Dismissing socialism is as silly as dismissing capitalism would be. There is no simple answer to society: The best combination is a mixture of many things. There'll be hints of socialism there.
Similarly, perhaps Paul was criticized for his dismissal of French Literature professors because a lot of people realized what a stupid blanket statement he made. Just because it's easier to bullshit about literature doesn't mean the whole of literature is bullshit. That's like assuming that just because math is about simplistic formulas, the entirety of math is simple to comprehend.
I don't know much about French literature, but what I do know of it tells me that by learning about it, I'd be learning not just about literary theory but about French sociology, French history, and the feelings behind France at various moments in times. There's an incredible amount of information in literature. It's not a bug that it's subjective in nature and prone to debate. That's the feature.
But it wasn't a blanket statement (applying to all french lit profs equally). It was a generalization (a reference to the average intelligence of french lit profs).
It's meant to be understood in the same way that "men are taller than women" is meant to be understood; a counter-example will get you nowhere here.
Socialism has killed hundreds of millions of people in the 20th century. I think it's fair to put it into the "doubtfully useful techniques" bin, where a higher standard of proof for usefulness is required to make use of anything that seems socialist.
Unfortunately, exactly the opposite is the case today. Free enterprise and competition is looked on skeptically, while socialism (multiply disproved and damned by the experience of history) is gleefully embraced and readily adopted with insufficient skepticism.
Socialism has killed hundreds of millions of people in the 20th century.
I disagree completely. Implementing socialism in disenfranchised states is by far a more streamlined process than implementing any brand of capitalism. What killed "hundreds of millions of people" was the coupling of fragile citizenries with malicious and self-serving leaders, not the establishment of socialism. I see correlation, but no causation, and I find hasty dismissal of socialism as the "disproved and damned" counterpart of capitalism as completely flawed--especially in a society where the two have been working together (I'd say successfully) for quite some time.
This is the crux. Socialism/communism as implemented bears little resemblance to the utopian vision, instead of utopia the result is human tragedy on a grand scale. This has happened so many times that it's unlikely to be mere accidental correlation (Stalinist USSR, communist Eastern Europe, China under Mao, North Korea, Cuba under Castro, Myanmar under the Junta, etc.)
And yet, because the vision and practice differ so much this provides a ready excuse for every new generation of socialist utopians to put forward the theory that those historical examples were not really, truly faithful implementations of socialism/communism. Rather than the more realistic theory that utopian socialism is impractical and unstable, and when attempted to be implemented it inherently degrades into the totalitarian examples we've seen so many times from history.
My contention is only that this line of reasoning is dangerous and harmful, and that socialist ideas deserve far more skepticism in public debate than they typically receive.
The reigning tag-team champions of Democracy and Capitalism take human nature into account. They are both designed around the idea that people are self-interested. They do not function in spite of selfishness and greed. They function with it.
Unfortunately, no system is perfect, and any system can be gamed. Today, we see that this is true for Democracy and Capitalism as well.
Capitalism also bears little resemblance to its utopian vision. Perhaps the problem is following these as ideology instead of simply seeing these "models" as tools. National Parks and vast stores of natural resource leverage a communist model, Health insurance (really any insurance) leverage a social model, Growth, speculative enterprise leverage capital models. I see no reason why we cannot choose the right tools for each job.
Capitalism has killed millions too, and not just an abstraction of it posing under the name. Capitalism makes human abuse profitable. The best way to restrain that abuse requires practices that are currently being attacked in Amerca for being socialistic.
When has capitalism killed people? I often find when people trot out this claim, they're thinking of things like imperialist wars or the coercion of disadvantaged workers--things that cannot be said to be "capitalism" in the modern American use of the term.
We could take the circuitous route of pointing out our oil addiction, then pointing out how oil lobbyists strongly influenced our invading Iraq and piling up an estimated hundred thousand deaths. Or we could talk about the sweat shop system that abuses workers outside of state in order to produce cheap good. If you think the clothes on your back came clean out of squeaky-good American virtue, you got another thing coming.
But we could go a step further than that and point out that the reason they need to go to China to produce their goods is because laws exist in America banning them from doing the same here. Those laws weren't created by a third party. That's the U.S. government intervening and preventing abuse. On the scale of government, that's totalitarian rather than anarchic, and that's what we're really talking about. "Capitalism vs socialism" is debating two middlemen on a larger scale.
You need to strike a balance. You can't have a system that doesn't reward hard work, but you also can't have a system that doesn't support people on the bottom. The problem with Paul Graham's thinking is that he cuts out a lot of complexity and focuses on one shallow idea that, taken out of context, is patently absurd. Saying "Socialism doesn't work" says nothing but says it prettily and vapidly.
Fact is, we're not a wholly capitalist system. We probably need to be less capitalistic now, because the way the market works at the moment people are getting hurt. It's a straw man argument that socialism leads to Stalin and Mao and Hitler and genocide. Those weren't socialist governments. They were totalitarian governments that went corrupt. But socialism does exist in the larger part of Europe, and in many cases it's led to happy societies that don't have certain of the major issues America's got right now. A lot of them rank higher on the national happiness index than we do, so I guess they're doing something right.
"We could take the circuitous route of pointing out our oil addiction, then pointing out how oil lobbyists strongly influenced our invading Iraq..."
No, we can't take that route. Nevermind that it's a conspiracy theory. I thought I had it made it clear that I do not consider the coercive use of force to be "capitalism". Nor did any of the important economic philosophers, except for Marx, who wasn't any good at economics.
