“Toutes choses sont dites déjà, mais comme personne n’écoute, il faut toujours recommencer”: everything has already been said, but since no one listens, it is necessary to say it again.Really, the socialist impulse is a hardy perennial. How can something so frequently and so thoroughly discredited persist in the hearts of men? Some think it has something to do with the gullibility of the human animal, some (but we repeat ourselves) with the persistence of the utopian dream. We suspect there are many explanations, of which the raw desire for power is an unedifying but also underrated aspect. We also favor the explanatory power of original sin, which has profound psychological as well as theological implication for many of the more farcical aspects of human experience. What is more farcical than socialism?
At any rate, the career of socialism is a powerful argument for the phenomenon of life after death. Remember: the death of socialism in the United States (except on college campuses) had been solemnly pronounced over and over during the 1980s and 1990s. In the past several years, however, we have had multiple sightings of the beast. Zohran Mamdani is only a particularly flagrant contemporary presentation.
Given the prevalence among the tender-hearted of socialist fantasy, on the one hand, and animus toward the free market, on the other, we thought it might be useful to say a few words in defense of the latter. In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith noted the paradox, or seeming paradox, of the free market: that the more individuals were left free to follow their own ends, the more their activities were “led by an invisible hand to promote” ends that aided the common good.
Private pursuits conduced to public goods—that is the beneficent alchemy of the free market. (We forbear to say “capitalism” because the term, though not coined by Marx, was popularized by him as a synonym for “exploitation,” when in fact its effect has been almost wholly about liberation.) In The Road to Serfdom and other works, Friedrich Hayek expanded on Smith’s fundamental insight, pointing out that the spontaneous order created and maintained by competitive market forces leads to greater prosperity than a planned economy.
The sentimentalist cannot wrap his mind, or his heart, around that datum. He (or she) cannot understand why “society” should not favor “cooperation” (a pleasing-sounding word) over “competition” (much harsher), since in any competition there are losers, which is bad, and winners, which may be even worse.
The unhappy truth is that socialism is a version of sentimentality. ...
No mere empirical observation, it seems—let it be repeated innumerable times—can spoil the pleasures of socialist sentimentality. This unworldliness is tied to another common trait of intellectuals: their contempt for money and the world of commerce. The socialist intellectual, especially the well-heeled one, eschews the profit motive as something beneath his dignity. He recommends instead increased government control of the economy. He feels, Hayek notes, that “to employ a hundred people is . . . exploitation, but to command the same number [is] honorable.”
The really frightening question that wholesale economic planning raises is not whether we are free to pursue our most important ends, but who determines what those “most important ends” are to be.Is it battling “climate change”? Abolishing “racism”? Forbidding gas stoves or air conditioning? “Whoever,” Hayek notes, “has sole control of the means must also determine which ends are to be served, which values are to be rated higher and which lower—in short, what men should believe and strive for.” History reminds us that more government intervention and control means higher taxes, greater inefficiency, and economic stagnation.
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