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ANALYSIS/OPINION:

Are you amazed about what your fellow humans conceive and create when it comes to technology the iPhone, 5G, the Tesla, rockets that land upright after being fired, artificial hearts, etc., etc.? Are you also amazed by the willful ignorance of history and economics shown every day by the political and media class?

Engineers who ignore the laws of physics find themselves unemployed. Politicians who ignore basic historical and economic truths often go on to leadership roles with the aid of corrupt and/or ignorant members of the media.

When it comes to economic policy and political organization, it should be obvious to any sentient human that Switzerland has a far better model than Venezuela. Many in the left-leaning media and certain politicians (such as Bernie Sanders) spent years praising the Chavez revolution in Venezuela, even though the economic and human rights disaster the country has become was easily foreseen by anyone with a basic knowledge of history.

There was some good news from this past weeks election that the U.K. will now almost certainly get its independence back, and that most of the British voters rejected socialism. However, millions of British still voted for the socialists, despite the fact that socialism has been an unmitigated disaster wherever and whenever it has been tried.

It results in death and despair, poverty and oppression yet all too many buy the fraud rather than the reality. It now has been four decades since Margaret Thatcher was elected and saved Britain from its earlier socialist experiment. Those voting socialist this time were probably either too young or stupid to remember the misery socialism wrought.

For the past three decades, the Fraser Institute in Canada (along with many economic policy organizations from around the world) and the Heritage Foundation have each produced an annual report on the state of economic freedom by country. Economic freedom has been growing despite many ups and downs and, as the world becomes more economically free, it also becomes more prosperous. Economic freedom is highly correlated with economic well-being, and increased life spans and happiness.

In both indices, Hong Kong has had the top spot for economic freedom. Unfortunately, that laudable distinction is probably about to end because the Chinese communists, like their socialist brethren almost everywhere, fear freedom.

Socialism elevates the collective over the individual, which by definition requires destroying individual liberty. Under socialism, the individual is usually required to hand over (by force if necessary) an ever-increasing share of his or her work product to the state or its agents. Individual action, including speech and belief, is restricted anyplace it runs afoul of the state-sanctioned collectives.

Democratic socialism implies that the socialists can be voted out, as happened in Britain with election of Mrs. Thatcher in 1979, and in a number of the Scandinavian countries at the end of the last century. But that only happens where the existing institution of an independent judiciary is strong enough to resist the socialists attempts to monopolize everything and stop future free elections, as they have done in many places.

Outside of Western Europe, the institutions of a civil society often have not been strong enough to remain independent of socialist movements and leaders, and thus change has only come about through violence or economic collapse, as occurred in the communist block and many places in Latin America and Africa.

In the United States, the left has been working to undermine the necessary civil institutions for a successful society including the courts, schools, churches and the free press. The current effort to impeach the president is another example of an attempt to undermine the Constitution.

Two articles of impeachment have been reported to the House. One is abuse of power. But without listing specific illegal activities, it is meaningless other than an expression that one does not like the president (being crude, crass and unlikeable is not an impeachable offense).

The Democrats were going to include bribery, but their definition was so expansive they had to drop it because congressional horse trading and log rolling would be included, as would most conditional foreign aid and other normal activities of those in government and elsewhere.

The United States has a mutual legal assistance treaty with Ukraine, so asking for information about apparent influence peddling was totally appropriate political opponent or not. The other charge is obstructing Congress. Disputes between Congress and Executive are supposed to be settled by the courts as they have been for two centuries, not by impeachment. The Supreme Court (which is the appropriate institution, not the Congress) has just announced that it will decide how many tax and other records the president has to turn over so the obstruction charge is now moot.

Technological progress tends to grind to a halt without the rule of law, due process, and other features and institutions of a free society. After the Constitutional Convention in 1787, Ben Franklins response to a question regarding what sort of government they created was A Republic, if you can keep it. Will we continue to pass the test?

