Christian Science Monitor: Is Barack Obama really a socialist?
Interesting article. I offer my reflection below.
Fairfax, Va. – Since telling Joe the Plumber of his wish to "spread the wealth around," Barack Obama is being called a socialist. Is he one?
No. At least not in the classic sense of the term. "Socialism" originally meant government ownership of the major means of production and finance, such as land, coal mines, steel mills, automobile factories, and banks.
A principal promise of socialism was to replace the alleged uncertainty of markets with the comforting certainty of a central economic plan. No more guessing what consumers will buy next year and how suppliers and rival firms will behave: everyone will be led by government's visible hand to play his and her role in an all-encompassing central plan. The "wastes" of competition, cycles of booms and busts, and the "unfairness" of unequal incomes would be tossed into history's dustbin.
Of course, socialism utterly failed. But it wasn't just a failure of organization or efficiency. By making the state the arbiter of economic value and social justice, as well as the source of rights, it deprived individuals of their liberty – and tragically, often their lives.
The late Robert Heilbroner – a socialist for most of his life – admitted after the collapse of the Iron Curtain that socialism "was the tragic failure of the twentieth century. Born of a commitment to remedy the economic and moral defects of capitalism, it has far surpassed capitalism in both economic malfunction and moral cruelty."
This failure was unavoidable. It was predicted from the start by wise economists, such as F.A. Hayek, who understood that no government agency can gather and process all the knowledge necessary to plan the productive allocation of millions of different resources.
Likewise, socialism's requirement that each person behave in ways prescribed by government planners is a recipe for tyranny. A central plan, by its nature, denies to individuals the right to choose and to innovate. It replaces a multitude of individual plans – each of which can be relatively easily adjusted in light of competitive market feedback – with one gigantic, monopolistic, and politically favored plan.
A happy difference separating today from the 1930s is that, unlike back then, no serious thinkers or groups in America now push for this kind of full-throttle socialism.
But what about a milder form of socialism? If reckoned as an attitude rather than a set of guidelines for running an economy, socialism might well describe Senator Obama's economics. Anyone who speaks glibly of "spreading the wealth around" sees wealth not as resulting chiefly from individual effort, initiative, and risk-taking, but from great social forces beyond any private producer's control. If, say, the low cost of Dell computers comes mostly from government policies (such as government schooling for an educated workforce) and from culture (such as Americans' work ethic) then Michael Dell's wealth is due less to his own efforts and more to the features of the society that he luckily inhabits.
Wealth, in this view, is produced principally by society. So society's claim on it is at least as strong as that of any of the individuals in whose bank accounts it appears. More important, because wealth is produced mostly by society (rather than by individuals), taxing high-income earners more heavily will do little to reduce total wealth production.
This notion of wealth certainly warrants the name "socialism," for it gives the abstraction "society" pride of place over flesh-and-blood individuals. If taxes are reduced on Joe the Plumber's income, the rationale must be that Joe deserves a larger share of society's collectively baked pie and not that Joe earned his income or that lower taxes will inspire Joe to work harder.
This "socialism-lite," however, is as specious as is classic socialism. And its insidious nature makes it even more dangerous. Across Europe, this "mild" form of socialism acts as a parasitic ideology that has slowly drained entrepreneurial energy – and freedoms – from its free-market host.
Could it happen in America? Consider the words of longtime Socialist Party of America presidential candidate Norman Thomas: "The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism, but under the name of liberalism, they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program until one day America will be a socialist nation without ever knowing how it happened." In addition to Medicare, Social Security, and other entitlement programs, the gathering political momentum toward single-payer healthcare – which Obama has proclaimed is his ultimate goal – shows the prescience of Thomas's words.
The fact that each of us depends upon the efforts of millions of others does not mean that some "society" transcending individuals produces our prosperity. Rather, it means that the vast system of voluntary market exchange coordinates remarkably well the efforts of millions of individuals into a productive whole. For Obama to suggest that government interfere in this process more than it already does – to "spread" wealth from Joe to Bill, or vice versa – overlooks not only the voluntary and individual origins of wealth, but the dampening of the incentives for people to contribute energetically to wealth's continued production.
Donald J. Boudreaux is professor of economics at George Mason University. He is the author of "Globalization."
My Reflection
When I evaluate candidates, political parties, and elections, I tend to process them through several lenses. Contrary to the Enlightenment and modernist notions about the perfectibility of human beings, I'm a big believer in human depravity. I wholeheartedly embrace Lord Acton's axiom that "Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely." Maintaining the balance of power between competing branches of government is one important response to this concern but what about the role of government regarding other facets of life?
Society is not merely an aggregation of individuals under supervision of a government. Society is individuals living in an organic, interdependent set of communities and institutions. Culture shapes the form and interrelatedness of communities and institutions, but every society has them. Family, neighborhood, city, school, business, government, and religious communities are just a few institutions that are common to most cultures.
