Haque’s first ten paragraphs detail his selection of economic, political and social ills, all of which he blames on capitalism. Capitalism is “an economic system in which investment in and ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange of wealth is made and maintained chiefly by private individuals or corporations, especially as contrasted to cooperatively or state-owned means of wealth”.
The problem here is that those ills are not the consequence of our economic system. They are variously the consequence of bad government policies, individual greed and corruption, political corruption, ill conceived laws, cronyism and many other factors that have nothing to do with capitalism. But by blaming them all on capitalism, Haque can mislead the reader into believing that the solutions must therefore lie with the opposite of capitalism: socialism.
The dictionary has socialism as “a political and economic theory of social organization that advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole”. In other words, the resources used are regulated by the community and the fruits of the economy are distributed by and for the community.
That really sounds great doesn’t it? The wealth produced by economic activity become “public goods that are allocated democratically, invested for the common good, and held in trust by democratic polities”, as Haque puts it. Sign me up! But not as one of those chumps who will risk everything to start a company; not when its success becomes a “public good that will be allocated democratically”. Haque wants to socialize success but keep risk and failure individual. If the success can’t be mine but the cost of failure is still mine, count me out.
No, I want to be one of Haque’s “democratic polities” that does the allocating. History shows that the people who get to decide who gets what make out like bandits. And of course, I will make sure the top elites get the lion’s share of the “public goods” as long as I get my cut. The most socialist countries have insanely wealthy elites, because they are in bed with the government. And the government bureaucrats make out very well indeed.
What Haque is missing is that the bad government policies, individual greed and corruption, political corruption, ill conceived laws, cronyism and many other factors exist in whatever economic and political system you can devise. Those forces will corrupt Social Democracy as surely as they do Capitalism. Even worse so, because Social Democracy concentrates so much more control and regulation in the hands of politicians and bureaucrats, where corruption can be so much more efficient.
So we won’t get any relief from the evils that now afflict us, and at the same time our economy will suffer, as all economies that shift from capitalism to socialism have suffered throughout history.
To paraphrase Churchill: Capitalism is the worst form of an economy, except for all the others.
