Fine, have a socialist revolution, but please be competent about it

Nobody has any idea yet what the long-term effects of the Covidepression will be. How deep and systemic a change it brings to the United States will likely depend on how long it takes to get our economic lives back to something like normal. That, in turn, depends on factors like how quickly we can roll out testing for everyone, how well we do at supplying hospitals with what they need, and what level of risk we're willing to take.

The uncertainty hasn't kept a lot of journalists from making bold predictions about the future of capitalism. If you're left-leaning, the predictions are triumphant: conservative world views have failed, and change is here! (See here, here, and here for examples.) If you're right leaning, then you see the recent expansion of government to stave off disaster as a sign something has gone terribly off the rails. (See here and here for examples, and yes, the Economist is still center-right, although it's easy to have forgotten that in the last four years because of how much they hate Trump.)

What is it about economics, the least certain science, that makes people so certain? More locally to me than the op-ed pages of major periodicals, the people I follow in my social media feeds seem pretty certain they know where the current crisis is heading and what it all means. I've got friends who are sure it's all a scam to enlarge government power, and I've got friends who are sure it's an unintended but inevitable failure in global conservative capitalism that will bring about its fall. I'm not aware that any of these friends have taken more than the one semester of intro to economics I took in college, nor have any historical credentials beyond my minor in history, but they're really sure they know what it all means.

At the moment, I feel small and uncertain and very much aware that I only took one economics class in college and that I can't predict what will come. I will only assert to know two facts relevant to the topic:

• There is no economy on Earth that is either full-bore laissez faire capitalist nor power-to-the-people socialist. The United States doesn't have socialized medicine, but we do have government regulation and intervention in all kinds of markets. North Korea doesn't have a stock exchange, but they do allow farmers who produce more to keep some of what they produce. So "becoming socialist" only means that the U.S. might slide more to one side in its hybrid economy than it has been.
• Socialism is an economic system, as is capitalism. It is not a political system. That doesn't mean, of course, that there isn't a deep and interdependent connection between the political workings of a country and how it expresses its view of economics and vice versa. It just means that socialism and capitalism can mean very different things depending on the underlying culture and politics of a nation espousing those economic philosophies. 

It may be that the modern world requires a shift to socialist solutions. I don't know. In my twenties, when I was so disgusted with the Marine Corps and what I saw as the abuse of power that can take place in a non-democratic system, I tended to favor socialism because I saw it as more amenable to democracy and less likely to be part of totalitarianism. After I got out, though, I went to college, got a steady diet of socially-liberal/economically conservative thinking that seemed to be backed up by the incredible boom the country was going through under Bill Clinton, and I backed off of socialist ideology. It didn't help that the one socialist political party I donated to sent me newsletters that made it clear the party was more interested in propaganda than truth. I've remained generally center-left with occasional center-right economic ideas since then.

For all I know, capitalism may yet make a rebound. Bill Gates may give us a hail-Mary vaccination, and the mystique of capitalism will live on. But let's say the U.S. needs to switch to socialist solutions. Let's say that widening income disparity makes true democracy impossible. Let's say the threat of mass pandemics is so dire we literally cannot afford to have anyone who doesn't have access to health care. Let's say the threat to the environment is too strong to let economic decisions be left to the market. Let's say that the coming tech-driven unemployment will be so dire, we have to institute universal basic income to deal with it. And let's say the people actually manage to elect officials willing to change the laws to get it done.

The mule with the spinning wheel

Well, congratulations on getting what you want, socialist-leaning leftists. Now don't screw it up. Because it is easy to screw up. Neither socialism nor capitalism nor any combination of the two can overcome the basic problem of economics we all learned about in that one intro course: how to try to meet unlimited human wants with limited resources. There is no free lunch. Socialism fixes some problems and creates others. The choice between one system or the other isn't a question of getting rid of problems; it's a question of what kinds of problems suit the nature of your society best.

At best, socialism will bring marginal gains, not Utopian ones. It will curb the worst excesses of capitalism and help stave off some of the disruptive boom and bust cycles of the free market. There will be costs to this, but it is very possible the overall marginal change will be for the better, especially given our modern, inter-dependent world.

But marginal gains will only happen if your socialist system is run efficiently. The problems with the current, capitalist regime isn't necessarily a problem with capitalism. It could be a problem with capitalism run by cronies, fools, and incompetents. Fiscally conservative Germany is handling the crisis much better, because it is run by people who aren't fools, cronies, or incompetent.

If the new, more socialist-leaning America isn't careful, crony capitalism could easily be replaced by crony socialism. Corporations could easily make a shift from selling to hospitals to governments, for example, and they could still maintain or even enlarge their influence in government. A badly run social welfare system can fail to meet needs as much as no formal system at all. Seizing power isn't at all a guarantee of knowing what to do with that power. Much like Trump seemed surprised by winning the presidency, socialist-leaning leftists could end up like Lyle Lanley's "mule with the spinning wheel": "No one knows how he got it, and danged if he knows how to use it!"

Jordan Peterson likes to keep lodging a fairly dumb critique of politically active people, saying that people ought to first do the hard work of getting their own lives in order before they go about "distracting themselves" with political work. YouTuber Big Joel does a pretty good critique of this notion*, but maybe there is a version of the argument that I could keep alive here. It's one thing to bring about a revolution based on broad, fundamental philosophical principles. And it's a good thing. But the success or failure of a revolution isn't in big ideas about equality or social justice or commonweal or whatever. It's built in the quotidian, bureaucratic routines the revolution sets in place, and whether those routines help achieve the goals of the revolution.

In other words, before you even get power, you'd better have a plan. From the moment you achieve power, you'll be trying to run a system America has no institutional knowledge of while surrounded by enemies who want you to fail. Permit me to be skeptical for a moment, but the ever diversity-minded progressive set isn't always the best at gaining unity on a plan. As the old joke goes, "I'm not part of organized politics. I'm a Democrat." If you want your revolution to succeed--and if a change comes, then of course I'd like it to succeed--then you've got to make people forget that joke.


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*My teenage son watches videos by Big Joel and hbomberguy. I'd like to endorse these two as really excellent channels for teens who are learning how to think through big issues. One of the strengths of both channels is how they will take a subject, like the philosophy of Ben Shapiro or flat earth theory, and treat it with both humor and intelligence. They don't just dismiss the ideas as stupid, they take the time to really reason out the flaws in the ideas they are debunking. Most people are too lazy to do this, as they consider flat earth or Shapiro to be beneath them, which means, unfortunately, that people like Shapiro don't get enough people debunking him with the same level of earnestness he puts into his own work.