It is my perspective that government exists to protect and care for the soil from which these institutions spring forth. That is what the framers of the U. S. Constitution intended. It corresponds well with the Judeo-Christian heritage of decentralization and personal responsibility. Two related perspectives have emerged within Christianity over the past century that give us essential lenses through which to evaluate government and society: Sovereignty and subsidiarity.
Sphere Sovereignty
Abraham Kuyper first articulated sovereignty more than one hundred years ago in the Netherlands, but it is grounded in perspectives that preceded Kuyper. Others have since reworked Kuyper's conceptualizations. At its core, sphere sovereignty maintains that a set of institutions and traditions emerge in a society that addresses a particular aspect of human existence. These institutions and traditions form a sphere of competence that is not directly under or over the sovereignty of another. Thus, there are spheres of marriage and family, government, business, the arts, religion, etc. We don't run our families like we would run a business, and we don't run our government like we would run a family. While all spheres of life interact and touch each other, there is a need for each sphere of society to be reticent about intruding too deeply into the institutions and traditions of other spheres.
Subsidiarity
Subsidiarity is a term coined by Pope Leo XIII in 1891 to describe a principle that holds that government should only get involved in initiatives that exceed the capacity of individuals and private groups. Within society's various institutions, functions should be carried out at the most localized level possible, with regional and national levels executing only those functions that can not effectively be done locally.
Whether in name or not, this concept long preceded Pope Leo XIII. For instance, the Tenth Amendment to the U. S. Constitution says:
This is just one example of subsidiarity evidencing itself within Western thought.
Some see these two perspectives as expressions of libertarianism. Not so. Pure libertarianism believes in the perfectibility of humanity by eliminating the government and other institutions that constrain individual liberty. Sphere sovereignty and subsidiarity value societal institutions, including government, and they see the panoply of institutions as essential for human flourishing among carnal human beings.
Barack Obama and Present Democrat Leaders
American liberalism is deeply influenced by the opposing wing (to libertarianism) of the Enlightenment and Modernist belief in perfectible humanity. Here the government is not the enemy of personal freedom but rather the vehicle for personal freedom. It is reasoned that if people are simply provided with basic needs and made independent of stifling societal institutions and cultural values holding them back, then their natural goodness will spring forth. FDR said that:
In response, he proposed a Second Bill of Rights that included the following rights:
- The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;
- The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;
- The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;
- The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;
- The right of every family to a decent home;
- The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
- The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;
- The right to a good education.
No one will deny these are highly desirable outcomes, but necessitous people are indeed free because they can take responsibility for themselves and improve their lot through cooperative participation in society's institutions. But notice what happens when we cast these desirable outcomes in the language of "rights." They cease to be goals achieved by virtuous people working together within various semi-autonomous spheres of life. They become realities that the government is mandated to create without regard for the impact such efforts will have on the other institutions and traditions of the culture.
Instead of government playing a subsidiary role to the mediating institutions of society, everything is stood on its head. All other institutions are relegated to a subsidiary position under the national government. Their freedom to function is granted only as far as they do not conflict with the national government's duty to grant people their "rights." Instead of vibrant semi-autonomous spheres of life engaged in by free and virtuous people, these mediating institutions are made impotent shadows of their historical selves, with the primary relationship in society becoming the one between individuals and the federal government.
This is what Barack Obama referred to in the recently released recording of a 2001 radio interview. He characterizes the U.S. Constitution as flawed because it did not contain these "positive rights" as presented in FDR's Second Bill of Rights. While we have historically understood that the wealthy are responsible to the poor, and part of that responsibility is met through taxation, we have always upheld the centrality of personal property rights. Based on Obama's sense of positive rights, all wealth becomes, first and foremost, society's wealth to be redistributed according to whatever sense of "fairness" he or the government may deem just.
This is the brave new world into which Obama intends to lead us. It is not a world of apocalyptic doom, but it is a world, as Boudreaux so eloquently says, based on "…a parasitic ideology that has slowly drained entrepreneurial energy – and freedoms – from its free-market host" in Europe. It is the slash and burn of a societal ecosystem for a world where only the government fills the societal landscape.
Despite his carefully crafted image and charming, charismatic eloquence, Obama is not a centrist seeking a middle way. He is a man on a mission to create a world that is an updated version of New Dealism grounded in 1960's political radicalism. There is nothing at all "third way" in his vision.
Emerging Church and Obama
One of the most ironic things I've seen in this election is the broad embrace of Obama by many Emergent or emerging church folks. The very name "Emergent" comes from the philosophical notion of "emergence," which Wikipedia explains refers to "…the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions." Thus, the emerging Church resistance to hierarchical ecclesiastical structures and the cherished notion of generative communities giving witness against the Empire (in true Hauerwasian fashion) in their independent contexts, watching new ways of being spontaneously emerge and converge.
Yet when it comes to justice and governance, so many of this community warmly embrace repackaged modernist visions of perfectible humanity through government-supported individualism, with its corresponding assault on the mediating institutions of society. Their idealistic quest for justice in the face of the Empire places the populous ever more firmly into the grasp of a centralized empire.
And just in case you were wondering, I won't be voting for Barack Obama on Tuesday. 🙂
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