Richard W. Rahn is chairman of the Institute for Global Economic Growth and Improbable Success Production.

Read the original:
Economic freedom versus the negative effects of Democratic socialism - Washington Times

DAVID BROOKS

I WAS A SOCIALIST in college. I read magazines like The Nation and old issues of The New Masses. I dreamed of being the next Clifford Odets, a lefty playwright who was always trying to raise proletarian class consciousness.

'I came to realise that capitalism is really good at doing the one thing socialism is really bad at: creating a learning process to help people figure stuff out.'

If you go on YouTube and search David Brooks Milton Friedman, you can see a 22-year-old socialist me debating the great economist. I'm the one with the bushy hair and the giant 1980s glasses that were apparently on loan from the Palomar lunar observatory.

The best version of socialism is defined by Michael Walzer's phrase, what touches all should be decided by all. The great economic enterprises should be owned by all of us in common. Decisions should be based on what benefits all, not the maximisation of profit.

That's not what democratic socialists like Bernie Sanders are talking about, but I get why some of their socialist concerns are popular. Why do we have to live with such poverty and inequality? Why can't we put people over profits? What is the best life in the most just society? Socialism is the most compelling secular religion of all time. It gives you an egalitarian ideal to sacrifice and live for.

My socialist sympathies did not survive long once I became a journalist. I quickly noticed that the government officials I was covering were not capable of planning the society they hoped to create. It wasn't because they were bad or stupid. The world is just too complicated.

I came to realise that capitalism is really good at doing the one thing socialism is really bad at: creating a learning process to help people figure stuff out. If you want to run a rental car company, capitalism has a whole bevy of market and price signals and feedback loops that tell you what kind of cars people want to rent, where to put your locations, how many cars to order. It has a competitive profit-driven process to motivate you to learn and innovate, every single day.

Socialist planned economies the common ownership of the means of production interfere with price and other market signals in a million ways. They suppress or eliminate profit motives that drive people to learn and improve.

It doesn't matter how big your computers are, the socialist can never gather all relevant data, can never construct the right feedback loops. The state cannot even see the local, irregular, context-driven factors that can have exponential effects. The state cannot predict people's desires, which sometimes change on a whim. Capitalism creates a relentless learning system. Socialism does not.

The sorts of knowledge that capitalism produces are often not profound, like how to design the best headphone. But that kind of knowledge does produce enormous wealth. Human living standards were pretty much flat for all of human history until capitalism kicked in. Since then, the number of goods and services available to average people has risen by up to 10 000%.

If you have been around a little while, you have noticed that capitalism has brought about the greatest reduction of poverty in human history. In 1981, 42% of the world lived in extreme poverty. Now, it's around 10%. More than a billion people have been lifted out of poverty.

You've noticed that places that instituted market reforms, like South Korea and Deng Xiaoping's China, tended to get richer and prouder. Places that moved toward socialism Britain in the 1970s, Venezuela more recently tended to get poorer and more miserable.

You've noticed that the environment is much better in capitalist nations than in planned economies. The American GDP has more than doubled since 1970, but energy consumption has risen only modestly. America's per-capita carbon emissions hit a 67-year low in 2017. The greatest environmental degradations are committed by planned systems like the old Soviet Union and communist China.

The Fraser Institute is a free-market think tank that ranks nations according to things free-market think tanks like: less regulation, free trade, secure property rights. The freest economies in the world are places like Hong Kong, the US, Canada, Ireland, Latvia, Denmark, Mauritius, Malta and Finland.

Nations in the top quartile for economic freedom have an average GDP per capita of US$36 770 (N$525 445). For those in the bottom quartile, it's US$6 140 (N$87 750). People in the free economies have a life expectancy of 79,4 years. Those in the planned economies have a life expectancy of 65,2 years.

