Believe it or not I’ve still been thinking about Marx and socialism and I can’t help but conclude that it’s just not functional, especially after our discussion in class. My most superficial problem with it is that its beginning is a violent and bloody revolution. With the exception of the American Revolution I can’t really think of a revolution that actually improved government. And all of the socialist revolutions that I can think of gave rise to monstrous tyrants like Mao, Lenin, and Hitler.
This brings me to my second problem with Marx. A socialist society requires surrendering all of your property rights, giving all the products of your labor to a totalitarian ruler and trusting him to distribute them appropriately. Milton Friedman argues, and I think rightly so, that ALL human rights stem from property rights. So giving up your property rights will inevitably mean giving up all of your rights. There’s no way that a people without rights could form a functional human society. Nature gives us pictures of societies like these, namely ants and bees. The individual in a bee hive has no rights and no property. And even though hives as a whole tend to be very prosperous, we would hardly call them better than a free human society.
In class we talked about the problems with capitalism that Marxism could possibly remedy. Namely, wealth disparity and the lack of care society provides for the individual. But to say that capitalism can’t remedy those problems itself is to jump the gun I think. At this point I’d like to say I’m really only talking about America given that it’s the best example we have of capitalism. Sure, if you look at wealth disparity over the past 10 years it might not have changed much, it might even have grown. However, if you look at the whole period of capitalism (which one could argue began with the end of the feudal system) wealth disparity has decreased dramatically and the standard of living has improved immeasurably. Maybe it’s happened more slowly than we would like, but the fact that it’s happening is undeniable.
Pure capitalism can also provide care for the individual and usually generate more wealth in the process, but the reason we don’t see the happening is precisely because the government has gotten involved. I think one of the best examples of this is healthcare. I could write a book on the problems I see with government run healthcare but I’ll list a few here to try to strengthen my argument. The reason drugs are so expensive is because the FDA has so regulated pharmaceutical companies that it costs billions of dollars to bring a drug to market. And the number of drugs that make it to alpha or even beta testing (which costs millions of dollars itself) and then go on to be rejected by the FDA is staggering. I read an article in either Time or Business Week (I honestly can’t remember which) that listed 8 cancer treatment drugs that cured the cancer of their test patients but still failed to be approved by the FDA for various, and often petty, reasons. This simply means that the next drug the company does get to market will have to cover the cost of producing that drug, and every drug that failed before it, making them exponentially more expensive for the consumer. I’m actually going to just stick with this example for now because if I list more this blog will be excessive. But the point is that the lack of care our society provides for its individuals can in many cases be traced back to government involvement.
My last problem with socialism is simply that wealth redistribution is morally wrong. Robin Hood was a criminal, we may think he’s badass for sticking it to the corrupt nobles but the fact is he was stealing. The government taking more from the rich simply because they are rich and giving it to the poor is no different. In fact, it is in some way worse. At least the nobles in Robin Hood were clearly corrupt. The vast majority of top income earners in America are rags to riches stories. We just hear about the Enron executives on TV and assume all wealthy CEO’s are like that.
So, to summarize, I simply don’t see how Marxism will solve the problems of capitalism and better than capitalism. And in some cases, Marxism creates problems worse than that of capitalism.
6 comments:
Well, call me a naive, unoriginal bleeding-heart liberal college student, but I'm going to have to disagree here.
I admire a lot of Marx's ideas, though I would agree that suddenly ditching capitalism overnight would be a bad idea.
I would have to read a lot more Marx before I form more of an opinion about the feasibility of Marxism.
But I have no issues whatsoever about "redistributing wealth," at least in the sense of taxing the incredibly wealthy at a much higher percentage than the working class. The poverty, preventable deaths and institutionalized racism in this wealthy first world country is shameful. The rich will still be rich if their taxes are raised and they're forced to pay fairer wages.
Perhaps if America had made dramatic changes in the past, it would be more reasonable to try deregulation or a flat tax now, I don't know. I think, for example, that much of the land in the south should have been redistributed to freed slaves, natives and poor whites after the Civil War. (Yeah, I'm a disgrace to my Southern heritage, I know.)
I'm not an economist, but I have heard many people I respect (Libertarians, mostly, and I definitely agree with them that drugs should be decriminalized ASAP) tell me how harmful government involvement is to the economy, and they assure me that evidence supports them. But that seems unlikely to close the vast gap between the rich and the poor, at least to me.
My point about wealth redistribution wasn't that it doesn't do any good. My point was that it's simply not the governments place to take that money, at least not solely on the basis that those tax payers are more wealthy.
Also, our country isn't as wealthy as we'd like to think. For the past decade or so we've had a massive "standard of living" bubble funded by home equity and credit debt and that's coming back to bite us now in the form of this crisis. My point being that we aren't as equipped to eradicate poverty and provide for our less fortunate as we might think. That being said I'm not stupid, I know we're still wealthy as a country. I just think we need to be careful about how much wealth we think we have, its easy to get carried away.
Why isn't it the government's place to take more money from the rich just because they're richer?
We live in, well, not a true democracy obviously, but we live under a government that we elect, admittedly in a very complicated manner. They have the power to tax the people.
If the government wants to raise taxes or lower taxes, they can. We can then elect people who can change that decision, or choose to accept it, or we can just leave. Even our constitution can be amended. I suppose we could even revolt, although as big and as divided as America is, and as powerful as the military is, well, perhaps not. Whether it's fair or morally right to take more money from the rich, or to have given the government that power in the first place, well, I would say the fact that it's beneficial and really doesn't affect the quality of life of the rich themselves justifies it.
"Whether it's fair or morally right to take more money from the rich, or to have given the government that power in the first place, well, I would say the fact that it's beneficial and really doesn't affect the quality of life of the rich themselves justifies it." That seems like an ends justifies the means argument to me. And the government has the right to tax to support itself. It does not have the right to tax for social engineering, which is essentially what redistribution is. True, it can also tax to support the general welfare but the general welfare is MUCH better supported by encouraging investment, not taxes. One of the best analogies I've heard so far describing redistribution is like a boy taking a bowl of ice cream from one town to another. Along the way some of the ice cream melts and he eats some of it as well. So by the time he gets to the town there's only a fraction of the ice cream left. Government is just bad at handling money, it tends to lose most of it in the bureaucracy and the people they are trying to help, end up getting very little. Especially when they could have gotten more through the free market.
I would have to agree with Claire. I admire lots of Marx’s ideas, particularly his theory of alienation, which serves as a strong case against capitalism and has failed to be mentioned in the post/these comments. Because of the four types of alienation (alienation from the product of their labor, from their life-activity, from their species-being, and from other humans), Marx argues that capitalism reduces individuals to the status of animals. He says that an essential part of being human is feeling free, but because the worker is constrained by forced labor, he will only feel free while engaging in animal-like functions (eating, drink, and reproducing). Marx’s alternative to capitalism might not be the most feasible, but I think this critique is accurate nonetheless.
First, Marxism does not solve all the social issues of our capitalistic nation. But Marxism does allow for an avenue for society to directly deal with a lack of resources and opportunities for the poor members of society. Even though Robin Hood does distribute wealth through means we find despicable his message and morals are correct - he wants to take wealth and money which was being hoarded and it could be better spent paying for the food and education of the poorest people in any given society.
Post a Comment