The Current State of Government “Socialist” Systems Does Little For Its Reputation
- On Socialist Systems in America
- Discuss, Fight, Die
- America’s Unlikely Unrest
- Darby Saxbe’s Advice to Steven Bartlett
- Undiagnosed
Anytime you find yourself in a debate with one who espouses a positive view of “democratic socialism”, they frequently argue, “We have socialism all through America. You don’t seem to mind that!”
This argument assumes neither I, nor anyone, has a problem with such institutions. I began looking into these systems and institutions they so eagerly list when attempting to refute my claim that socialism is the “Gospel of envy”, as Churchill put it, and relies on government intervention whereby group A removes from group B against their will and giving it to group C. Let’s take a quick look at just a few and give them a grade.
Public Universities and Community Colleges
There has been a growing revelation over time that university in America is extremely progressive, to the point of willful suppression of papers, social pressure to conform, loss of employment, and ostracization from peer groups and career development opportunities. It’s widely been reported through many outlets that there no longer exists diversity in university faculty (Duarte et al., 2015) and political bias in university being abundantly in favor of progressive liberal ideology (Redding et al., 2023). Inbar & Lammers (2012) discovered a political bias so great, they found that 6% of social and personality psychologists identified as conservative. Lee Jussim (2012) released commentary on these findings, listing many privileges afforded to liberal psychologists and social psychologists as well as a warning to academia if they continue on this path. As a result, many are choosing not to attend such universities and the APA recently was advised they were being placed on suspension.
Grade: F
Public Schools
Public schools have failed students for decades. This is abundantly clear and obvious. Their spending is frivolous and incoherent to common business practices. One example, they allot a budget to a department within a public school. If that amount is not spent in full, they will be allotted a smaller amount next year because they did not utilize all of the money. What if they needed more the following year, but helped the county save money this year? Too bad. Automatic tenure enables lazy, ineffective, and sometimes harmful teachers to thrive under the umbrella of employment immunity. The fact that they have a monopoly on free education insulates them from competition and parental choice, shielding them from the need to improve quality or prove results.
Grade: F
Social Security
Social security has long been on a crash course with reality, financially speaking (Diamond & Orszag, 2005). Social security has created poor incentives that do not work (Friedberg & Webb, 2009). It has failed to provide adequate trade-offs, and like many social programs, fails to take into consideration behavioral consequences of policies and reforms intended to address social security (Mastrobuoni, 2009). It’s dysfunctional on a good day.
Grade: D+
VA Healthcare
Just ask a veteran how that’s going. You’ll get everything from, “I’ve been denied consistently” to “It takes forever to get anything done. I feel like I’m in Canada!” Their monopoly disincentivizes innovation. It runs about how I’d expect a government business to run.
Grade: C
DMV
Remember getting your driver’s license? Wait forever. No sense of urgency. Rude employees. Monopoly that eliminates the need for improved performance.
Grade: D-
Post Office
The phrase “Going postal” did not just arrive accidentally. This is an instance where they found themselves in panic mode when Amazon, UPS, and Fed Ex began to compete. They did not know what to do with competition. They’d never experienced it before. As a result, they are last in customer satisfaction, performance, and delivery standards among those delivery services.
Grade: D-
Lastly, the common phrase you hear in any government run business, whether school, government offices, DMV, government departments, any government run social program, is this, “That’s not my job.” That is what the government incentivizes, laziness.
I recently made this statement:
Placing decision-making for a society of over 300 million into the hands of those elite few who will have no change in employment status nor drop in income if they are completely wrong, and will likely gain financially from their decisions, as so many in politics have proven, can only lead to disastrous outcomes, alongside those elite few gaining power and wealth at the expense of those who didn’t do their homework on basic economics.
In Short
Intellectual honesty requires I concede one point. The concept of democratic socialist policies, ideas behind equalizing resources and results, and attempts to ensure the poor are lifted up through social programs are amazing ideas and would be beautiful to see enacted. The problem is it will never be realized in reality. Once individuals are denied the freedom to exchange at mutually determined prices, earnings are redistributed by political authority, and economic decisions are concentrated in the hands of an elite few, the question is no longer whether power will influence economic outcomes, but how and for whose benefit, and who decides. Human beings have seldom demonstrated immunity to the temptations accompanying concentrated power, greed, and tyranny, and installing any forms of socialism will open such tyrannical floodgates while completely annihilating any chance of innovation and expanded creation of wealth to further ignite the economy. Human nature simply won’t allow it.
The truth is, if I ran my business in the same fashion as the government, I wouldn’t have a business at all. So please save your breath coming to me with ways in which our current social systems work. No they don’t.
Stay Classy GP!
Grainger
References
Diamond, P. A., & Orszag, P. R. (2005). “Saving Social Security.” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 19(2), 11–32.
Duarte, J. L., Crawford, J. T., Stern, C., Haidt, J., Jussim, L., & Tetlock, P. E. (2015). Political diversity will improve social psychological science. The Behavioral and brain sciences, 38, e130. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X14000430.
Friedberg, L., & Webb, A. (2009). “New Evidence on the Labor Supply Effects of the Social Security Earnings Test.” Tax Policy and the Economy, 23(1).
Inbar, Y., & Lammers, J. (2012). Political Diversity in Social and Personality Psychology. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 7(5), 496-503. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691612448792.
Jussim, L. (2012). Liberal privilege in academic psychology and the social sciences: Commentary on Inbar & Lammers (2012). Perspectives on Psychological Science, 7(5), 504–507.
Mastrobuoni, G. (2009). “Labor Supply Effects of the Recent Social Security Benefit Cuts: Empirical Estimates Using Cohort Discontinuities.” Journal of Public Economics, 93(11–12), 1224–1233.
Redding, R. E., Frisby, &., Craig L., O’Donohue, W. T., & Lilienfeld, S. O. (Eds.). (2023). Ideological and political bias in psychology: Nature, scope, and solutions. Springer.