Over the past century, planned economies have produced an enormous amount of poverty and scarcity. What's worse is what happens when the political elites learn what you can do with that scarcity. They turn scarcity into corruption. When things are scarce, you have to bribe government officials to get them. Soon, everybody is bribing. Citizens soon realise the whole system is a fraud.

Socialism produces economic and political inequality as the rulers turn into gangsters. A system that begins in high idealism ends in corruption, dishonesty, oppression and distrust.

I learned the ills of socialism quickly and became a Whig slowly.

My first economic hero is Alexander Hamilton. He came to America with almost nothing and found an economy dominated by land-rich oligarchs like Thomas Jefferson. He realized that the solution was to make everyone a capitalist. He created credit markets so that capital would be fluid and more people would have access to investments.

My next hero is Abraham Lincoln. He grew up poor and launched his career as a Whig. He gave more speeches on banking and infrastructure projects than on slavery. That's because he wanted to spread capital and grease the wheels of commerce so poor boys and girls like him could rise. He helped create the land-grant colleges so that more people would have the training to compete as capitalists.

Another major American figure in the Whig tradition is Theodore Roosevelt. He loved the dynamism that capitalism arouses and knew that sometimes you have to limit giant corporations so millions of less established capitalists can compete.

All of these leaders understood that the answer to the problems of capitalism is wider and fairer capitalism.

Today, parts of our capitalist system in the United States are in good shape. Growth is remarkably steady, inflation is low, employment is high, wages for the poorest Americans are rising twice as fast as for high-wage workers.

But capitalism, like all human systems, is always unbalanced one way or another. Over the last generation, capitalism has produced the greatest reduction in global income inequality in history. The downside is that low-skill workers in the US are now competing with workers in Vietnam, India and Malaysia. The reduction of inequality among nations has led to the increase of inequality within rich nations, like the United States.

Also, education levels have not kept pace with technology. More people grow up with inadequate schools, disrupted families and fragmented neighbourhoods. They find it harder to acquire the skills to become good capitalists. The market is effectively closed off to them.

These problems are not signs that capitalism is broken. They are signs that we need more and better capitalism. We need a massive infusion of money and reform into our education systems, from infancy through life. Human capital-building is like nutrition: It's something you have to attend to every day. We need welfare programmes that not only subsidise poor people's consumption but also subsidise their capacity to produce.

We need worker co-ops, which build skills and represent labour at the negotiating table. We need wage subsidies and mobility subsidies, so people can afford to move to opportunity. We need tax subsidies for health care, to make it easier for people to switch jobs. We need a higher earned-income tax credit, to give the working poor financial security so they don't get swept away amid the creative destruction. We need a carbon tax, to give everyone an incentive to reduce carbon emissions without pretending we know the best way to do it.

Every single idea I just mentioned comes from the American Enterprise Institute or Brookings or some other institution derided as being part of the neo-liberal elite. All these ideas would make capitalism work better.

A big mistake those of us on the conservative side made was to think that anything that made the government bigger also made the market less dynamic. We failed to distinguish between the supportive state and the regulatory state. The supportive state makes better and more secure capitalists. The Scandinavian nations have very supportive welfare states. They also have very free markets. The only reason they can afford to have generous welfare states is they also have very free markets.

I don't know if the Scandinavian welfare model would work in nations as big and diverse as the US, but its success points to a few truths: The state nurtures prosperity when it helps people become capitalists. The state causes incredible levels of misery when it gets too far inside the decision-making processes of capitalists. It creates enormous misery when it cripples the motivational system that drives capitalism. It causes enormous misery when it meddles with the relentless learning system that market mechanisms make possible.

Capitalism is not a religion. It won't save your soul or fulfil the yearnings of your heart. But somehow it will arouse your energies, it will lift your sights, it will put you on a lifelong learning journey to know, to improve, to dare and to dare again.

Last Sunday I attended a service with a young friend at a church that has quickly become a home for her. There were several hundred congregants. Ninety percent were under 30. Ninety percent were Latino. The service was two hours of joy and exultation glow sticks and song and balloons.

