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 ole