It was a pleasure debating Brian Leiter last week. The resolution, to repeat:
“Social democracy is preferable to market capitalism, but ultimately America will need to move towards a socialist system.”
Here are some thoughts I failed to fully articulate at the live event. As always, I’m happy to publish any reply my opponent wishes to compose.
1. To his credit, Leiter expressed zero sympathy for any actual socialist regime. He even condemned Cuba; good for him. But Leiter still insisted that the totality of these awful experiences show next to nothing about the desirability of socialism, which frankly seems crazy. As far as I could tell, Leiter hews to the classic Marxist position that we should transition to socialism only after capitalism creates incredible abundance. Unlike most historical Marxists, however, he doesn’t think that even the richest countries are ready yet. My question: If we finally got rich enough for socialism, why think that a socialist regime would be able to maintain the prior level of prosperity, much less provide continued progress?
2. When I discussed the actual performance of social democracy, Leiter was surprisingly apologetic. He conceded that we have wasteful universal redistribution, instead of well-targeted means-tested redistribution. His only defense was to repeat the flimsy argument that it’s too hard to sustain popular support for means-tested programs.
3. On regulation, Leiter appeared to endorse open borders; good for him. He also professed agnosticism on housing regulation. Since these are by far the two biggest forms of regulation in modern social democracies (measured by how much regulation changes the likely market outcome), it’s hard to see why he would believe that increased regulation has, on balance, been good for humanity or the poor.
4. According to Leiter, “ultimately America will need to move towards a socialist system” because automation will one day cause mass unemployment. This position baffled me on multiple levels. Most obviously, why not respond to automation with redistribution rather than nationalization, and thereby avoid killing the capitalist goose that has hitherto laid a mountain of golden eggs?
My fundamental objection, however, is that history teaches us that technological unemployment is only a morbid fantasy. When firms figure out ways to get more output out of fewer workers, this may cause unemployment in the short-run. Soon enough, however, business has repeatedly figured out new jobs for workers to perform. Business has already accomplished the miraculous task of creating new roles for the enormous number of workers disemployed by the mechanization of agriculture. Every future economic transformation pales by comparison. Remember: Almost everyone was a farmer for almost all of recorded human history. Then industrialization eliminated almost all farm jobs. Yet today, we don’t miss these jobs. Instead, we get fat on all the cheap food, and do jobs our agrarian ancestors would have struggled to understand.
Leiter had two responses to my reaction. One was “maybe this time it will be different”; Leiter even appealed to David Hume’s problem of induction to downplay all prior economic history! If you take this line, however, it would only entitle you to say “it is logically possible that America will need to move towards a socialist system” – a vacuous claim indeed. Frankly, if you take Hume seriously, even the best empirical evidence shows nothing about the future, so why bother debating at all?
Leiter’s better argument was that capitalists are perennially trying to cut costs – and that in the long-run capitalism works. So eventually capitalists will figure out a way to run the economy without workers – an outcome that is individually rational for a capitalist, but socially disastrous for capitalism. My response: Yes, capitalists want to figure out how to produce a given level of output with fewer workers. Their deeper goal, however, is to figure out the most profitable way to employ all available inputs. As long as there are able-bodied people who want to work, there will be a capitalist brainstorming how to make money off the situation. And to echo Leiter, in the long-run this works.
5. Leiter bizarrely insisted that “the” goal of socialism was to allow human freedom – legions of vocally authoritarian self-identified socialists notwithstanding. He followed up with the classic socialist argument that saying “If you don’t do what I say, I won’t give you the job you need to avoid starvation” is just as much an abridgment of freedom as “If you don’t do what I say, I will shoot you.”
The standard reply, of course, is that there is a vast moral difference between getting you to do what I want by threatening to take away something to which you are morally entitled (e.g., your life) and getting you to do what I want by threatening to take away something to which you are not morally entitled (e.g. my assistance). Thus, imagine you will be suicidally depressed unless I marry you. Is my refusal to marry you morally equivalent to making you suicidally depressed by threatening to shoot you unless you break off your engagement to your willing fiance? Of course not. You aren’t entitled to marry me if I don’t approve, but you and your fiance are entitled to marry each other even if I don’t approve.
