Why Socialism Is Irresponsible

It's a shame that all the main parties competing for your vote are socialist, because to understand human beings is to understand that socialism doesn’t work; and the reason it doesn’t work is because it gets its fundamentals wrong. Just so we’re clear, socialism is the view that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or heavily regulated by the state. Of course, it has morphed into something that purports to be friendlier towards the individual, taking the Marxist principle “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” and using it as a conceptual lever to usher in state ownership and radical redistributive measures. But spraying perfume on raw sewage still doesn’t make it smell much better.

I’ve written for years about the fundamental problems with socialism (see side bar) – namely the way that capitalism is superior in the vast majority of ways, the perennial problem with top-down as being mostly inferior to bottom up, the fact that the people socialists purport to want to help are the ones hurt hardest by their policies, and the fact that the price system is better than the state at allocating resources.

But perhaps the even bigger issue is that socialism has a big contradiction at the heart of it, which goes largely unnoticed by the socialists. It encourages those behaving in a way that socialism claims to be against, and it penalises those behaving in a way that socialism claims to advocate.

To see why, let’s break down socialism’s most fundamental principle, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”. Unfortunately, the big flaw is that the system rewards those who are behaving badly according to the values of the socialists themselves, and punishes those who are behaving rightly according to those same values. The “From each according to his ability” part means society functions best when people contribute to society in accordance with their ability to do so. This is a good thing; no quibbles there. The “to each according to his needs” part means people should receive help from society in accordance with how much they need it”. Most of us would agree that this is a good template for society – and one in which we do our best to help the first group thrive as much as possible, and the second group become part of the first group wherever possible.

The core problem at the heart of society, though, is that people are active agents with their own incentives, and people’s ‘according to their need’ is not simply a product of their environment as the socialist narrative holds - it is a lot to do with the decisions they make and the way they behave. By failing to acknowledge that people should be given credit for their positive contributions to society, and that people should also take responsibility and be accountable for their failure to contribute, the socialist model gets both things backwards. The socialist narrative treats those who contribute most as the enemy, and those who contribute least as the victim.

Don’t get me wrong – there are many vulnerable people who through no real fault of their own can’t contribute as much as others to society – and they should, of course, be the ones for whom the quality “to each according to his needs” should be most sympathetically administered. But, alas, there are many people who, through perverse incentives, bad decisions and wrong behaviour have made themselves part of the “to each according to his needs” group when they should be part of the “From each according to his ability” group. Socialism blindly treats this group as victims of a societal injustice, instead of as people who create greater dependency for themselves by their own behaviour.

Moreover, in the system that the socialist ideology ought to support – that those who can contribute more to society should be rewarded – the socialists then bemoan the natural outcome of this, which is that inequality increases, so they then claim an injustice based on the very principles their Marxist systems claims to advocate - that those who can contribute do so according ‘to their ability’. Socialism rewards those who are willing to be a burden to the economy, by treating them as the oppressed and taking money off others to give to them; and it penalises those who are willing to work hardest to make the most contributions to society by stigmatising them as oppressors who owe a debt to society in the form of supporting those who are willing to be a burden to society. It is a belief system with a big contradiction at the heart.