Edmund Heaphy | Deputy Editor
Trinity seems to have a penchant for socialism. We all – or most of us – have a penchant for equal rights. Things like marriage equality. And rightfully so. Morally, there aren’t many arguments against things like that. And morally, if we could get socialism to work it would be better than capitalism. Morally speaking. Because ideal socialism is always better than ideal capitalism. Right?
As in, if we could get socialism to work, and if everyone was kind and loving and generous, then of course socialism would be better than capitalism. That has always been the argument anyway. Because why would you choose a model that rewards greed, selfishness, fear, back-stabbing and corruption when you could choose a model filled with fairness and equality?
Famously this line of thinking was put forth by political philosopher G.A. Cohen. He spent his life comparing socialism and capitalism and no-one ever seemed to be able to argue with him. In 2009, he published Why Not Socialism?, published just after his death that year, which once and for all seemed to cement the notion that socialism, if we could get it to work, would be by far the best way of running an economy from a moral perspective. And if we are all good and just, we should all be concerned about morals.
I’ve seen this line of thinking from many students in Trinity, especially in certain circles. It’s the kind of thinking that feels right. And more importantly, it feels like a lot of thinking, and a lot of critical thinking at that, has gone into it when you hear people talk about it. While avoiding generalisations, it’s fair to say that when someone in Trinity seems to have put a lot of thought into what they’re saying, it’s not fun to challenge them, even if you might have different views. I’ve spoken to a lot of people who are, or want to be, people who can see the flaws in socialism. And they want to be able to see the merits of market economies and capitalism.
Proponents of socialism can’t just decide what type of environment capitalism creates.
But what are they? Earlier this year, Jason Brennan, a political philosopher based at Georgetown University, published a response to Cohen, entitled Why Not Capitalism?. Up until then, the only arguments against Cohen seemed to involve pointing out that in countries where socialism has been tried – the Soviet Union, China, Cuba and in places like Vietnam and North Korea – it hasn’t gone well at all. As in 100-million-people being-killed-by-socialist-governments bad. As in the-poor-not doing-well-at-all-in-these-countries bad. People point out that eighteen of the top-25 most capitalist countries also happen to be among the top-25 countries on the UN’s Human Development Index. Or, that someone living on the poverty line in the US, even when adjusted for purchasing power, is still within the richest 14 per cent of people in the world. Never mind, people say, because reality has nothing to do with morals.
And they are right about that. We should still have the discussion about whether ideal socialism – the kind where murder doesn’t happen and the kind where everyone is equal – is better than ideal capitalism. As Brennan describes Cohen’s argument: “If you had a magic wand that would make people less greedy, rapacious, and nasty, and more kind, loving, and generous, you’d wave that magic wand.” And then we’d choose socialism, or so the argument goes. Because ideal capitalism breeds all those negative characteristics and doesn’t leave room for the positive ones to develop.
The trouble is that there’s no evidence to say it actually does. People seem to think that just by saying capitalism breeds greed and corruption that it makes it so. The trouble is that, as Brennan points out, this isn’t comparing like with like. Why do we get to compare ideal socialism – one where everyone is kind and generous – with the supposedly “ideal” capitalism where everyone is greedy and corrupt? From a moral perspective, what about comparing socialism and capitalism on an equal footing, where we don’t resort to the lowest common denominator-form of capitalism? Like pointing out that in real-word examples – which are the only way of informing us of how ideal capitalism might work in a theoretical moral comparison – the top ten countries ranked by Transparency International as being the least corrupt (Denmark, New Zealand, Singapore, Finland, Sweden, Canada, the Netherlands, Australia, Switzerland, and Norway) also happen to overlap fairly heavily with the the countries ranked as the most economically free – the most capitalist. Six of the top ten most transparent countries are in the top ten most economically free. Denmark is in the top twenty. In fact, there is an extremely strong correlation between countries with a higher economic freedom rating and their score on the Corruption Perception Index.
We get value from pursuing projects and getting recognition for things we can call our own.
No-one is saying that this kind of empirical research settles the matter. But as Brennan says, social-scientific research is the only way “to know whether capitalism is corrupting or ennobling”. Studies have shown, for instance, that the likelihood of a person making a fair offer to a stranger in an deal increases the more capitalist the economy is. There are other factors at play of course, but in these studies, the most famous of which were conducted by Neuroeconomist Paul Zak, the amount of economic freedom – how capitalist the economy is – turns out to be the strongest predictor of fairness, far stronger than any other factor they could find. Proponents of socialism can’t just decide what type of environment capitalism creates. That’s intellectually unfair, and even more so when it’s actually ignoring the evidence. More importantly, they can’t just say that socialist economies breed generosity and fairness either. And, in light of this, the suggestion that, if we did all happen to be generous and fair, we’d prefer socialism, doesn’t ring true. This is because there are aspects of capitalism that make it far more desirable to socialism and aspects that don’t have to do with greed or selfishness, but instead who we are as people and who we are as humans.
As Brennan points out, just as we can all grasp why you might want to write a book by yourself rather than participate in a committee that has equal say about every sentence, or why an artist might want to paint by themselves instead of “having each brushstroke decided by committee”, we can all grasp why you might want to own a factory or a business or a conglomerate or a farm.
Humans, as a species, are project pursuers. We get value from pursuing projects and getting recognition for things we can call our own. That’s not selfish or greedy – that’s a fundamental characteristic of who we are. This kind of thing gives meaning to our lives, and socialism all but strips it away. As E. O. Wilson, the father of sociobiology jokes about socialism: “Wonderful theory, wrong species.” And that’s even if we could get it to work.
