Paul Frantizek
Aug 24, 2017 · 2 min read

I’ve always thought it useful to think of socialistic policies (rather than full-blown socialism) in terms of what motivate them.

First you have the most mild form of socialistic policies, the basic social safety net programs which are designed purely to ameliorate conditions of extreme poverty and misfortune. These are programs intended to provide a subsistence level of support — keep people from starving, provide basic medical care, maybe rough housing. To my mind these programs aren’t objectionable, since the sort of desperation that accompanies extreme poverty invariably leads to social instability that negatively affects everyone. This is the sort of socialism found in the Christian Democracy that was popular in the late-19th and early-20th Century.

The second form I would call Keynesian socialism, which is mainly intended to manipulate economic growth by gaming the demand cycle. This I reject because it’s stupid and useless, serving mainly to draw out conditions that would rectify themselves more quickly if allowed to adjust naturally (Think of most US economic policy in the 2008–2010 time frame, which didn’t do much more than increase debt). This is the kind of socialism you typically find in neoliberal technocratic regimes like the EU and US under the Wall Street financed Dem/GOPe duopoly (Because technocrats simply can’t allow economic cycles to occur naturally — otherwise, who would need technocrats!).

The last form is the one I consider the most objectionable and dangerous, egalitarian socialism. This seeks to directly redistribute wealth through transfer payments and regulations like housing, credit and hiring mandates. These sorts of policies are both economically destructive and socially corrosive — the former, by undermining natural incentives and the later by encouraging class division and conflict. This is the kind of thinking that can’t simply set an injured man’s broken leg, but has to agitate him over why a wealthier man gets to go to a nicer hospital.

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