WHERE’S THE PROOF THAT IT WORKS?
Inspiration for this post comes from an excellent book written by Dr. John McNerney of University College Dublin and published in 2016 with the title: Wealth of Persons – Economics with a Human Face.
While the book’s primary thrust is an exploration of the entrepreneur’s role of creative destruction in the success of free market economies, McNerney provides ample thought provoking comparisons between capitalism and socialism.
In particular, he highlights the work of economist Janos Kornai (b. 1928), who remained in Hungary during WWII and the subsequent communist takeover. Kornai wrote about the failures of socialism from the “concrete experience of living in a centrally planned economy.”
As the U.S. electorate turns its attention to Democratic candidates vying for nomination in the 2020 presidential election, including some — Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris — who espouse a socialist platform for centralized health care and redistribution of wealth, we believe it is instructive to listen to someone like Janos Kornai who actually experienced socialism in a 20th century Eastern bloc country.
Here we quote one of Kornai’s most insightful observations about socialism:
“Science essentially concerns the study of reality and in this respect it must have ‘theoretical relevance’ not just in terms of a method but also in terms of the subject matter. I turned away from Marxist socialism because it did not compare its theories with reality.”
Just like socialist deceivers before them, Democratic candidates are selling a utopian theory of “equality, social justice and free stuff,” without ever providing examples of real socialist successes. But unpersuaded Americans need to issue a reality check by challenging them to answer these basic questions:
Please give us an example of a successful Socialist country?
How will your socialist policies avoid the typical downfalls of shortages and price increases, as evident in the long wait times of Canada’s version of Medicare For All and Venezuela’s 1.62 million percent inflation?
If the profit incentive is eliminated or redistributed, why would people and businesses take risks, innovate, advance and create? And if they won’t, how will we keep our existing jobs, how will new jobs, products and markets be created, and how will we continually improve our standard of living (which has been the envy of the world under our current free market economy)?
If your solution for social justice and happiness is to give people free stuff (money, education, health care, etc), then what do you say to these time honored and respected sociological musings about human purpose and dignity?
A social order based on “public charity” (handouts) merely traps the human person in an iron cage of idleness. – Alexis de Tocqueville
The slave is he to whom no good is proposed as the object of his labour except mere existence. – Simon Weil
In acting, we not only perform actions, but we also become ourselves through those actions — we fulfill ourselves in them. – Pope John Paul II
Kornai concludes his dismissal of socialism as follows: “Unless economic theory attempts to explicate the reality of the human person and his or her potentialities, it results in a reductive understanding of human action. Then the theory risks becoming a lie that creates the impression of empty talk. You can talk the talk and repeat the words but the meaning is missing because the horizon is not broad enough to comprise the many different aspects of the truth of the human being.” McNerney adds, “Kornai realized that socialism is a deception because it is a logical speculation about a fragment of reality that purports to be the whole of reality.”
We must lean on realists like Kornai to educate Americans who are either too young to have experienced the abject failures of post-WWII socialism or susceptible to deceptive promises by ambitious political advocates of socialist theory.