Socialism in the Zeitgeist
In the comments to my previous post on consequentialist libertarianism, Joe Otten wrote:
I think I view attempts to do good through government with a healthy skepticism, and that libertarians generally view it with unhealthy outright hostility.It is hard to see how something like state education has had perverse consequences. We would probably still be semi-feudal if we hadn’t adopted it – an educated workforce makes modern capitalism, democracy and technology possible.
I gather from Joe’s blog that he does not identify himself as a socialist; he is a British Liberal Democrat. I have no reason to believe that he is being dishonest in claiming to view government with a healthy skepticism. In short, he seems to be a very sensible specimen of the mainstream political Left. And yet…
And yet the second half of Mr. Otten’s comment is enough to elicit a sigh of despair from every libertarian. If you don’t understand what I find so disheartening about this, then please keep reading, because you are very likely also a Sensible Leftist, and the rest of this post is for you.
The comment implicitly asserts that educating children would be impossible without the state. What is remarkable is not so much the assertion itself, but the fact that Mr. Otten seems to think this perfectly self-evident, as he did not bother to give any evidence or argument for it. I encourage anyone who isn’t familiar with the movement for market-based reform of education to explore the Cato Instiute’s school choice clearinghouse.
But even if we assume that Joe Otten isn’t familiar with the school choice movement, his comment is still extraordinary. He thinks it is self-evident that a state-run monopoly is necessary to provide education to children. Imagine your reaction to someone who asserted that state-run monopoly is the only effective way to produce steel or wheat for the modern world. Those are the sorts of ideas one expects from an unreconstructed socialist, not a Sensible Leftist.
The economist Robert Heilbroner, who was for many years one of America’s most forthright socialists, wrote in 1989, “Less than 75 years after it officially began, the contest between capitalism and socialism is over: capitalism has won… Capitalism organizes the material affairs of humankind more satisfactorily than socialism.” Today, most people would agree with Heilbroner on this point. Socialist ideas such as state-monopolized education remain popular not because people embrace an unreconstructed socialist vision, but rather due to unthinking devotion to the status quo. People who grow up in a world where the government provides various services tend to assume that those services couldn’t be provided without the government. Quite simply, this is a failure of imagination.
I’d like to wrap up by making a broad point: fundamentally, government is a means of coercion. Unless there are specific reasons why coercion is needed to get something done, it can most likely be done better and more cheaply without using government.
[Note to Joe Otten: Please accept my apologies in advance if I have unfairly put words in your mouth while trying to make my point.]
I thought I might see this sort of reaction.
So lets clear up a few things.
1. Quite clearly there isn’t a state monopoly on education – there are private schools (bizarrely, we call them ‘public schools’ over here). So there are no grounds for you to accuse me of thinking one necessary.
2. I have no problem with voucher schemes, and private provision. Whether the state buys directly from teachers or via a middleman is a practical question. Whether parental choice is increased through vouchers or by other means is a practical question. The important thing is that the state pays – or most of it wouldn’t happen at all.
Many proposed “market based” reforms are good, but I would rather not be dogmatic. Does the reform provide better value, higher standards, more choice, or not? If it does, it is worth supporting, whether it is “market-based” or not. (That’s consequentialism)
3. You can create a better system not involving the state? Do it! Nobody is stopping you. If it works, I will send my kids too. Until then, don’t piss on the education we have.
4. When universal education was first brought in by the state (not counting earlier sunday schools) there wasn’t universal private education about to appear that got crowded out. Around the world, whereever there isn’t universal education paid for by the state, there isn’t universal education full stop. I wonder why.
5. It is quite wrong that you call this socialism. Socialism, doesn’t mean “anything that the state does” – eg roads and defence. It is a distinct political philosophy. Calling anything you disagree with socialism may work as a cheap rhetorical device, especially in America. But it is absurd. Conservative are happy for the state to spend lots of money, on causes opposed to socialism, and just as misguided.
Regarding (1) and (3): You are correct that the state school system is not, strictly speaking, a monopoly. What the state does do is force everyone to pay taxes to support its school system and not charge individual parents who send their children to its schools. In practice, the state school system is the only option available for parents who aren’t rich enough to pay for their child’s education twice (once for a private school and once for the state school their child doesn’t use). This is a pretty huge barrier to entry for anyone who has an idea for how to do education better and wants to start a private school.
On (2) and (4), I agree that subsidizing education is a good idea, although I think your views of what would happen if we didn’t subsidize it are excessively dire.
Lastly (5), “socialism” does tend to be used in that manner in America. Perhaps this is because socialism as a coherent philosophy has mostly disappeared from the zeitgeist here, while Europe still has active socialist parties. But you are correct: the common American usage of “socialism” is very imprecise. I’ll choose my words more carefully next time.
Not in the UK, unfortunately, but in some European countries, parents can get together and start a new school, if they are dissatisfied with local provision, taking their share of public spending on education with them.
This is a way of giving some of the advantages of consumer power without sacrificing universal provision.
In the UK, the agenda seems to be to take schools out of the hands of parent governors and hand them over to churches or other busybody groups, with extra state funding guaranteed. Some such groups are private sector, and so the policy is attacked from the left as privatisation, but, and you might agree, this bears less resemblance to a functioning market than the first option, with its consumer power and ability to find niches. The second more resembles pork barrelling.
I don’t believe your original quote from ‘Joe’ implies in any way that “educating children would be impossible without the state.” It merely states that universal, state-funded education (in the place of no education at all) has been a positive thing.
Second, you don’t seem to quite grasp what socialism is. Jacob, your quotes and what you have to say on the subject seem rather misguided.
The debate is between communism and capitalism – it’s not socialism vs. capitalism.
Socialism was originally the transitionary economic and political state between communism and capitalism. Because this has been seen by many as a good thing, a good compromise – a ‘humanised capitalism’ – it, or parts of it, have been adopted and promoted by many people, countries and parties; indeed over sixty currently governing political parties around the world claim to subscribe to theory.
I can only assume that, as highly regarded as he is, Robert Heilbroner, being American, has a similarly warped view of communism and socialism and was in fact intending to refer to the former.
Few would disagree, for example, that the ‘Bustkellism’ period of social democratic consensus in the United Kingdom in the years after the war was a period of widespread socialist, or at least socialist-influenced, reform. It saw major economic changes, wide-scale nationalisation, vastly increased redistribution of wealth and the creation of a national health service. These were highly popular at the time and many of the measures stay with Britain today. It was not communism, of course not.
What you must understand is that socialism is distinct from communism. Wings of socialism can and do advocate a mixed economy. So for Heilbroner to say that “capitalism has won” is laughable. Socialism, or parts of it, are entrenched in many, many countries and millions of people are dependent on it for health, for welfare etc.
As the Oxford Dictionary states, the only thing necessarily implied by the word ’socialism’ is “an opposition to the untrammelled workings of the economic market”.