From: utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!faustus
Newsgroups: net.politics
Title: Socialism
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.917
Posted: Sun Feb 20 22:30:00 1983
Received: Mon Feb 21 06:38:40 1983




	What is wrong with socialism? This is not really a hard
question to answer. What I think is wrong with socialism is that
it assumes too much on the part of those running the state. In
Marx's time, people placed a great deal of faith in so-called
"scientific thought", i.e., that any problem we have can be
reduced to a simple one through the straightforward application
of reason. So we have his system: one in which the central
government controls things in a scientific and planned manner.
To be sure, ideally there need be no central government, but
practically no country, socialist or not, can run without a
government of some minimum size. But as we can see by the mess
that the USSR is in right now, and indeed the mess that results
whenever the US government attempts to run some industry, a
centralized government is simply not capable of running an
economy entirely. The way this works in the US is much more
appropriate (or at least the way it theoretically works): each
business looks out for its own interests and the government
merely ensures that they don't look out for it too much. This
really is the decentralization that Mr. Terribile speaks of: the
thousands of small corporations run the economy far better than
the government could ever hope to. Which is not to say that the
government has no part in this process: rather, it has (or
should have) a severly limited but quite appropriate role
as general overseer and mediator. In the past I have found the
idea of the economy as an organic being quite hard to accept, as
this conjures up shades of the social darwinism of Spencer and
William Graham Sumner, but the alternative, that of an
artificial creation that must be controlled like a crude and
error-prone machine, leads only to the communist system, and
this has, I think, been adequately proven by experience to be an
utter and dismal failure. In this light the communist system
appears to be equivalent to taking a perfectly healthy human and
attatching him to all sorts of life support systems that are not
only unnecessary but quite badly built. We would not expect him
to survive for long, or at least not to be very healthy for
long. 

	Wayne Christopher

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