They weren't worshipping capitalism, but something higher. But still their work lives came into view. Look how far we've come! Look how far we've come! different people kept saying.

I saw my own family's Jewish immigration history being re-enacted right in front of me. We, like they, started out as butchers and seamstresses and tailors, self-employed capitalists because it can be hard for immigrants to get corporate jobs. The opportunity explosion my family experienced and your family probably experienced is happening still, made possible by the ever-expanding pie that capitalism provides.

The theme that day was hope, transcendent hope and more immediate hope. Move and miracles happen! a young Latino woman sang. Every year, hundreds of millions of people march with their feet to capitalism.

Today, the real argument is not between capitalism and socialism. We ran that social experiment for 100 years and capitalism won. It's between a version of democratic capitalism, found in the US, Canada and Denmark, and forms of authoritarian capitalism, found in China and Russia. Our job is to make it the widest and fairest version of capitalism it can possibly be.

David Brooks is a columnist for the New York Times. This column, published on 5 December 2019 in the Times, was prepared for a Munk Debate on the future of capitalism, held on Wednesday in Toronto.

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I Was Once a Socialist, Then I Saw How It Worked: Two cheers for capitalism, now and forever - Namibian

A recent poll by the news website Axios found that a larger number of individuals born after 1980 have a more favorable view of socialism than capitalism. This created a good deal of shock, horror, and revulsion among those of us born before 1980.

I contend we should not be surprised. To begin, many of the leaders in this country have the bad habit of calling both universal health care and tuition-free post secondary education socialism. This is not accurate. Socialism is the government ownership of agriculture and the means of production.

Moreover, those born after 1980 have much different life experiences than those of us who are called baby boomers.

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The government paid for 80% of a boomers college education. Over the past few decades, this has been reduced to about 30%. After adjusting for inflation, tuition and fees at my alma mater, the University of Missouri-Kansas City, are currently five times higher than when I was an under graduate student in the mid-1960s. I was able to work my way through college and emerge debt-free. Presently, approximately 60% of college graduates are $29,000 in debt.

From 1947 until 1980 and after adjusting for inflation, the median family income increased by 200%. With the decline of unions, the median family income has increased only 28% since 1980.

Obviously capitalism has not worked so well for the post-boomer generations. Why should we be surprised by their skepticism?

JOHN PIEPHO, Cape Girardeau

See the original post:
Letter to the Editor: Opinions about socialism (12/16/19) - Southeast Missourian

In politics, it is never about what they say it is about. What are the heated debates on man made climate change, school climate strikes and the recent Fargo City Hall meeting featuring Greta Thunberg knock-offs urging the city to support a city-wide climate emergency declaration, really about?

...the climate crisis is not just about the environment. It is a crisis of human rights, of justice, and political will. Colonial, racist and patriarchal systems of oppression have created it and fueled it. We need to dismantle them all, said Greta Thunberg.

The interesting thing about the Green New Deal, is it wasnt originally a climate thing at all. Do you guys think of it as a climate thing? Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy-thing, said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezs then chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti.

Socialism has failed around the world. It has killed tens of millions of its own citizens with its cultural revolutions and genocides. Witness the history of Russia, Germany, N. Korea, Cuba and Venezuela and todays China, which has imprisoned one million Muslims in re-education camps and threatens students in Hong Kong with tear gas, beatings and jail.Nevertheless, the Red River Valley Democratic Socialists of America co-sponsored the Friday, Sept. 20 school climate strike featuring competing bullhorns and images of the Earth melting like ice cream and signs threatening 11Years, The Wrong Amazon is Burning, and Tick-Tock Doomsday Clock.

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Then the RRVDSA libels me for raising questions in my Dec. 3 letter to the editor about the City Hall meeting, branding me a liar, leach, coward and lawyer helping scumbag bankers rip homeowners off, in Zac Echolas Dec. 4th letter to the editor.

