The Taint of Socialism
Recently, I spoke with someone who jokingly stated that I couldn’t understand/didn’t believe in capitalism because I was a Democrat. It’s somewhat laughable that I wouldn’t understand capitalism given my background as an economics major and as someone who’s worked around and with a variety of entrepreneurs and small businesses. Regardless, I’ve been thinking a lot about that comment. It’s one that I think scares many people. We don’t want policies labeled as “socialist” because they’ll be rejected as a matter of course. Anyways, the comment stuck with me for a while. I didn’t get the opportunity to give an appropriate response, so I decided to write one:
I believe in a free society, but we are most assuredly in a mixed economy with portions of both socialism and capitalism. The most prominent in many aspects is capitalism, but it’d be unreasonable to ignore the aspects of our society/economy that are not pure capitalism. We’ve determined in almost every way to limit capitalism from its fullest extent. We do not live in an entirely free economy and I do not believe any of us would truly want that. For years we’ve scrutinized monopolistic corporations and broken up these monopolies to better serve the whole of society. We still do this today. We also regulate our business to prevent against shoddy design/manufacturing. We protect the consumers from corporations taking the easy way out. We’ve stopped lead paint from being used. We’ve ensured that consumers are properly warned and protected when products have been determined to be unsafe. We impose mandatory recalls on those companies. We impose fines for these wrongdoings. None of these things is “pure capitalism,” but as I said before, none of us would truly want to remove those aspects from our economy.
The question always comes down to how much regulation is necessary. We can agree some regulations need to be removed or altered to allow for more freedom in our business world. We can also disagree on whether regulations need to be imposed on banks for risky behavior. Or if we need to impose more regulations on our companies to provide a disincentive to polluting. Or impose certain regulations to move our country’s energy portfolio further into sustainable territory. We can disagree on those aspects, but each future regulation is not a destruction of capitalism as we know it. At a point, regulations can push us to a place where it no longer resembles capitalism in the least. I do not believe we are truly there. I think there is more we can do to protect our society and the future generations from the current. However, each of those regulations builds upon the foundation set by over 200 years of precedent. Precedent that states that as a country, as a society, our definition of capitalism is not one where regulations do not exist. It is one in which regulations exist to benefit society. Things can be changed, but the basic model works. And it fits our definition of capitalism.
Now, we also have parts of our economy that do not resemble “true capitalism” in the least. The many social services and infrastructure built within our economy are not based on capitalism. Our social safety net is in its nature a socialist concept. Of course, that’s a dirty word in today’s lexicon, and while we can debate the true meaning of socialism (spoiler: the definition does not resemble any of what we call socialism today) and the context that it’s used in, we can be sure that many of the things labeled socialism in the past have come to be important parts of our society. The most important being social security, Medicare, and Medicaid. FDR’s New Deal was decried as socialism, yet much of it stands today as a testament to parts of society we expect. But we can also look to parts of our society that carry socialist traits such as the Interstate Highway System, fire departments, police departments, public schooling, public libraries, food stamps, etc. These parts of our society are not pure socialism in the idea that socialism is complete government control of the means of production, but they are socialist concepts based on the idea that providing these goods as part of the country’s tax system is better than opening up these goods in an anarcho-capitalistic manner.
Justice demands that we look out for those that can’t look out for themselves. The children, the oppressed, the poor, etc. Our society, over time, has developed methods to protect these people through progressive taxes, the social safety net, regulations on business, and other social needs. In this aspect, the government has been a force for good in our society. By preventing child labor, by providing national defense, by providing public education and public libraries, by providing law enforcement and fire rescue, by providing the necessary infrastructure, by protecting consumers from unsafe goods, and by implementing social security. Each of these draws in socialist tendencies to create the economic structure we desire.
We can define our economy in a variety of ways, but it is neither one of pure capitalism or pure socialism. And that’s probably for the best. I don’t want to live in a society where the government owns the complete means of production. I also don’t want to live in a society where the justice system is run by a private company. These are the extremes, and to the contrast of much of our online social interactions, the extremes are not the answer.
In the end, labeling our society as a mixed economy is probably the most appropriate. We’ve taken the best aspects of a variety of “pure” economic philosophies and created the system we have today. It’s not perfect, but it is where we’re at. The attempt to demonize the word “socialism” has proven to be a successful emotional marketing strategy albeit an inauthentic way to win the argument. We hear “socialism” and think of oppressive dictators who killed those who opposed their rule. It’s an egregious misrepresentation to invoke the same in our domestic public policy debates.
We have our system. We can debate the merits of new regulations and new policies. We can debate the effectiveness of public healthcare, basic income, or privatized social security. But let’s rid ourselves of the idea that “socialism” is a true dirty word when so many parts of our society are socialist constructs.
Originally published on the Politics for Tomorrow blog. Part of PeachPod.
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