6. Moral entitlement aside, “If you don’t do what I say, I won’t give you the job you need to avoid starvation” is rarely relevant in modern labor markets. Why not? First, there are competing employers, so if you don’t like an offer, you can shop around for another. (Smarter yet, take what you can get, but keep searching for a better offer). Second, if you live frugally, even a relatively low-wage worker can save up a nest egg, making it easy to turn down unappealing offers in the future. Naturally, you can object, “I still face the choice to either live frugally, work for some employer, or starve.” If so, we’re back to my original reply: Complaining about being “free to starve” is the flip side of demanding that strangers support you whether they like it or not.
7. Leither took umbrage at my authoritarian interpretation of Marx. I freely grant that Leiter’s invested more time reading Marx than I have. However, I too have devoted long hours to Marx’s oeuvre (though I’ve spent far more reading about the actual history of socialist regimes), and I stand by my bleak assessment.
Did Marx explicitly say, “We should round up priests and execute them”? To the best of my knowledge, no. Yet that is the most reasonable interpretation of what Marx had planned. What are we supposed to think when Marx makes Orwellian statements like, “[B]ourgeois ‘freedom of conscience’ is nothing but the toleration of all possible kinds of religious freedom of conscience, and that for its part [socialism] endeavors rather to liberate the conscience from the witchery of religion” (Critique of the Gotha Program)? It doesn’t sound like Marx plans to respect the rights of people who don’t wish to be so “liberated.” If Leiter is right, why did so few Marxists protest Lenin’s religious persecution? I say it’s because Marx provided the Orwellian language they needed to insist that Freedom is Slavery. As I wrote two decades ago:
Innumerable social thinkers disagree with much of Marx’s thought, but praise his reflections upon human freedom, the depth of his insight in contrast to the shallowness of liberalism. Yet it is difficult to understand how Marx’s concept of freedom is anything more than a defense of tyranny and oppression. No dissident or non-conformist can see society as the “realization of his own liberty.” And what can the attack on “the right to do everything which does not harm others” amount to in practice, except a justification for coercing people who are not harming others? The problem with “broad” notions of freedom is that they necessarily wind up condoning the violation of “narrow” notions of freedom. Under “bourgeois” notions of religious liberty, people may practice any religion they wish (“a private whim or caprice” as Marx calls it); how could this liberty be broadened, without sanctioning the persecution of some religious views?
Listening to Leiter, a law professor at the University of Chicago, I couldn’t help but think, “Leiter is talking like Marx’s lawyer.” When a Mafia enforcer says, “Sweet kids you got there; be a shame if anything happened to them,” a Mafia lawyer will vigorously deny that his client threatened to murder children. Any neutral adult, however, knows that the Mafioso did exactly that. I say the same about Marx’s writings. “I’m going to bring you real freedom” is a classic Offer You Can’t Refuse – as Marxist revolutionaries have shown us time and again. A skilled lawyer can obfuscate this scary truth, but a learned philosopher should not.
READER COMMENTS
Thaomas
Mar 16 2020 at 10:40am
Too bad the debate was not just about Social Democracy/Democratic Capitalism, since Socialism is so so far off the political agenda for the foreseeable future.
The only interesting (to Neoliberal me) part of the debate was # 3. Why not accept that Social Democracy/Democratic Capitalism is a heterogeneous collection of market-altering regulations and redistribution policies each with it’s own cost benefit flow (with some possible interactions, too) and that coming to an aggregate judgement on the aggregate cost-benefit even if we could agree on exactly what counts as zero regulation/redistribution is not very useful.
Rather, shouldn’t the discussion be about what principles/political processes could make the mix of the net cost-benefits better. Maybe we should reduce restrictions on housing and commercial development AND tax congestion and CO2 emissions; have free trade AND a higher EITC/Child tax credit; encourage immigration AND have more progressive taxation, more subsidy for health insurance AND pay fore it with a consumption tax rather than the capped wage tax.
entirelyuseless
Mar 16 2020 at 10:48am
You may or may not be aware of this, but Leiter wrote a book specifically against the idea of religious freedom. So yes, your interpretation seems to be right.
Steve Fritzinger
Mar 16 2020 at 11:35am
I hope you can post a video of the debate soon.
It sounds like Leiter thinks there is a sharp distinction between labor and capital. Especially in his second response to point 4. That might have been close to true when Marx was writing but there is no clear line like that today. At least in developed countries.
