The communism of the free market
What is communism? Taken at its root meaning, what is it really? Is it not the unity of society, oriented towards a common goal? If not, isn't that at least the purpose of advocating a communist society: to unite us and drive us towards a singular goal? It is an admirable purpose, is it not?
However, in every attempt at communism in recorded history, there have remained divisions, stratification, suspicion, and bitterness: the very things communism was supposed to end. What went wrong? Smarter men than I have written extensively on the subject. But I think it might be educational to think in terms of "what could we do that would go right?"
One thing we could do is examine the economic processes of capitalism (or, more accurately, free markets), which communism tried to abolish. In a free (or relatively free) market, a person generally produces goods or services which are not particularly useful to himself, at least not in the amounts he produces. Why does he do this silly, wasteful thing? Well, so he can exchange the goods or services he produces for the goods or services produced by others. Since the development of currency, it has become obvious that a person can acquire more goods for himself by producing one thing in abundance and then trading it, via currency, for the other things he wants or needs, than by trying to produce on his own everything he wants or needs.
But all of this is selfish and, if our goal is unity and cooperation, counterproductive. Or is it? If everyone is working for himself, specializing in one thing each, and trying in this way to gain all he can for himself, he is participating in the process of producing goods for strangers, and for society at large. Think of an assembly line: attaching widget A to widget B might seem useless, until all the other widgets have been affixed, and you have a brand-new, functioning thingamajig. An excellent example of cooperation brought to you by the free market.
I can hear you objecting: "But what about a spirit of unity, feelings of commonality, a zeitgeist of good will?" (You're awfully redundant.) I would like for you to suppose for a moment that there is a man aware of himself, his situation, and such. This man - let's call him Kweisi - is truly interested in himself, his own well-being, and the satisfaction of his own needs and desires. He is a dyed-in-the-wool capitalist, and he cares nothing for the well-being of strangers, and every action of his is carefully planned to advance his own material holdings. He would be quite willing to steal and defraud, except that is against the law, and he fears punishment under the law. But he is willing to employ children, pay employees as little as he can get away with, place people in unsafe working conditions, and form monopolies, all of which is allowed under the free market system. His only criterion for an action is: will it increase my personal wealth? You might call Kweisi any number of things inappropriate for a family-friendly blog, and you would be quite right to do so. Now suppose that his workers start dying because of unsafe conditions in his dungeonlike factory. He's losing valuable worker production, the other guy's factory implements safety features and hires Kweisi's best men, and some leave for safer, lower-paying work. Now Kweisi's production is down, and morale is low. Kweisi is hemorrhaging cash by keeping an unproductive factory around (and cash represents the purchasing power of precious possessions) and he is forced to implement safety measures in his own factory, and perhaps increase pay, to attract workers back to his factory, so he can start earning revenues to replace the cash he's losing and start turning a profit again.
Now imagine Kweisi has a retail outlet in a poor neighborhood, and there's a crime wave. But fortunately, his stuff is safe, because he has the latest security features, and some muscle-headed goons, just in case. However, all the people that would have shopped at his retail outlet have been robbed (or murdered), and can't spend any money at his store. So Kweisi goes on a mission to root out the corruption at the local police force and get the boys in blue to crack down on crime, so his store can start turning a profit again. Also, he starts exploiting the local teens in his store, paying them a microscopic wage to work from the time school lets out until their parents get home, so he can keep them out of trouble and take advantage of their desire for dating money, and providing them with money to spend in his store - burning his candle at both ends and in the middle.
Now suppose that the flu is sweeping the country, killing hundreds, thousands, and more with each passing day. Well, of course Kweisi is going to do his level best to discover and mass produce the cure, hoping to sell it to the masses. The rich probably wouldn't pay through the nose for it, because they could just go to their mountain retreat to get away from the blasted virus - but the millions who are stuck in the path of the oncoming epidemic, they will pay whatever they can, and Kweisi is just the man to exploit that opportunity. He mass produces the cure for the flu, selling it at the middle-class price for the first day or two, and then selling it at a clearance to the poor, after most of the middle class has already been soaked.