Socialists will not surrender the climate change propaganda and the tool it gives them to achieve their real goals and Echolas attempt to silence me proves the point of my 12/3/19 letter, that those who think they are saving the world will have no respect for other viewpoints.

Know what this is really about, know who is behind it, watch for ongoing proof; but most of all, speak up and spare the children. They should be in school.

Read this article:
Letter: Those pushing climate change theories are really pushing socialism - INFORUM

Delegates clad in red T-shirts designed for the occasion, rose up while singing the name of the man they call their commander-in-chief: Julius Malema. They moved to the stage where their leaders were sitting and knelt before them, hands raised, singing in praise. The Economic Freedom Fighters congress, dubbed the National Peoples Assembly, feels like a mixture of politics and cult, where Malemas word is the gospel of ultimate truth.

Perhaps the singing fighters were still infused with the spirit of Christian musician Dr Tumis rendition of You Are Here, which had them rocking with their arms raised to the heavens before Malemas speech. Ironically, moments before, Malema denounced personality cults.

***

On Saturday, 14 December, the six-year-old EFFs second congress officially kicked off in the Nasrec Expo Centre, the exact spot where the ANC had its big elective gathering two years ago. In 2014, the EFFs first conference took place at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein, following the ANCs congress of 2012. Its hardly a coincidence. The EFF, an expelled splinter of the ANC, has been selling itself as a more authentic version of the governing party and this project continued at their congress this weekend.

Its happening roughly 18 months before South Africas next local government election, and Malema set his party firmly on a socialist path in front of an audience that included trade unionists Zwelinzima Vavi and Joseph Mathunjwa. Malema seemed undeterred by the wholesale rejection by voters in the United Kingdom this week of this very ideology, but then, South African political dynamics are very different.

The EFF is gunning boldly for the socialist gap that some in the ANC believe former businessman Cyril Ramaphosas presidency is creating. The theme for the congress is emblazoned in yellow on the red banner hanging on the stage: Consolidating the ground towards socialist power.

First, Malema laid the foundations:

We are here as the representatives of the poor and the downtrodden, united by our love for our people, and our determination to unchain them from their inhumane realities. He described how, in South Africa, the scars of colonialism and apartheid live on. The failure to undo the ownership patterns of our economy and the failure to give back the land to our people has resulted in our people having political rights, but no economic freedom.

In the presence of diplomats from nine embassies and representatives of EFF structures from six other countries, including Lesotho, Namibia and Liberia, and in the presence of his old chum, former Robert Mugabe minister and aspiring Zimbabwean president Saviour Kasukuwere, Malema went on to blame capitalism for many of Africas ills, such as the spread of disease and suffering, and landlessness. The wars that are taking place are a result of capitalism and capitalist greed! The subdivision of Africa into small incapable states is a direct result of capitalism and capitalist greed, he said.

Malema presented socialism as a solution to these ills, but said it would not be authoritarian socialism with forced collectivism and disrespect of the individual.

We are not going to dance vosho the same, he added in a rare off-the-cuff joke. The EFFs socialism doesnt ascribe to despotism, a one-party state and a cult of personalities.

Socialism is not some huge bureaucracy that disregards rights and freedoms of individuals. People would not have to render private non-exploitative property, such as houses, cars, and clothes to the state, or share their underwear with anyone another unscripted quip.

It is, however, about ending the private ownership of the means of production, [such as] mines, huge farms, monopoly industries. Its the kind of socialism that does away with private property, owned by individuals and used to make a profit, like banks and factories.

Socialism to us primarily means that we should collectively develop the productive forces and make sure that all people have equal access to economic sustainability and have the basic needs, Malema said.

There should be free education, water and sanitation, housing and electricity, health care, and development that benefits everyone in short, economic freedom. EFF socialism would also include democracy, human rights, peace and stability, said Malema. Even though land redistribution without compensation got a prominent mention, it wasnt a central theme. Ordinary voters, it became clear ahead of the elections in May 2019, are more concerned about jobs than about land or even ideology.

