Dachas in Malibu

The Conning Tower ^ | Dec. 30, 2004 | Trentino

[Davis]

At the same time, 1984, as the eminent Harvard professor of economics, J. K. Galbraith was discovering the multitudinous benefits of socialist productive capacity in the USSR, any schoolkid in that evil empire could have told him that had the Soviets taken over the Sahara, in two years there would be a shortage of sand.

If Galbraith had spoken with Soviet factory workers out of sight of their overseers, he would have heard them say, "Yes, we pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us."

But double-domed Lefty Galbraith was immune to facts of everyday existence in the workers' wondrous paradise, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. He was delighted to find grist for his Marxian mill. Here was empirical proof, even if he had to invent it out of whole cloth, of the intellectual merit of his lifelong rejection of capitalism.

There never was an intellectual case for socialism as deliverer of prosperity to the prisoners of starvation, the wretched of the earth. The argument for socialism as a rational approach to producing goods, for prosperity, had long ago evaporated.

The labor theory of value, socialism's foundation is simply wrong. Things are worth what people will pay for them. There is no unit of inherent economic value. In the absence of markets, it is impossible to make rational economic decisions; you won't know what things cost. Hence, there never was science in "scientific socialism."

Remarkably, greed didn't disappear with collectivism. Money wages and job perks, residence permits, access to scarce goods, ability to travel—a host of things including the work itself—are not equal. Would you believe it? People living under socialism act in the direction of their greater happiness as they see it. They act purposefully just as they do under capitalism.

Nevertheless, it is capitalism's "inequality" which absorbs the attention and earns the intense moral disgust of intellectuals of socialist bent.

Inequality, they declare, is unfair. It matters not a whit to them that the inequality of human beings proceeds from a Divine mistake: humans are individual, unique, different from the instant that sperm and egg shake hands. If only our Creator had made us truly equal, like ants or bees or paramecia—though, come to think of it, they each differ, too. Never mind, socialism will correct the obscene inequality that thrives under capitalism.

The process by which Lefties propose to cure the grievous error of inequality is leveling, not the playing field, the players. We have had a certain amount of experience with that process in the past.

During the terror days of the French Revolution, 16,000 heads were severed by Dr. Guillotin's famous apparatus in order to promote equality. In similar fashion, old uncle Pol Pot ordered the execution of people who wore eyeglasses, the sign of the contemptible haughty non-peasant class, enemies of equality.

The effort is to see (some of) the mighty brought down because it is unjust and quite likely obscene as well that some should flourish while others wither. To the dedicated faithful Lefty, there ought to be no difference in reward for the able, the diligent. What about the inept and slothful? Are they to be left to beg their bread?

They hope to achieve this leveling peacefully through a legislated redistribution of wealth from the undeserving rich to the deserving poor. Barbara Ehrenreich, the shrillest Lefty in the pack puts it this way: "Tax the rich and enrich the poor until both groups are absorbed into some broad and truly universal middle class. The details are subject to debate."

She knows, does Barbara, that with this trifling change in the social structure, America will stay prosperous, filled with the goods that socialism cannot produce. Her Lefty friends in academe will retain their tenured status and her Lefty friends in film will keep their Malibu dachas. And pigs will fly.

Equal, at last!

[rlmorel]

A well written article. I've saved it.

[ijcr]

To J. K. Galbraith, Communism was the solution to the perfect equations of economics. It was here that the supply and demand lines intersected,human foibles were eliminated and the sheer mathematical application of the "Rules" could be enforced.

[Davis]

Thank you!