What's the point? The point is, even though Kweisi is a total creep, he renovated his factory with needed safety features; he fought crime; he employed teens who need job experience more than they needed their free time; he funded the discovery of the cure for the flu, and provided it to millions, saving countless lives. Even though he's a creep. Why did he do all this? Because there was the potential for reward for his actions: the market made him do it, you might say. The truth is, a free market convinces even the worst people to do good things, and it doesn't discourage good people from doing good. The free market unleashes a spirit of unity and cooperation that communism, forced socialism, and the welfare state all stifle. Under communism (as it was practised in the USSR and elsewhere), the wealthy joined the government and protected their wealth, maintaining an appalling disparity of quality of life between the government officials and the rest of the country. Under forced socialism, the more productive will always resent the less productive, instead of feeling generous towards them, as many do in a free market. And the welfare state alienates giver from recipient, lowering the morale of both.
One might object that I'm forgetting about the virtues of justice and equality. Well, you are right that the outcome of a free market is inequitable. But to treat two people unequally before the law, so that they can be equal in possessions and lifestyle, that is unjust. This is dramatically illustrated in the case of a wealthy young man who inherited all of his wealth, and who gambles and gets drunk, and buys and destroys things until all of his money is gone, and a woman who was born poor but worked hard to provide a good life for herself and her family - in a welfare state, she has to pay his bills. In a free market, he has to marry her or talk her out of her money to get at it; either way, he at least has to make some kind of effort. But the point is, if you believe in equality of result or outcome, she has to give him half of her money. If you believe in equality before the law, and the traditional definition of justice, she gets to do what she wants with the money and possessions that are hers, just as he did what he wanted with his money. Equality before the law is not just more considerate of different inputs than equality of outcome, it's also much easier to maintain and carry out. If you think about it, it's very equitable.
So there you have it: the free market is everything communism wished that it could be. There's so much unity and cooperation and good will and equality, the free market is, in a literal sense, very communist.
SRS
Note: for more on equality before the law versus equality of results, I highly recommend Thomas Sowell's excellent book The Quest for Cosmic Justice. Also available at BarnesandNoble.com and Overstock.com (and presumably other places you could find without my help).
However, in every attempt at communism in recorded history, there have remained divisions, stratification, suspicion, and bitterness: the very things communism was supposed to end. What went wrong? Smarter men than I have written extensively on the subject. But I think it might be educational to think in terms of "what could we do that would go right?"
One thing we could do is examine the economic processes of capitalism (or, more accurately, free markets), which communism tried to abolish. In a free (or relatively free) market, a person generally produces goods or services which are not particularly useful to himself, at least not in the amounts he produces. Why does he do this silly, wasteful thing? Well, so he can exchange the goods or services he produces for the goods or services produced by others. Since the development of currency, it has become obvious that a person can acquire more goods for himself by producing one thing in abundance and then trading it, via currency, for the other things he wants or needs, than by trying to produce on his own everything he wants or needs.
But all of this is selfish and, if our goal is unity and cooperation, counterproductive. Or is it? If everyone is working for himself, specializing in one thing each, and trying in this way to gain all he can for himself, he is participating in the process of producing goods for strangers, and for society at large. Think of an assembly line: attaching widget A to widget B might seem useless, until all the other widgets have been affixed, and you have a brand-new, functioning thingamajig. An excellent example of cooperation brought to you by the free market.
I can hear you objecting: "But what about a spirit of unity, feelings of commonality, a zeitgeist of good will?" (You're awfully redundant.) I would like for you to suppose for a moment that there is a man aware of himself, his situation, and such. This man - let's call him Kweisi - is truly interested in himself, his own well-being, and the satisfaction of his own needs and desires. He is a dyed-in-the-wool capitalist, and he cares nothing for the well-being of strangers, and every action of his is carefully planned to advance his own material holdings. He would be quite willing to steal and defraud, except that is against the law, and he fears punishment under the law. But he is willing to employ children, pay employees as little as he can get away with, place people in unsafe working conditions, and form monopolies, all of which is allowed under the free market system. His only criterion for an action is: will it increase my personal wealth? You might call Kweisi any number of things inappropriate for a family-friendly blog, and you would be quite right to do so. Now suppose that his workers start dying because of unsafe conditions in his dungeonlike factory. He's losing valuable worker production, the other guy's factory implements safety features and hires Kweisi's best men, and some leave for safer, lower-paying work. Now Kweisi's production is down, and morale is low. Kweisi is hemorrhaging cash by keeping an unproductive factory around (and cash represents the purchasing power of precious possessions) and he is forced to implement safety measures in his own factory, and perhaps increase pay, to attract workers back to his factory, so he can start earning revenues to replace the cash he's losing and start turning a profit again.