Philo
Mar 16 2020 at 12:26pm
Point #4: It seems Leiter holds that capitalism will eventually produce genuine abundance—everything we want will be available for free—and at that point (though not before) we can and should have a socialist society. Socialism in heaven, capitalism elsewhere! As Thaomas notes (above), “Socialism is so far off the political agenda for the foreseeable future”!
Mark Z
Mar 16 2020 at 2:17pm
At that point, though, socialism would be redundant. If fully automated factories produce everything for free to satisfy even limitless demand, then mission accomplished; there’s nothing to gain by nationalizing the factories, or turning them into co-ops (unless we’re worried about the robot workers not being paid the full value of their labor). Maybe the belief is that capitalism will squelch the availability of the abundance to everyone, by I don’t see why it would; capitalists would have no incentive to do so. One would have to attribute an irrational sadism to capitalism as a system to expect that as costs of production plummet to 0.
In short, I think the condition under which socialism is supposedly warranted is also a sufficient condition for socialism’s obsolescence as an idea.
Maniel
Mar 16 2020 at 12:43pm
“Leiter hews to the classic Marxist position that we should transition to socialism only after capitalism creates incredible abundance.”
His view supports a similar approach to dieting: I plan to transition to junk food only after my healthy diet makes me incredibly fit.
Mark Z
Mar 16 2020 at 2:32pm
If we actually automate the economy and render workers redundant, then the marginal cost of production is 0 (if there are capital maintenance costs, that means either you still need workers to maintain the capital, or if there are robots that maintain the capital who themselves don’t require maintenance, than there are no maintenance costs), and the prices will therefore tend toward 0, and no one will need to work.
Automation does not lead to a higher unemployment equilibrium state, I think this point needs to be hammered home since few people understand it. If the rate of automation is really fast there may be frictional unemployment, but that’s a temporary phenomenon, and it seems doubtful that we’re at risk of seeing automation occur at a rate faster than what we’ve seen in 19th and 20th centuries that failed to cause sustained mass unemployment.
Matthias Görgens
Mar 17 2020 at 1:41am
The best argument I found against this position:
Improvements in transport productivity, like better wheels or cheaper carriages or more roads, made you able to do more with fewer horses. Yet, we didn’t have technology unemployment for horses, just the opposite.
Of course, that happy state for horse employment didn’t last forever.
So who knows whether human employment won’t follow the same trajectory?
Now, just to be completely clear, I don’t buy the argument. But you have to contend with it, if you want to argue against technological unemployment.
Jeremy
Mar 17 2020 at 8:48am
Point #4: “Maybe this time it will be different”: The favourite phrase of die-hard socialists around the world since the Paris Commune failed. At least it’s in a new context.
It has to be admitted—for all its flaws (and capitalism does have its fair share), capitalism is ultimately about achieving the highest level of production. This means, naturally, using as many resources, human or otherwise, as efficiently as possible—which of course means finding a way for people to be useful. This is also why pure capitalism winds up being untenable, though, as some more socialist ideas (sick days, shorter working hours, unions, etc.) improve production overall—thus, the market will favour those who implement such ideas over those who don’t, thereby moving the economy away from the pure state of capitalism it started with. This is one of the reasons why I’m an advocate of socio-capitalism—both socialism and capitalism are simply impossible to maintain in a pure form.
Point #5: I’ve generally rebutted that argument not by saying that the employer would be taking away something the worker isn’t morally entitled to, but rather by pointing out that the employer is making an offer: Do this for me, and I shall give you money. It’s rarely the worker approaching the employer to suggest a job they can do, after all; usually, the employer is the one who says they need somebody to do such-and-such work under such-and-such conditions, and are there any takers? If the worker chooses not to accept this offer, the employer cannot be morally obligated to uphold their end of the offer. Of course, they may choose to offer money or some other form of assistance anyway without repayment (that is to say, charity), and I would argue that the government is morally obligated to maintain a basic standard of living for the poorest denizens of the country (and financially obligated as well, I believe—there is some evidence that it’s just cheaper to have basic housing and healthcare for them), but that has nothing to do with jobs and employment.
Point #7: Utopia is impossible so long as the old ways of thinking remain. Thus, we need a guillotine.
