Refuting Socialism

Fresh off the heels of his new manifesto (not of the communist variety, though), Iain ...

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Fresh off the heels of his new manifesto (not of the communist variety, though), Iain Murray, CEI senior fellow, joins Jonah on The Remnant to discuss The Socialist Temptation: what it is, who it hits hardest, why socialism isn’t really even an economic theory, and what to do about it.

Show Notes:

–The Socialist TemptationIain’s new book,

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  1. Avatar photo
    Patrick

    Great listen, Jonah.

    But I’d love to hear a debate with someone with corporatist leanings.

    During 2007 financial crisis, it strikes me that the ratings agencies (apparatchiks) failed because they stopped doing their duty for the State, and instead were co-opted by the market.

    So basically, we do need SOME apparatchiks, but just fewer of them overall so as not to require apparatchiks for the apparatchiks.

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    DougAz

    Michael Porter taught me his Competitive Advantage and Competitive Strategy at BigCorp Executive education school in the early 1980s. He chairs this https://www.socialprogress.org/about-us/who-we-are
    Which I found from Nicholas Kristof latest column: ‘We’re No. 28! And Dropping!’ https://nyti.ms/2Raosjf

    America: 28th place - Update Nicholas Kristoff' column:

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  3. Kant B. Real

    The 3/4 of the way through the "Refuting Socialism" on The Remnant, great work as always by Mr. Goldberg. The aspect of Nationalism is Socialism, or wax/wanes of sorts, is good. But an earlier Remnant by Goldberg discusses the how liberalism doesn't have the horseshoeing effect that any authoritarian systems have, & that is the difference that I would rather see discussed. I do not like authoritarianism regardless of being left or right.

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  4. Brian C

    Good episode. At the end when the discussion circled back around concerning people attracted to socialism as part of the desire to be part of something. That sounds like it tracks more with you people and those without families to provide for/care for.

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      Tracie

      The People's Front of Judea. (Life of Brian.) Fits both criteria.

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    2. Brian C

      Sorry, not you people, I meant young people

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    Belt

    I watched Dr. Who back in high school, and I was mostly exposed to the Tom Baker run. But what a run it was, and the stories were engaging and interesting. And I do remember K-9...

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    Victor Clairmont

    Thanks for the podcast!

    So, the little bit about when a company is hiring people how eventually when they get too big they then have to hire an HR manager which is therefore, not there so much for the growth of the company but there to help make sure the rules of the state is enforced, almost an employee of the state rather than the company (because if those rules were not there they could use that money to hire another worker), was very good insight. I had not thought about Hr in those terms, but looking at it that way makes a lot of sense.

    Also, not shocked that regulation helps monopolies for large corporations by preventing start up competition since the barrier to entry is much higher. This point has been long argued in republican circles and does have a bit of credence. Mark Zuckerburg is happy for regulation because, even if it hurts him short term, long term he will have less challenges.

    Any ideology by the way couched in morality will have a strong pull among a dissatisfied populace. So, conservatives better get on the bandwagon and start couching their idea's in terms of morality also. Because the youth seemed dissatisfied.

    Ah, Iain Murray will be in the list of top 10 for best "No you won't this is a podcast!" endings. His over the top Monty Python-esq delivery made me chuckle.

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      Tracie

      "So, conservatives better get on the bandwagon and start couching their idea's in terms of morality also."
      ______________________________

      Always thought conservatives were pretty good at this.

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        Dan Jett

        Some variations of conservatives are; Trumpistas not at all

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          Tracie

          Good point.

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  7. PM

    Well if socialism really isn't an economic theory then why are Republicans raving against it?

    Why can't jobs return to America, with all new green factories, putting an emphasis on putting Americans who are out of work back to work? Call it Republican Socialism :)

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      Tracie

      It doesn't have to be a real economic theory to result in bad legislation.

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      Victor Clairmont

      Because we will have rolling blackouts like California.

      Green energy needs work.

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      1. PM

        California has more problems than rolling blackouts. But it's just some degree of talk, right?

        I recall a conversation with one of the former site advertisers mentioning how California was helping to save the planet by keeping factories overseas.

        Well we won't talk LA air quality or whatever may be burning at any given time.

        But yeah we need better battery technology to bring about that better world.

        And Smoky needs to put down the bong and get onto those wildfires.

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    Eric Sharf

    Excellent, as usual. But I had to laugh at “differently-abled.” I worked at an organization for the blind when that one came out. A visually-impaired colleague told me, “I’m so differently-abled that I walked into the street and was differently-abled by a bus!”

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      Tracie

      In school we were told never to refer to a patient's "bad" leg, but instead use the supposedly value neutral "affected" leg. Once I was working with a patient who kept saying: "So, ya want me to use the bum leg." We went with her term.

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    Michael Garrett

    Spare a soupçon of sympathy for my college second-year, to whom I forward many a Remnant podcast with plea that she listen and learn and arm herself against her instructors' intentions.

    Also, good people of similar bent, take a moment to read this seminal Wall Street Journal editorial, originally run on 18 April 1979, and penned by the great Robert L. Bartley of blessed memory, which addresses the point raised around the 55 minute mark about how, when and why the interests and practices of "Big Business" diverge from those upheld by free-market liberal capitalism.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB122728924999048295?st=bphks4xcgpnc6cg

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    Ethan Cordray

    Conversations like this one tend to have the salutary effect of reminding me about why I used to call myself a socialist back in college (besides to get girls), and why -- though I no longer consider myself to be a socialist -- I still find myself to be strongly sympathetic to many of the views of my friends on the left.

