Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Why Socialism Is Doomed

When asked why socialism has failed as an economic and political system, supporters of socialism will produce a range of answers. No no! "The population was too diverse," socialists will say. No no! "The government was too authoritarian!" they will say. No no! "They faced too much corrosive competition from capitalist sympathizers!" they will say. Well, the example of kibbutz in Israel let us rule out most of these superficial excuses for why socialism hasn't worked and help us get to the real reason why socialism is a doomed system.

Here's a brief description of a kibbutz, or a collective agricultural community in Israel where inhabitants share property, labor together, and the government garauntees equal standards of living for all regardless of how much an individual produces. In essence, this is socialism.

"The kibbutz movement started in the early twentieth century in what was then Palestine by Zionist émigrés from Europe who were idealistic and Utopian. Capitalism, industrialization, and the conventional family repelled these émigrés. Kibbutzniks, as they were called, replaced these fundamental aspects of modern societies with collective agriculture where all property was owned by the kibbutz, where adults were treated equally regardless of productivity, and they were rotated every few months among the various tasks that had to be performed on a farm, such as milking cows, planting crops, serving meals, and so forth. They considered the close-knit family to be a creation of capitalism, and substituted for that family structure communal dining, a fair amount of promiscuity, and separate communal living for all children, who were allowed only brief visits with their parents each day."

While these communities started well and temporarily prospered, by the 1980's the kibbutzim had been abandoned as economic and political systems. The failure of these microcosims for socialism highlights broader problems with implementing socialism on a national scale.

The kibbutzim were the golden opportunity for socialism to prove itself. The inhabitants of these communities were highly motivated, very forward thinking, and united by a common religion. There was arguably more social cohesion in the kibbutzim than in any socialist country on earth, which demolishes the argument that socialism failed because of a lack of social or ethnic unity. The kibbutzim faced no pressure from capitalists or competing economic or political systems, which tosses the claim that capitalist opposition caused the failure of socialism straight out the window. Finally, local government was benign and the kibbutz had no secret police to suppress dissention, which crushes the authoritarian explanation for socialism's demise.

Given ideal conditions of social cohesion, ethnic and religious homogeneity, and benign and efficent government administration, why did the kibbutz fail? Because people weren't happy working and not being appropriately compensated. In order to ensure socio-economic equality, the government taxed and redistributed wealth equally throughout the population. Slackers abounded and leeched off the hardworking members of society. Hardworking members of the kibbutzim stopped working so hard, and the entire system suffered as a result.

There was an alternative to the kibbutzim called moshavim, which enjoyed much greater success than the kibbutz model. "Unlike the original kibbutz, moshav members hold their land as private property and are paid at least in part on the basis of performance; at the same time, moshavim also often have considerably communal property as well, managed by rules that try to curtail free-riding and the "tragedy of the commons."

If this isn't proof, I don't know what is.

Quotes are from here.

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