The Regressives - problems with the Left - Part II

"Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it." - Thomas Sowell

Let's turn our blazing guns on the Ur-Left.

Socialism is in the vogue again, at least among those who never had to try it. According to polls, half of the young adults in America look favorable on socialism and accordingly half of them view capitalism negatively. In 2015 the 65 years old hard-left Jeremy Corbyn emerged from his 40 year-long, well-deserved obscurity and, until his very recent fall from grace, has become the unlikely hero of Britain's Millenials and Generation Z.

It doesn't seem to matter that everywhere socialism was introduced, it produced poverty and a police state at best, and mass murders all too often. A huge body of scholarly work has been written on why the simple idea of central planning causes this. They will be completely ignored here. My aim is to convey what I imagine the impression an extra-terrestrial with a cursory view of human history would get by looking at our last hundred years. 

The Grisly Past

The socialist experiment was aided by liberal sympathy from the get-go. G.B. Shaw defended Stalin at the time of the Great Purge that killed a million citizen of the Soviet Union. Between 1930 and 1953, almost 2 million people died in the Gulags. Including deaths of deportation, hunger, ethnic cleansing, and purges, the total death toll of Stalinism is between 6 and 20 million. When confronted with the contrast between Soviet propaganda and reality, Western apologists were often quoted to say: "You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs". To which, George Orwell replied: "Where's the omelet?"

The famine caused by Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward killed around 30 million Chinese between 1958 and 1962. No one can say confidently how many people perished during the ten years of madness called the Cultural Revolution, but the estimations range from a couple of hundreds of thousands to 20 million. Mao more than once expressed the opinion, scaring the sh... out even of European communist dictators, that he would welcome a nuclear war if it destroyed the imperialists. Half of humanity might expire, but they would be replaced soon anyway in a fully socialist world.

The Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, whose irrational bloodlust surpassed even Mao's, killed 2 million people from a population of barely 8 million. Noam Chomsky, the giant of the Left, defended the Khmer Rouge until it was impossible, claiming that the genocide was the result of American intervention. Later, instead of admitting his mistake, he said he had been right by the data available at that time.

Around 100 million people were killed in the 20th century by communist dictatorships. They were most apt at killing their own citizens. The numbers are debated and most studies place them between 60 and 110 million, but where the error margin is in the tens of millions, the point is already made.

The Present

But let's leave the horrible past behind. A decade ago leftish parties all around the Western world praised Hugo Chavez, the poster boy of 21st-century Socialism. Today Venezuela, the country sitting on the largest oil reserves in the world, is wreckage. Her people are ruled over by a maffia-like regime backed by China and Russia. The response of Chavez's erstwhile fans wasn't exactly a loud apology.

In 2019, when the USA, in concert with a number of South American countries, recognized Juan Guaidó as the legitimate president of Venezuela, 70 scholars, experts, and politicians of the Left signed an open letter condemning the USA for interfering with Venezuela's internal politics. By that time the country was in ruins. It had the highest inflation in the world. 4 million of its citizens fled. Venezuelans reported losing on average 11 kilograms in 2017. Luckily, the Left has found who to blame. The USA.

The sad affaire seems to prove the old adage. Socialists don't love the poor, they just hate the rich.

No true Scotsman

The defenders of socialism often say that the previous versions weren't "real socialism", or good plans were derailed by basic mistakes and power-hungry leaders. But every single one of them? Correlation is not causation, and in the messy affairs of politics and economics, things can go wrong for an infinite number of reasons. But the fact that every single country ended up worse off by adopting it is supposed to give the supporters a pause. History even offers examples that could pass as controlled experiments. South vs North-Korea, East Germany vs West Germany, Taiwan vs China. Same people, same culture, similar geographical locations, and gaping differences in economic outcomes. And that doesn't even count the terror.

Explaining this away requires many years of higher education to suppress common sense.

In search of new heroes

The Nordic countries are the boogeymen of the Right and the heroes of the Left. But despite what Bernie Sanders preaches, these countries are the examples of Socialism only as much as the USA is of laissez-faire capitalism. Neither of the two exists in the Western hemisphere. Liberal democracies are welfare states, each combines regulated capitalism with various levels of social safety nets.

For the less squeamish, China is the newfound champion of Communism. It unquestionably executed the greatest humanitarian achievement in history by pulling 500 million people out of poverty. Its break-neck growth is unbroken for three decades. The size of its economy is bound to surpass the USA's soon. But China started to rise when it abandoned the idea of fully centralized control over its economy. It's the greatest polluter in the world; its human-rights record is abysmal; its surveillance system on its own citizens would turn Orwell's Big Brother green of envy. There is no reason to assume that its glorious run will go indefinitely after it has caught up with the West and run out of ideas to copy. The illusion of the much-praised effectiveness of its government is shattered by its bungle of the COVID-19 situation and unleashing the virus on the world. To its neighbors, it's an insecure, xenophobic bully.