Now imagine Kweisi has a retail outlet in a poor neighborhood, and there's a crime wave. But fortunately, his stuff is safe, because he has the latest security features, and some muscle-headed goons, just in case. However, all the people that would have shopped at his retail outlet have been robbed (or murdered), and can't spend any money at his store. So Kweisi goes on a mission to root out the corruption at the local police force and get the boys in blue to crack down on crime, so his store can start turning a profit again. Also, he starts exploiting the local teens in his store, paying them a microscopic wage to work from the time school lets out until their parents get home, so he can keep them out of trouble and take advantage of their desire for dating money, and providing them with money to spend in his store - burning his candle at both ends and in the middle.
Now suppose that the flu is sweeping the country, killing hundreds, thousands, and more with each passing day. Well, of course Kweisi is going to do his level best to discover and mass produce the cure, hoping to sell it to the masses. The rich probably wouldn't pay through the nose for it, because they could just go to their mountain retreat to get away from the blasted virus - but the millions who are stuck in the path of the oncoming epidemic, they will pay whatever they can, and Kweisi is just the man to exploit that opportunity. He mass produces the cure for the flu, selling it at the middle-class price for the first day or two, and then selling it at a clearance to the poor, after most of the middle class has already been soaked.
What's the point? The point is, even though Kweisi is a total creep, he renovated his factory with needed safety features; he fought crime; he employed teens who need job experience more than they needed their free time; he funded the discovery of the cure for the flu, and provided it to millions, saving countless lives. Even though he's a creep. Why did he do all this? Because there was the potential for reward for his actions: the market made him do it, you might say. The truth is, a free market convinces even the worst people to do good things, and it doesn't discourage good people from doing good. The free market unleashes a spirit of unity and cooperation that communism, forced socialism, and the welfare state all stifle. Under communism (as it was practised in the USSR and elsewhere), the wealthy joined the government and protected their wealth, maintaining an appalling disparity of quality of life between the government officials and the rest of the country. Under forced socialism, the more productive will always resent the less productive, instead of feeling generous towards them, as many do in a free market. And the welfare state alienates giver from recipient, lowering the morale of both.
One might object that I'm forgetting about the virtues of justice and equality. Well, you are right that the outcome of a free market is inequitable. But to treat two people unequally before the law, so that they can be equal in possessions and lifestyle, that is unjust. This is dramatically illustrated in the case of a wealthy young man who inherited all of his wealth, and who gambles and gets drunk, and buys and destroys things until all of his money is gone, and a woman who was born poor but worked hard to provide a good life for herself and her family - in a welfare state, she has to pay his bills. In a free market, he has to marry her or talk her out of her money to get at it; either way, he at least has to make some kind of effort. But the point is, if you believe in equality of result or outcome, she has to give him half of her money. If you believe in equality before the law, and the traditional definition of justice, she gets to do what she wants with the money and possessions that are hers, just as he did what he wanted with his money. Equality before the law is not just more considerate of different inputs than equality of outcome, it's also much easier to maintain and carry out. If you think about it, it's very equitable.
So there you have it: the free market is everything communism wished that it could be. There's so much unity and cooperation and good will and equality, the free market is, in a literal sense, very communist.
SRS
Note: for more on equality before the law versus equality of results, I highly recommend Thomas Sowell's excellent book The Quest for Cosmic Justice. Also available at BarnesandNoble.com and Overstock.com (and presumably other places you could find without my help).
posted by weblogbob83 at 4:46 AM
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