It was refreshing to read The Economist, U.S. News & World Report, and other magazines commenting on how individual liberty and limited government are the most important legacies of the twentieth century. A consensus of sorts is emerging that our darkest hours occurred when we tried to put some other goal ahead of freedom, only to discover that doing so inevitably means the loss of both.
But there are still those among us who don’t get it. They call themselves progressives or sometimes liberals, but we remember their older, more honest label: socialists.
I’ve had two opportunities recently to observe socialist thinking close up. The first involves a project, not yet funded, that would have Heartland join forces with some liberal advocacy groups to oppose corporate welfare masquerading as “economic development” programs. It should be a fruitful collaboration, but these folks are kind of scary.
A Matter of Means and Ends
Most of us hesitate to endorse the notion that “the ends justify the means,” and rightly so. It contradicts the fundamental message of morality, which says some things are right or wrong regardless of their consequences.
Placing ends above means also overlooks the fact that some of the things we value most highly are processes, or means, rather than ends. Justice, for example, is best understood as a process for arriving at truth and assigning guilt or innocence, obligation or entitlement. If you mess with the means, the outcome will be unjust.
Elevating ends above means is also dangerous. It was used to justify all of the greatest crimes of the twentieth century: Stalin’s murder by starvation of millions of peasants in the Soviet Union; Hitler’s massacre of Jews, gypsies, and other unpopular minorities; China’s “Great Leap Forward” (which required the execution and starvation of some 35 million people); and the more recent slaughter of pro-democracy protesters in China’s Tiananmen Square.
Do my liberal partners understand this? One of them recently sent me this message by e-mail:
I might not disagree with all your ideas in principle but we would probably disagree in the implementation. As they say, the devil is in the details and I care about who wins and who loses. . . .
I think the controversy would come in the details such as creating local organizations that can control and partner in development and thus make it a community decision of what is needed. Then the benefits (e.g. $s) go directly to the community. However, these organizations would have to be controlled by the community.
When he writes, “I care about who wins and who loses,” he is saying he doesn’t trust the impersonal processes of voluntary exchange and cooperation to produce results that he favors. He is willing to interfere with the means to achieve an end that is different from what freedom would otherwise achieve. Indeed, he thinks means are mere “details,” and that our disagreement is over “implementation,” not morality.
My liberal friend wants to create “local organizations that can control and partner in development.” The word “control” in this context implies the ability to use force to direct investment decisions. Since my friend wants economic development to follow a path he has decided is best, rather than one freely chosen by others, he has no choice but to give his planning organization the power to initiate force.
Like many socialists, my friend instinctively reacts against the violence implicit in the word “control.” He hopes to soften it by adding the word “partner,” which implies voluntary cooperation and mutual benefit. But plenty of organizations already exist that can partner with investors and help coordinate economic development decisions. It is the ability to force others to change their plans that distinguishes his organization from those that already exist, and it is this power that will define how it acts.
The Problem of Democratic Control
Initiating force is a power we reserve to governments. All other institutions must rely on persuasion and negotiation. The use of force is okay, my liberal friend writes, so long as it is “controlled by the community.” That makes its decisions synonymous with “a community decision of what is needed.”
But why (or for how long) would an organization that can use force base its decisions on the views, values, and interests of an entire community? To ask the question is to answer it. How is it even possible for an organization to know the many views, values, and interests of the people who will be affected by its decisions?
My friend predicts that by allowing a community-controlled organization to use force, “the benefits (e.g. $s) go directly to the community.” But I wonder how many Russian peasants, German Jews and gypsies, and Chinese civil rights activists got those benefits when government was put before markets in much of Asia and Europe. Does the use of force really produce its opposite, a free society?
Politics, we learned during the twentieth century, cannot create or sustain organizations that genuinely pursue the “public” interest. As counterintuitive as it may seem, processes that are blind to individuals and to specific ends, such as markets and the rule of law, do a far better job advancing the “public” interest and respecting the interests of the few, the weak, and the different.
Greenpeace’s Modest Proposal
Pandora’s Poison, a forthcoming book written by Greenpeace staffer and radical environmentalist Joe Thornton, provides another close-up look at socialism at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Thornton calls for placing the chlorine industry under the control of “a transition planning board that includes representatives of all affected stakeholders, such as workers, communities, environmentalists, the general public, and the businesses that use and produce chlorine-based products.”
Thornton isn’t shy about the purpose of the board. It would be to gradually shut down the entire chlorine industry. Later, he writes, similar boards would be created to destroy other industries, including nuclear energy, forestry, mining, fishing, and farming.
Thornton, like all socialists, thinks his ends justify his means. “In my view,” he writes, “progress is a meaningless concept unless it implies steps toward some specific end.” Who chooses this end? Why, Joe Thornton, of course. His various (bone-headed, by the way) ideas and assumptions about environmental protection would become a set of “ecological imperatives” on par with our Constitutional rights to free speech and due process.
Thornton’s proposal could have been written, indeed was written many times, in the 1930s, the “pink decade,” before the brutality of those actually implementing socialist ideas in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union became public knowledge. The same appeals to pre-capitalist nostalgia and misrepresentation of the rules of a free society are here, unchanged after half a century of experience and learning.
For example, Thornton gives us an updated version of the question often posed to Karl Marx: “Can we really expect nurses, machinists, housewives, and farmers to give meaningful perspectives on toxicology, epidemiology, and other subjects? This question I can answer with an unambiguous yes.”
How Much Have We Learned?
My liberal friend and Joe Thornton don’t seem to realize their ideas are profoundly anti-individual, anti-freedom, and anti-democratic. Sadly, their kind of thinking and writing are ubiquitous as we mark the turn of the millennium.
Turning to government to solve problems is a deeply ingrained cultural instinct that shows little sign of going away. There seems to be no crime too deadly, no act of mismanagement too costly, and no injustice too grievous to discredit governments in the eyes of their citizens. Governments in the U.S. and Europe grow bigger and bigger with each passing year, and on an almost-daily basis another part of our lives falls inside the circle of what is widely considered the legitimate concern of government.
Why do the old utopian promises of a pre- or post-capitalist civilization still draw the unthinking approval of so many people? Is it because they cannot see the bodies–over 170 million by one count–of the victims of fascist and totalitarian dictators who mouthed similar platitudes a generation ago, who ruled the former Soviet Union until a mere ten years ago, and who still oppress 1.2 billion people in China?
