[quote]Headhunter wrote:
This is why all socialist schemes, from National Socialism to Soviet Socialism or any other such abortion, must devolve into fascism/authoritarianism.
While all the things you mentioned are wonderful, you can’t do so at gunpoint.
[/quote]
National Socialism, the Nazis, are considered to have been a right-wing Fascist government. How is that relevant to a a discussion on Socialism?
Authoritarian governments are found on the right and the left. Communism was the authoritarian extreme of socialism, while Fascism is the authoritarian extreme of capitalism. I consider both of these to be ‘cancers’ that destroy the underlying society by the malignant growth of a necessary feature of society. We must have a a society that addresses the competing goals of liberty and equality.
Anarchists and libertarians are on the extreme end of the liberty scale, advocating for minimal constraints on what an individual can do. Socialism is the other extreme (I’m ignoring the ‘cancers’ of Communism ans Fascism), where the state assures a level playing field by imposing nationalization of many of the means of production. I don’t advocate either of these positions.
Modern liberals are not socialists, in the sense that practically nobody seriously advocates for public ownership of the means of production, especially in the United States. Liberals do want to use a fraction of a nation’s wealth for the collective good of all. Most conservatives believe this as well, it is just a question as to what we want to do collectively.
Anyone, other than an anarchist, is going to use force against you if you do not pay your taxes. Governments need to use force as a last result, that is not a liberal idea and that is not a conservative idea, that is just how governments work. In an authoritarian government, there are not many checks against raw force. So Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and other tyrants use violence without constraint. In a non authoritarian model, the government must be constrained in it use force, usually by the rule of law.
The real questions are “what are the areas that society chooses to address collectively?” and “what is the level of constraint against government’s use of threats of violence?”
Personally, I would like to see government be able to address universal health care in a way similar to western Europe. The reason for this is simply that it works much better than our system. It has a significantly lower cost (9-12% of GDP) vs. our system (18% of GDP) and produces measurably better results as determined by the World Health Organization. I think that universal health care would be good for entrepreneurship: I think that more people would be willing to try new ventures if they had a safety net for their families.
I am not very wild about welfare systems that segregate us into categories. I would like to see something like a negative income tax, which is a pure income redistribution. You take some flat percent of every dollar earned, and you give everyone, even Bill Gates, a monthly stipend. The stipend is set at a true poverty level. You then eliminate all other sorts of welfare, you eliminate any minimum wage. The government taxes income at a flat rate and it cuts checks. This can be done efficiently, since you don’t require the government to have to decide anything in each case. This was proposed by Milton Freedman, and it has been tested in large scale experiments - it actually worked pretty well (practically nobody is willing to live at poverty levels, everybody want more}
One thing I really like about this is that everyone feels the pain of the income tax. It doesn’t matter if the dollar is earned on Main Street or Wall Street, if it is income, you pay a fixed percent (maybe 30%) of it as taxes. Also, if anyone want to say how easy the poor have it now days, you can challenge them to save every dollar they earn for a month and to try to live only on the stipend. I would also change bankruptcy laws so that the stipend could never be touched, but I would allow the bankruptcy court to garnish practically all of a person’s wages and personal wealth.
If you set the tax rate at 100%, you are a communist and you will need force because nobody has an incentive to work. If you set the tax rate a 0%, with a stipend of $0, you are completely laissez-faire and you are going to need violence to combat mobs rioting for bread. If you want to determine the stipend on a case by case level, you need a huge bureaucracy (the modern welfare state) and you end up rewarding people for falling into a supported categories. These sorts of bureaucracies can also turn authoritarian, which leads to more threats of violence. But perhaps if you have a negative income tax system, we can have a system that avoids these ills and actually minimizes the need for coercion. But it is a sad fact that governments will always need to have violence as a last resort - the police will always be armed.