See my post below, communism has always devolved into statist tyranny in every attempt so far. If a software development methodology had an equivalent track record to communism (adjusted appropriately for the subject matter) it would be far more reviled even than waterfall (if you could imagine such a thing) and nobody would ever seriously propose using it.
While the claim that national socialism has killed hundreds of millions is an exaggeration, the actual record isn't that impressive.
Most of the hell-holes on earth are a "people's republic".
Yes, socialism seems to work in Western Europe and Japan. However, that may be more a function of Western Europe and Japan than it is of socialism. It's unclear what wouldn't work in those places.
What the fuck is that supposed to mean? What does Western Europe have that makes it instantly capable of supporting any random-ass system? It's not like Europe's some magical land of milk and honey.
The fact that socialism works in Europe is because socialism is a potent economic system.
As an aside, we don't call it socialism here. We call it social market economy. Also, true socialist parties aren't nearly as big as social democrat parties, which are more moderate.
That's understandable. There're more shades to socialism than just the one that gets used again and again in America.
It's why this entire conversation is so ridiculous. Neither Paul nor the majority of the commenters here has a clue about what they're talking about. They're spouting talking points like there's a set-in-stone socialism that all would-be socialists have to follow. I'm not at all the pinko-commie sort, but it always tickles me when this particular weakness of HN comes out. For a bunch of people who work with complex systems daily, we suck at appreciating the complexities of economic systems and we adore Paul despite his habit of oversimplifying topics to the point of satire.
> What does Western Europe have that makes it instantly capable of supporting any random-ass system?
Europe doesn't have a history of large scale spontaneous massacres, see Rwanda and Darfur for examples. (Yes, the govts occasionally go on sprees, but that's different.) There's even a history of spontaneous organization and cooperation; that isn't universal.
> The fact that socialism works in Europe is because socialism is a potent economic system.
It's not potent enough to match the US' GDP per person, and the US is handicapped by enormous defense spending....
And, socialism hasn't been all that successful in improving the world's hell-holes.
That said, it's good to see the EU decide to have a foreign policy and start developing a military. It's past time for NATO, or at least for the US to take a much smaller role. Whether or not Russia/the USSR is/was a threat, Europe is wealthy enough to take care of itself.
You know, with that "potent economic system" and all.
> Facism and national socialism killed hundreds of millions
Exaggerate much?
Nazi Germany didn't kill a hundred million, let alone hundreds of millions and Franco's Spain, Chile, and the rest weren't a significant fraction of the German total.
There is no simple answer to society: The best combination is a mixture of many things. There'll be hints of socialism there.
Why would that be true? Aside from being the mid-point between two mutually contradictory opinions, what specifically makes you think that being a little bit of both is better than either? In the US, at least, the half-socialized sectors of the economy have been responsible for the biggest disasters -- S&Ls, Enron, and Lehman were all the result of smart capitalists exploiting dumb price controls.
Also! If you'd been writing this 80 years ago, would you have said "Dismissing democracy is as silly as dismissing fascism would be.... the best combination is a mixture of many things. There'll be hints of National Socialism there."
Socialism is an ambiguous word, but roads aren't a good example of any of them.
-Does socialism mean the workers own the company? Lots of perfectly capitalistic companies are actually socialist by that standard. I even know a company where the original founder has no equity anymore and everyone else has equity based upon seniority. What socialist would do better?
-Does socialism mean that the government owns the company? Amtrak, Fannie Mae, GM, AIG.... Hasn't been an amazing success so far.
-Does socialism mean that the government provides welfare? By that standard, Bismarck was a socialist. (But in reality, he was an old fashioned aristocrat who figured out you can snip socialism in the bud by using welfare to buy off its supporters.)
-Does socialism mean that the socialist party holds a monopoly on all commerce and politics? We, ah...tried that a few times and it didn't seem to work.
Roads? Most governments build roads, if only for their armies. You think Caesar was a socialist?
Adam Smith gives the example of paying for roads by road tolls in his book The Wealth of Nations. In the United States, much of state and federal funding for highways is derived from a tax on gasoline and diesel vehicle fuel, to much the same effect. The ultimate incidence of ALL taxation is on consumers (and everyone is a consumer), as any competent economist will tell you. These forms of paying for roads are not socialism, by any definition of socialism that I have ever seen, but they are forms of taxation that allocate the cost of using the tax-supported, publicly available resource rather well.
> they are forms of taxation that allocate the cost of using the tax-supported, publicly available resource rather well.
...which is how socialism functions, by every definition of socialism.
But you're sidestepping the argument. In a completely nonsocialist environment, the roads wouldn't be government-funded to begin with. There would be private groups each coming up with their own free-market system for roads.
Actually in many more socialist countries, highways and some urban roads are payed by the people who use them. Better examples are military and police force.
Similarly, perhaps Paul was criticized for his dismissal of French Literature professors because a lot of people realized what a stupid blanket statement he made. Just because it's easier to bullshit about literature doesn't mean the whole of literature is bullshit. That's like assuming that just because math is about simplistic formulas, the entirety of math is simple to comprehend.
I don't know much about French literature, but what I do know of it tells me that by learning about it, I'd be learning not just about literary theory but about French sociology, French history, and the feelings behind France at various moments in times. There's an incredible amount of information in literature. It's not a bug that it's subjective in nature and prone to debate. That's the feature.