And why are we celebrating China and not Taiwan, anyway? Again, an almost-controlled experiment where a homogenous population has been split and put under different systems for three generations. Taiwan is a pluralistic liberal democracy with environmental protection, gay rights, rule of law, and freedom of speech. It has the GDP per capita of France. China is a dictatorship with GDP per capita on par with Mexico.

Poverty

More than anything else, the fight against poverty is what animates socialist idealists.

My grandmothers' generation grew up in conditions that would seem horrible by today's standards. I have urban, low-level working-class ancestors on one side, poor rural laborers on the other. As children, my circa 30 great-aunts and -uncles, were often hungry, they lacked warm clothes, a bed of their own, and started working at the age of 12 at the latest. The third of them died in childhood due to accidents or diseases exacerbated by inadequate medical care and malnourishment. They were poor even by the standards of their time, but by no means were they exceptional.

Today, the poverty line in the UK is defined as a household income below 60% of the average. Using this definition there are over 3 million children living in poverty. Apart from very few of them, they have shelter, clothes, food, medical care, access to the internet. Not to mention electricity, running water, antibiotics, vaccines, anesthesia, and many other things we take for granted now, but none of them was available to the Rothschilds a hundred a fifty years ago. They never have to starve or feel cold.  Among men, life expectancy for those in the most deprived parts of England is 74 years, compared with 83.3 years in the least deprived areas. In 1940, the national average was 62.

Being poorer than others around you hurts and inflicts long term damage, but this poverty is very far from what the word meant just 2-3 generations ago. We live in the first era in history where the poor is obese. Acknowledging this (the general gist, not the obesity part) is not being indifferent to the problems of low-income families. But it helps to focus on the real problem of today, inequality.

Inequality

According to most economists, all on the Left and some on the Right, real wages of working-class Americans are stagnating since the '70s. Automation made many low- and middle-level jobs obsolete, whole industries have been outsourced to Third World countries, and the influx of immigrants are pushing down the wages of manual laborers. The benefits of globalization and technological progress are distributed unevenly. 

On the other hand, due to the same technological progress, an average worker has better TVs, more fuel-efficient cars, better medical care, a greater variety of goods, and greater comfort in almost every area of life. They also work less. It's very hard to decide which direction the scale tips.

A frequent mistake in measuring inequality arises from confusing income cohorts with individuals. It's true that the gap between the lowest and the highest 20% has grown in the last 30 years. But it doesn't mean that the same individuals compose those groups as 30 years ago. Most people start with a relatively low-income job - for example, a student doing hours at McDonald's or even a freshly graduated doctor - and their earnings grow at a varied pace until retirement. 

Inequality is inversely proportional to social mobility. Even in America, that has always prided itself, perhaps hypocritically, as a classless society, kids don't start off from the same baseline. Socialist countries, not entirely without classes though, by definition eliminated the problem, but at the price of making everyone poorer - and even that they could only maintain by sinking ever deeper in debt. As Margaret Thatcher said: "The trouble with Socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money."

As the last piece of food for thought. Warren Buffet, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs. They are among the richest and most influential men in the world. With Bezos and Zuckerberg the "among" could have been just left out. Every single one of them was born into a plain middle-class family. 

Inequality has an eroding effect on society, and unregulated capitalism exacerbates the problem. But the socialist cure is worse than the disease.


Low standards

The critics of Socialism usually focus on its dismal economic performance and political suppression, with good reason. But there is another aspect of socialist systems that is overshadowed by the graver problems. The depressingly low standards in almost everything. Terrible customer service, plain moronic leaders, ugly buildings, clothes, and cars, empty bromides, the banality of public debate. This feeds a bunch of other problems plaguing Socialist countries. Parochialism, inferiority complex, and constant paranoia. Corruption and nepotism as a part of everyday life.
Everything joyful in life is sucked out or tainted by the stale ideology. Life under those regimes was grey - when it was safe.

Environmental damage

Capitalism is often accused of treating the planet like a rental car and squandering resources as if they were inexhaustible. And the blame is sometimes deserved. The free market doesn't handle well negative externalities, and its excesses need to be curved by legislation. But if the price of damaging the environment is financially materialized, like in the form of carbon credits, the market adapts much more efficiently than a central planning authority would. The Soviet Union generated nearly twice as much pollution per unit of GNP as the United States, besides deforesting, polluting its air and water, and nearly exterminating animal species. The greatest polluter in the world today is China. Plastic waste floods the oceans from Asia. The richer the countries are, the better they are in controlling their environmental impact.

Conclusion

If the 20th century didn't disabuse people of their belief in Socialism, nothing ever will. But hardcore leftists are a small minority and most sympathizers could probably be shaken up by some history lessons. Capitalism, with its current problems of stagnation, inequality, and housing shortage, comes up short against a utopia. But like democracy, it shines against its tried and tested alternatives.