least have adopted some measure of Capitalism) to the Socialist democracies of northern Europe…the the socialist democracy of the US, Canada, Australia and, well, just about every other 1st world nation state. Pure political Socialism also sucks, of course, but if you wanted to do an apples to apples comparison it would be tough to compare political systems, such as Democracy to Socialism, as there is quite a bit of cross pollination. Again, I think when folks are thinking of Socialism what they REALLY mean is democratic countries that use elements of capitalism and social programs for things like setting the bar on poverty levels, health care, large scale public projects and the like. They don’t mean the other aspects of Socialism that have been dropped, like the state owning the means of production, collective ownership of property and the like. Pretty obviously, those things would ‘contravene freedom’, but there isn’t really a comparison in Capitalism since Capitalism isn’t a political system.

16

Ultimately it comes down to one’s control over the fruits of one’s own labor. Consider it like this if you want to; at a say… 25% tax rate, which is a good middle-of-the-road amount, that means that your pay for everything you do on Monday each week, and until about 10 am Tuesday is being taken from you. Or if you prefer, you don’t start working for yourself until 10 am every morning (assuming 8 hour days starting at 8 am).

Raising that tax rate means in effect that people are basically working more without being paid for it- their take-home pay will decrease. And if they’re taking that money and then spending it on things they don’t agree with (for whatever reason), I can see how people would feel as if they’re being coerced in some way.

Now of course, we already have this- plenty of people are against military spending, and lots of others are against social programs. It’s the idea that we’d be expanding that which gets a lot of people’s goats, and usually the right-wing, because the only proposals to do this are typically for social programs and things they don’t like to begin with. Everyone generally agrees that infrastructure and public utilities are a good thing- few people gripe about not having privatized water or garbage utilities, for example.

Another thread of the antipathy toward socialism is the idea that it’s a… leveling(?) scheme. In other words, the thinking is that it’s sort of a government-enforced Robin Hood scheme whereby people who have sacrificed, saved, made consistent good choices and done the “right” things are now being penalized by extra taxation on the behalf of people who didn’t do those things. Again, it’s a matter of degree- I think people aren’t entirely against things like basic public hospitals or homeless shelters- few are that heartless, but they do draw the line at behaviors like poor people smoking- it’s a double-whammy of stupid that shouldn’t be encouraged or assisted- the general idea is that if you’re poor, smoking is doubly dumb- it’s an expense you probably can’t support, AND higher health care costs come with it. So they don’t feel that their money that they worked for and ostensibly made some kind of sacrifices to get should be spent on someone without the sense not to smoke as a poor person. Throwing good money after bad, so to speak.

But if they’re compelled to do so by say… socialized medicine, they’re going to be bitter about it and feel like they were unfree to make that choice about where the fruit of their labor would be spent.

17

“Socialism” is just a snarl word in American politics, and has been for the last 50 years or so, to be hurled indiscriminately at whatever proposal the right doesn’t like. In that context it doesn’t “mean” anything.

18

Those don’t fit the definition of socialism. A government paying for a service is not the same as the government owning the means of production.

19

The word “socialism” is used in a lot of different ways beyond the early 20th century definition.

20

Well, several of us in this thread are working off of the actual definition of Socialism. As that means we are all talking past each other, maybe we should define the term. Also, as I noted, Socialism is both an economic system and a political system, as well as a term used for general health and welfare or large scale public projects. Which aspects of Socialism are we talking about to compare it with Capitalism, which is only an economic system? If we are talking economic Socialism, then how does your ‘different ways’ differ from the actual definition of economic Socialism, and can you give real world examples of countries using it? As far as I know, the closest Socialism gets today in real world use (in countries that aren’t economic disaster areas) on the economic side is mixed economic systems, where the state owns and controls SOME means of production while some are privately owned and operated (i.e. Capitalism). Is that the ‘difference’, and are we than comparing strictly the state owned and operated part against the privately owned to determine their, um, freedom rating?