OVERBREADTH

Since it’s May Day, global holiday of international Socialism, it seems a fitting occasion for me to confront what I like to call “another GOP myth.” Today’s myth: that Democrats are Socialists.

In her recent, groundbreaking, and altogether brilliant interview with Bill O’Reilly of the Fox Vomit-inducing Network, I mean, News Network, my choice for the next POTUS and the host traded barbs over her plans to roll back the irresponsible, ill-timed and ineffective Bush tax cuts. And as it often does, the debate metamorpohosized from a discussion of Clinton’s particular plans to restore the American economy into a greater discussion of the merits of Democratic social policy at the most theoretical level. And as his kind so often does, O’Reilly called it “Socialism” (with a capital “S”).

What is Socialism?

Socialism is a political philosophy that eschews private property. The guiding animus of Socialist political organizations is to use coercive state power to “liberate” anything of value from individual ownership and instead have collective state ownership. In a Socialist state, the government owns everything within its jurisdiction as a de facto or de jure trustee for benefit of all the people, and distributes to all of the people resources needed to live. There is no free market economy in such a state. Government can create nonfree, centrally planned, markets by distributing some kind of currency to citizens in exchange for their efforts, which is redeemable for other comestible or durable property (like food), or limited tenancy in state-owned realty, in quantities fixed by central planners. The government may, essentially in its discretion, decide how much to value the benefits it gives to its participants; it may, and generally will, give equally to participants regardless of how valuable is their participation. In other words, it would be compatible with many socialist tenents and realities that hard working leaders of critical state enterprises get no more compensation than someone who stays home blowing his mind with intravenous drugs.

The fundamental feature of a transition from a free market, capitalist country as is most of the western world today, is the abolition of “private property” - in other words, total redistribution of the wealth.

But even in the western world, there is, and there has always been, some kind of governmentally-mandated redistribution of wealth. Not wholesale nationalization of all property. I’m talking obviously about TAXATION.

Republican demagogues from O’Reilly to W. Bush would have you believe that taxation is Socialism. This is a fallacy, and an exaggeration so ridiculous, I feel offended that I have to write to refute it. Yet for some reason, this ridiculous exaggeration has successfully curried hundreds of millions of American votes in my lifetime.  But surely you see that the mere fact that a Western government redistributes some wealth, and a Socialism redistributes some wealth (”all” includes “some” in my Aristotelian logic), does not make a Western Government socialist. 

Find me a Socialist state and I’ll give make you a rich man (but only in the currency of the socialist state):

Socialism in its pure form really has not had that many instantiations in world history. Soviet Russia gave it a half-assed whirl. So did their bitter rivals in western europe’s fascist states, oddly enough. However, in hindsight, it is hard to discern Nazi Germany from Communist Russia from Nigerian “Kleptocracy.” Some argue that the Israeli Kibbutz was the most, or only, successful instantiation of Socialism.

While there are very few Socialist states, there are a lot of Socialist people. They tend to be poor, working class, and possibly politically disenfranchised in other ways. They are, in short, generally the “have-nots” of a given polity. Socialism seems like a good “ism” for these people. They would like to collectivize their numbers so that they can maximize their political capital and impose their political will to take what they want and don’t have (property) from those who have more of it, but are fewer in number. However, Democratic (lower case “D”) republics often have a number of checks and balances to make sure they cannot succeed - we institutionalize rights to property in undemocratic ways.

For example, the U.S. Constitution contains a rights to property. Even if enough people band together to pass a law taking property they want away from someone else who owns it, they must compensate him. The notable exception is taxation. There is no compensation for the property government takes away by taxing you (such a tax would be of little help to the goverment that levied it).

In some countries, Socialist movements have a great deal of power, and Socialist thinking is more evident on the face of government. Several Western European states are an example. Political Scientists sometimes distinguish between two kinds of Democratic Republic: the “liberal democracy” (wherein “personal freedom” [to acquire wealth] is more valued, and redistribution is less tolerated, such as in the U.S.”) and the “social democracy” (wherein redistribution is more tolerated, and state welfare-providing institutions are, relatively speaking, more valued than personal freedom to acquire individual wealth, such as Denmark, where tax rates are over 50%). This could be because there are more socialsits in these countries, proportionally, or it could be because the centrists have more state-affirming values than “libertarian” liberal democrats. The dividing line has a lot to do with income tax - the closer national income tax rates get to 50%, the more likely you are in a social democracy. Additionally, in some of these states, the government is given a lot more power to take away private property, without compensation.

But while these social democracies redistribute more wealth than our liberal democracy - almost double some cases, a social democracy is still a far cry from Socialism in a big way: private property is still the rule, and not the exception.

But what is Private Property, really?

This concept of “private property” is obviously very important. What is it? Private property, it turns out, is a legal concept. Doctrinally speaking, private property is the right to exclude others from possession. If you own land, you can kick others off; if someone won’t leave, the law may help you remove him. If you own “personal property” (i.e. “chattles” or “movables” or “tangible personalty”, e.g. Cameron’s office supplies, your toaster, your car), you have the right to possess it, if someone takes it without your consent, you have a legal right to recover it.