It does seem to be a problem with any utopian thinking—not just with Karl Marx: Theoretical utopias tend to sound nice, but either they don’t take into account basic human nature (which is one of the problems with historical socialist regimes), or they require a blank slate—which is impossible to achieve without wiping away all history and opposing ideas, which is impossible to achieve without a great deal of destruction—wiping away all historical monuments and artefacts, wiping out people who espouse opposing ideas, etc. I think most people would agree that any utopia built on that sort of destruction isn’t worth it. In all frankness, I would argue that in order to build any sort of utopian world, one has to go step by step—changing the current system a few degrees at a time, allowing new ideas from different people to compete so as to establish which works best, implementing one idea in one area at a time to see what it actually changes—in short, allowing natural evolution to create utopia, not forcing it where it doesn’t belong.
On an amusing side note: according to ancient Greek mythology, you would, in fact, be morally obligated to marry somebody who’d be suicidal otherwise—there’s a few myths where either somebody didn’t marry, the other person committed suicide, and Aphrodite responded with murder, thus cementing her position as my least favourite of the Greek gods; or somebody threatened suicide and obtained marriage that way. Whether or not the ancient Greeks actually considered this the moral position is, of course, another thing entirely—their Gods weren’t the moral standard-makers that the Abrahamic God is.
robc
Mar 18 2020 at 8:19am
How are unions socialist?
In a hypothetical free market, minarchist utopia, unions would be an important player. With no occupational licensing laws, with a Kaplanesque school system (not state run) that is about education and not signaling, unions would have an important place for providing credentials to the employers. And to the employees, they would provide thing like group health insurance and clinics (since employers aren’t providing it any more), unemployment insurance, retirement planning.
I would see hospitals only hiring from the AMA union, for example.
Jeremy
Mar 18 2020 at 12:32pm
How are unions not socialist?
An employer is forced to give his workers safer working conditions, health insurance, paid sick time, higher wages, and other economic and social benefits by an outside group which bases its authority on the will of his workers. That seems exceedingly socialist to me—and to the industrialists who had to deal with unions when they first started, to the point where they would use “unionist” and “socialist” as interchangeable insults. And that was not much of an exaggeration, as no small number of the early union organisers were, in fact, socialists—unions were seen by many on both sides as a step towards the workers taking over and ruining a perfectly good capitalist economy. Read up on the history of unions and why laissez-faire capitalism failed—you’ll learn about both the socialist roots of unionism, and some of the problems run into when people attempted to put pure capitalism into practice.
robc
Mar 18 2020 at 1:38pm
What force? They are negotiated benefits.
The only time that socialism* comes into play (and this does relate to the history) is when the government is involved and setting rules. So unions as they exist today and unions that would exist sans government interference are entirely different.
*and I mean the textbook definition of the term, with the state owning or controlling the means of production.
Jeremy
Mar 19 2020 at 8:53am
“What force? They are negotiated benefits.”
I seriously advise you to look at the history; a less polite person than I would not be inclined to discuss such a statement seriously, and in any case not knowing the history that led to the ideas you discuss can only harm you. Strikes are a means of forcing the employer to negotiate, and one of the forceful methods which has lasted to the present day. Early unions would also commit occasional acts of sabotage in various forms—damaging machinery, doing deliberately substandard work, etc. There have been murders committed on behalf of unions (and, in fairness, against them as well). There were open skirmishes between workers and enforcers hired by their employers; this is one of the reasons the Pinkertons (who became quite famous in the latter decades of the Victorian Era and throughout the Edwardian era as strike-breakers) cannot legally be hired by the United States government. In West Virginia, this resulted in the “Mine Wars”, which I assure you did their absolute best to live up to the name. In short: Force is absolutely a means that unions have used and still use today, albeit generally with less actual violence these days. Benefits are, indeed, negotiated—but there is always an implied threat behind the negotiation.
“So unions as they exist today and unions that would exist sans government interference are entirely different.”
What I’m looking at is what unions do and have done, the ideals that led to their formation, and the situations that shaped them in those early years. A hypothetical situation in which unions are “entirely different” can have no more bearing on what they actually are than medieval guilds do.
“and I mean the textbook definition of the term, with the state owning or controlling the means of production.”
Here, I think, we have an honest misunderstanding. By socialism, I do not necessarily mean a form of government: I mean the socialist movement as a whole, which encompasses a number of ideas that do not necessitate government involvement, as well as ideas that do involve some form of government involvement. The main thrust of socialism is not central planning, but rather giving power to the workers, who, as the people doing the actual production, are viewed as more morally pure than the people financing the production, who are viewed as profiting unfairly from the work of others, and having a greater share of political power than the poor honest worker. Unionism falls quite neatly into this category.
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