    1. Somewhat contrary to your initial discussion, I think that the appeal of socialism often is indeed animated by specific economic theories, not just vague value appeal. To wit: most of my socialist and anarchist friends see themselves as being members of an economically exploited laboring underclass, forced by an exploitative owner-class to toil endlessly for oppressively-low wages. And I'm inclined to agree with them. Going back past Marx to Adam Smith, there's a certain intuition among workers that some version of the "labor theory of value" does have to be true, as my employer surely wouldn't choose to keep paying me unless they thought they were getting at least a little more productive value from my labor than I'm costing them in pay. That might not always seem true when you're a salaried professional, but it's much more obvious when you're an hourly-wage worker getting constantly jerked around by your manager, scheduled for *just* few enough hours to avoid them having to pay for your health insurance, and knowing that you'll be fired and replaced the moment your productivity drops below some number.

    2. Concern about wealth disparity isn't just about either resentment or abstract ideas about "equality" (though it usually includes those elements, too). It often is about the very rational fear of power concentration in the hands of a very small elite class. We all know that the law treats folks like Jeffrey Epstein more gently than your local Wal-Mart checker. And we all know that if there's a conflict between the interests of the owners of Wal-Mart and their checkers (which, you know, there always is), the owners are going to have a rather easier time explaining their views to the US Senate. It seems to many people that such obviously unjust disparities are an inevitable consequence of the concentration of wealth, and this sure looks like a bad thing when you're a Wal-Mart checker.

    3. This is from somewhat further along in your conversation, but that bit about the Koch brothers and privately-owned corporatism reminded me of something I thought of while reading (and disagreeing with) Terry Eagleton recently: Might it be the case that the most truly socialist element of the American economy is...the New York Stock Exchange?

    If socialism is defined in the old-fashioned sense as "popular control of the means of production," then the popular ownership of stock in publicly-traded companies would count, wouldn't it? "Popular" control needn't mean "state" control. I don't control the policies of General Motors by my vote for president (well, not that much), but I do control them by voting with my shares (okay, I don't really do that either, I leave it up to my financial advisor, who leaves it up to the mutual fund managers at Vanguard or whatever, but the point stands in theory). Is it "socialism" to let millions of Americans collectively hire and fire the CEOs of nearly every major corporation? Because at least theoretically, that's what we do.

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      James Spiller

      I think it’s true that a lot of socialists are motivated by a belief that the system oppresses rather than uplifting them.

      The same is true for a lot of Trump voting. In both cases, a little experience of what an oppressive system looks like would do a lot of good.

      People complain about their minimal wages while living in spaces with air conditioning, color TV, access to healthcare, over a decade of education, good chances of multiple decades of retirement, and so on.

      Whether it’s trumpist butchering of the golden egg laying goose or leftist, the belief that smashing the institutions that make us different from Argentina will give us results that are not only different from Argentina, but are wildly utopian is something that one could technically call an economic theory. But it is so obviously rooted in a moral sense that they’re “worth” more than they’re paid, a belief with essentially no support, that Jonah doesn’t treat it as economic. Hence the shoveling of money from America’s poor to America’s rich as such a prominent part of the platform (SALT/ student loans). Contemporary American socialism allows one to be a multimillionaire in San Francisco and to view expanding government subsidy to oneself as a social justice goal.

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    2. Ryan

      I appreciate your insights Ethan, thank you for sharing them! Out of curiosity, why is it that you no longer call yourself a socialist if you still align yourself with that worldview? I ask this as a former college socialist myself.

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        Ethan Cordray

        Well, my point three above is a bit of a devil's advocate position -- generally speaking, folks who advocate socialism do in fact favor centralization and regularization of the economy, not just "popular ownership" of capital. I'm generally opposed to such centralizing, managerial tendencies. So I'm not a "socialist" in the sense that the word is typically employed, and I'd rather not confuse people by claiming the title and then having to explain what I mean every time. And I think popular ownership, if widely distributed, would fulfill the putative goals of socialism better than centralization would. So my preferred policies are really more along the lines of the old-fashioned distributist model, trying to get capital ownership distributed widely across the population so that the gains of capitalism are shared more generally.

        I'm much more likely to call myself a Marxist than a socialist, since I think Marx's analysis of economic class conflict is quite helpful in understanding economics and politics (though not in the totalizing "scientific" ersatz religious way that oldschool Marxists thought it did). And I'm a big fan of examining the dialectical interplay between competing political ideas and social forces, and how it creates outcomes unforeseen and unintended by both sides' participants. But I'm anti-revolutionary, and think that it's usually best to pursue localized, incremental changes in as much continuity with evolved social customs as possible. So I'm a conservative, Burkean Marxist.

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        1. Ryan

          "Burkean Marxist" - I love that! And I am largely in agreement with most of the points you raise, even though I have major issues with Marx's historical materialism in particular.

          This is a bit of an aside, but I find it interesting that the people we associate with certain political ideologies heavily colours our perception of that particular ideology. For instance, it sounds like the socialists you know come largely from economically precarious circumstances, or what Marx would call a state of alienation. Whereas the socialists I have known (no doubt because I spent far too many years in grad school) were largely peevish, spoiled, upper-middle-class intellectuals with severe status anxiety.

          So naturally when I hear the word socialism my mind associates the term with people I didn't particularly enjoy being around. But in reality there is a wide range of people from all kinds of backgrounds who associate themselves with socialism or left wing politics, and these mental caricatures are just a lazy and close-minded excuse on my part.

          Anyways, thanks for sharing!

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