But that’s a doctrinal explanation of property law (and a very cursory one too, but more detail is not needed at this time). The doctrine of law is not the same as the meaning of law. Well, some people thought it was. Those people believed that law just had some free-standing metaphysical existence that transcended the physical world. These people thought, among other things, that Judges didn’t make judge-made law, they “discovered it.” This view had a number of interesting consequences. For example, judges exalted things like the “freedom of contract” to transcend any public interference — compelling conservative judges to overturn minimum wage and maximum hours laws. They saw a strict seperation between “private law” and “public law.” 

Later judges rejected this view of the law. Holmes realized that “private law” and “public law” were actually interrlated. Nothing in private law had any real meaning until public authority was applied. For example, if someone trespassed your home or converted your dog, it was your private law property right that allowed a Judge to send the sheriff to kick him out or get it back. Realists extrapolated a number of propositions from this basic observation of reality, some of which were right, some of which were wrong, and some of which were misunderstood, but most of which are not relevant here. The salient observation is that judges deciding private disputes were really acting on behalf of the government, not on behalf of some “brooding omnipresence” of legal rights and relations. In other words, what realists realized was that in the real world, “law,” if it is anything, is a manmade institution, and that public rights and private rights have a lot more in common than a previous generation realized. The realist lesson is that in the real world, we have no private property rights unless, and except to the extent to which, our governments protect them.

In fact, if you look at the history of the institution of private property in the ”English-speaking” world, you look back and see that once again, private property all began as public property. When William of Norman conquered England, he acquired ”by capture,” legal ownership of all of the land of England and everything on it. He parcelled it out to his henchmen, who became nobles, and it all just evolved from there. Once again, you see the fundamental feature that Government created the rights, and they were were worth as much as the Government was willing to protect them. They evolved from a mere “life tenancy” (noble owned property as long as he lived and loyally served the King) to more enduring forms of ownership - the sort of “absolute ownership” we now think of as being the way land is owned.

Self-help (like building a fance) may be a practical way to keep unwanted visitors of your lawn and exercise your right to exclude, but what if a lot of people want to take your property from you? It’s really just not practical to rely only your own self-sufficiency. And moreover, without a legal right to that property, why is your claim to it any better than the rabble trying to take it away?

What are the implications of the realist realizations about the nature of property?

There are some other lessons that we can draw also when we apply this thinking to other things. Government has done more than just assure that you and I can own our own homes or cars once we’ve bought and paid for them (or inherited them). really, the whole institution of society stands to fail without government. What institution but government can marshall the resources to protect our borders from foreign invaders, and preserve our way of life? Imagine a world where the Nazis had begun their conquest of Europe, but America still languished under the Articles of Confederacy, unwilling to raise a military. We’d all be speaking German and working for the benefit of the son or grandson of Hitler. Try owning your own home or car or practicing your own religion in that world!

What I’m trying to say is that without the public sector, there is no private sector. It just could not exist. There is no man among us who is 100% self-made. We all have the state to thank for what little safety we have to be born, grow up, work, own property, and die in relative peace.

What does this mean for us though? Does it mean there is no difference between socialism, where the state owns everything, and there is no private property, and the capitalism where we seem to own private property, but only at the forbearance of the state? Am I some kind of a fork-tongued socialist myself, trying to convince you that ownership isn’t real?

No — that would be an exaggeration too, if not a circular argument. Private property is real enough, because government protects it. Let us not forget that in the American political government , the legitimacy of the government rests on the consent of the governed, as Jefferson and Madison would have said. We would not have to consent to a government that didn’t value our right to private property, and protect it. Most people do not willingly consent to a government that abolishes ownership. They’re forced into it - like the Soviets were - a handful of revolutionaries forced their will on the entire country.

Besides, getting rid of private property is just not good social policy. The ability to acquire enduring possession of property is a good incentive to be productive. It unlocks the beneficial impacts of trade markets as well. It’s also something that even if we don’t have as much as we’d like, we can all sort of agree that if we had some, we’d like the law to protect it. In short, there’s a pretty solid consensus that private property should be protected by government.

What I’m really trying to tell you is to live in the real world. In the real world, “private property” is only as real as the government that protects it. We are all where we are, in some substantial part, because of the good work done by government. (By no means is that to say that we couldn’t be better off if there weren’t so many things about Government that sucked!) I find though, that there are two kinds of people: those who understand what property and the private sector really are, and those who want to believe the right wing myth, one that has its origins in an ancient and discredited philosophy of law, that believes that private property ownership is “more real” than government; that it has some transcedental existence, as thing in itself, and nonsense like that.

What is Taxation?

Thus, there is a huge difference between one government which says it will protect your private property and another which rejects it. No government that protects your private property can properly be called a “Socialism” - much less one that does so to the same extent as ours. At most, a government that redistributes wealth can be said to have some trace aspects of ”socialism” with a lower-case s, like a “social democracy.” But by the time you water down “Socialism” to “socialism” it does not mean the same thing. Almost anything could be a little bit “socialist.”

Despite the O’Reillys and Larry Elders of the world telling liberals that they don’t live in the real world, (often choosing particularly inarticulate interlocturs of American leftism who are poorly-suited to defend such attacks, such as they do), it is they who live in a world of nonsense, exalting imaginary concepts and ignoring the past. The GOP/FNC attitude is exaggerated, and out of touch with reality.  Taxation is not Socialism. It’s the price of freedom.

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