The congress, however, isnt directed so much at voters as it is at the EFF gallery and friends/supporters within the ANC. Malema went on to position the EFF as the kingmakers they want to be seen as. When the previous administration [of Jacob Zuma] tried to undermine our country through the [Gupta] family criminal syndicate, we did everything in our power to remove their puppet, and it is evident now that he was replaced with a more dangerous capitalist establishment, which is working in alliance with all-white political organisations, he said.

We carry the obligation to remove the sitting government from political power because they are dismally failing. We send a strong caution that if the current administration hands over power to unelected people, their president, like their former president, will not finish the term of office.

This threat to remove Ramaphosa closely aligns with the reported aspirations of the lobby aligned to ANC Secretary-General Ace Magashule ahead of that partys mid-term national general council in 2020. Malemas sentiment that Ramaphosa was deliberately creating crises in state-owned enterprises to privatise them, is shared, too, by radical economic transformation (RET) forces in the ANC.

Malema framed Ramaphosa as part of a bigger problem. The ruling party has presided over a false macroeconomic policy which was based on a misdiagnosis of South African capitalism, said Malema, without mentioning the governing ANC by name.

They assumed they could implement solutions in South Africa that are cooked in European experiences. Malema spoke in a negative light about the compromises made by the ANC in 1994, and about the false unity that followed. Malema described Ramaphosa who was elected ANC leader at Nasrec almost exactly two years before as a puppet of the white capitalist establishment.

Although Malemas political report included most of the tried and tested formulas about economic freedom that pushed the EFFs one million votes in 2014 up to 1.8 million five years on, it was the first time Malema has ever positioned the party so explicitly and extensively as a socialist one. To put it in perspective: in the partys founding manifesto adopted at its July 2013 gathering under the Leninist theme of What is to be done?, the word socialism isnt mentioned at all, although the EFF is characterised as a radical, leftist, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movement. Even in its 2019 general elections manifesto, socialist is mentioned only once, in the intro, when the EFF is described as a revolutionary socialist economic emancipation movement.

Malemas address to the delegates about 4,000, according to the EFF was mostly a serious one, also outlining the partys work in Parliament and in the municipalities where it was, until recently, partners of the minority DA governments.

Colourful jokes like those about Alexandra residents stealing the cheese out of Sandton fridges first told at his last ANC Youth League conference in 2011 did not feature this time. Malema stuck strictly to the all-English written script and instead remarked about the contrast between the concentration camp called Alexandra and the luxury that is called Sandton.

There was clapping and laughing only when he paused after each section in his report to lift his bottled water with a cheers to the audience. Instead of water in bottles which would have been too expensive for the thrift-conscious EFF leadership the ordinary delegates had plastic cups and water fountains.

Some delegates left the venue during Malemas speech to gather outside, News24 reported, as Malemas speech stretched to over an hour. According to point 18 in the gatherings rules of engagement document given to each delegate: No delegate will be allowed to sleep during the proceedings of Assembly Plenary session and commissions.

Why would Malema take such trouble to outline the EFFs socialism? Its two-fold. On the one hand, it would align the party more closely with the ANC, but on the other, he was likely also aiming to create more unity in his party.

We should all desist from undermining our ideological tools of analysis because it will undermine the cohesion and coherence of the EFF, Malema warned. Without ideological tools, the EFF would go nowhere and only be concerned with common and current affairs and issues.

Malema included a quote by Burkina Fasos former president (1983-1987) Thomas Sankara, saying that a soldier without proper ideological and political training is a potential criminal. The outcome of the partys leadership contest this weekend is likely to reveal who Malema was taking aim at with this. DM

Daily Maverick was denied accreditation to the EFFs National Peoples Assembly. See Daily Maverick statement here.

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Malemas opening address: A socialist gospel according to the men in red - Daily Maverick