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From: tonyw@ubvax.UUCP (Tony Wuersch)
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: Re: Orphaned Response
Message-ID: <186@ubvax.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 28-Jan-85 21:50:29 EST
Article-I.D.: ubvax.186
Posted: Mon Jan 28 21:50:29 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 1-Feb-85 12:27:49 EST
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>> >> Socialism aims to establish a society in which no man has arbitrary power
>> >> over another simply because he possesses property.
>> 
>> That is not the aim of  Socialism.  Socialism  is a  society  where  the
>> individual has no rights,  property or otherwise.  And without  property
>> rights no other rights are possible.  If a person does not own or is not
>> justly compensated for the product of his work, then he does not own his
>> life.  He is a slave.  Capitalism works by the virtue of property rights
>> and by the virtue of free-market  competition that demands the best from
>> each of us.  It works  because  those who have ability and work hard are
>> rewarded and those who are lazy and imcompetent are not.

I don't know who the poster of the news that contained the first sentence
was, since Michael Bishop, in the response I read, only calls him "You".

What Bishop quoted from about "Democratic Socialism" seemed reasonable and
not especially extreme to me.  Some of what Bishop said was ok too.  He's
absolutely right about the need for a strong Capitalism in the Industrial
Revolution.  But Marx said that too, which didn't stop M from saying that
things had gone too far by the mid nineteenth century.  Marx wanted
Capitalism to rage until it became possible to grow and progress by more
humane means than the impoverishment of entire populations and social
classes.

Capitalism today has become more humane; in Marx's time stealing could get
the death penalty in Britain.  But there is still a Third World tied to
world markets, in which only a lucky few can make a decent income in
capitalist modes of enterprise.  The rest slave or hunger or barely
subsist.  I'm sure the average worker in the Philippines or Brazil or
Hong Kong or Thailand, when not unemployed, works as hard as any
American or Japanese or European worker ("roughly"), and the gene pool
is the same in the Third and the First World.

Anybody who argues, like Bishop, that capitalism is FAIR has got to be
joking.  The problem of property rights is not that they are all bad,
so that their abolishment is called for.  The problem is that property
rights are arbitrary and unfair.  The most unfair property rights, I
think, are inheritance rights.  But property rights are great incentives.
I like making money.  I know very few people who don't like making money
when the chance is made available to them.

>> >> Socialism aims to establish a society in which no man has arbitrary power
>> >> over another simply because he possesses property.
>> 

That's not an extreme statement, its a reasonable one.  Just because
socialists and people who have called themselves socialists haven't yet
succeeded in making societies that are unmistakably better than
capitalism doesn't change the moral of most socialist writing, which
Bishop agrees with, that arbitrary power is wrong on its face.

We've done well enough to be generous.  This isn't the beginning of the
Industrial Revolution.  We can have capitalist institutions which
encourage production and register consumer needs along with socialist
institutions which provide education and culture, and mediate the most
gross violations of equity (I think extreme amounts of wealth, especially
when they are held by the children of productive people, are sickening,
for instance.  Extreme poverty is sickening too ).

Maybe growth would be a little slower.  A decent, alert, and mixed
socialism might have lots of other advantages (less crime, less
war, more art and culture, cleaner streets) which could go to everybody.
Instead of citing examples like Cambodia and the USSR, just look at
countries like Sweden and Norway, which are much closer to the ideals
of democratic socialism than any of the so-called socialist countries.
They're not bad examples to emulate, not bad at all.

Tony Wuersch
amd!amdcad!cae780!ubvax!tonyw