Flavor of the Day: Communism
Communism is now the media’s topic du jour, which shows how desperate they are for something interesting to talk about. To a reasonably normal person with an IQ above 60, it’s hard to understand how anyone could seriously debate the pros and cons of a tried-and-failed ideology whose goal it is to control the masses.
On paper, of course, communism is the ultimate compassion unicorn: Everyone contributes according to his ability and receives according to his needs. Wealth is shared, economic classes disappear, and no one exploits anyone else. It’s an intoxicating vision, especially for the intellectuals who imagine themselves being the ones to administer the system while the unwashed masses harvest the potatoes.
Enter communism’s mortal enemy: human nature. The major fallacy of communism is that it assumes people will continue to produce even after they realize that their additional effort does not produce additional reward. On the contrary, if the industrious person receives essentially the same reward as the loafer, he eventually realizes that his increased effort is foolish. The result is a decline in production, not because he suddenly becomes evil, but because he responds rationally to irrational incentives.
A farmer who can sell his surplus has a reason to grow more food, while a farmer whose surplus is confiscated by government thugs is motivated to grow less food or hide what he produces. A business owner who can profit by satisfying customers has a reason to improve the quality of his products and reduce costs. By contrast, a government employee whose compensation bears little relationship to results has a reason to obey procedures, avoid blame, and look forward to the end of the day.
Communism’s second fatal weakness is its concentration of power. Private ownership disperses decision-making among millions of individuals. They make mistakes, of course, but their mistakes are limited. One restaurant fails, one investor loses money, one manufacturer misjudges demand. Under central planning, however, a relatively small group of bureaucrats makes economic decisions for an entire country. Then, when the planners make a mistake, the mistake can be conveniently attributed to the incompetency of those tasked with the project.
The reality is that no committee, regardless of its members’ intelligence, can continually determine how many shoes, tractors, apartments, medicines, and loaves of bread millions of people will want. On the other hand, prices in a reasonably free market constantly transmit such information. Rising prices signal scarcity and attract additional production, while falling prices signal oversupply and discourage waste.
Communist planners suppress or distort these signals, then attempt to replace them with quotas, reports, and decrees. The result is a familiar combination: shortages of necessities, surpluses of unwanted goods, declining quality, and a flourishing black market. The black market is especially revealing, because it is nothing more than the free market asserting itself without bureaucratic permission.
Communism also claims that eliminating private capital will eliminate exploitation. In practice, of course, communism simply replaces economic power with political power, which is not liberation. Rather, it is simply a transfer of control from people who must persuade you to buy their products and services to people who have the power to order you to obey.
A private company may want your money, but it has to offer you something of value in return. A political monopoly, on the other hand, does not face the same discipline. If a government agency provides miserable service, citizens cannot patronize a competitor. If a central plan fails, the planners can insist that the plan was brilliant, but their underlings screwed it up.
This is why communist regimes become hostile to dissent. When the government controls employment, housing, transportation, food distribution, publishing, and education, disagreement becomes a threat to the system that controls every avenue of daily life. The leaders cannot admit that it’s the central planning itself that is defective, because such an admission would undermine their claim to power. They therefore search for saboteurs, hoarders, speculators, foreign agents, and ideological deviants. Even though government controls are what created the current crisis, the current crisis becomes the excuse for even more controls.
Meanwhile, the classless society develops new classes of its own. Party officials, administrators, military commanders, and favored insiders take the place of corporate leaders while ordinary citizens zip the lip and wait in line. It’s pretty simple: When political authorities control all resources, access to those authorities becomes the most valuable resource of all. In other words, connections replace competence. Privilege does not disappear; it simply becomes less visible and more difficult to challenge.
Defenders of communism often respond that true communism has never been tried. It’s a convenient defense, because it’s impossible to disprove. Every failure can be dismissed as an impure version of the ideal, but repeated failure is all the evidence a critical thinker needs. If attempts to implement a system repeatedly produce coercion, scarcity, unearned privilege, and repression, a rational individual accepts the fact that the system does not work for the average person.
Karl Marx maintained that under communism, everyone would be so content that they would give up their possessions to the collective voluntarily and that the state would eventually fade away. Which sounds nice, but the reality is that power is not well known for voluntarily fading away.
None of this means that capitalism automatically produces justice, wisdom, or universal prosperity. Markets can be corrupted by fraud, monopoly, political favoritism, and cronyism. People can behave dishonestly under any economic system. A civilized society needs laws, courts, property rights, and protections for those who cannot protect themselves. But the defects of markets arise largely from human imperfection, while the fatal flaw of communism is that it requires human imperfection to disappear.
Common sense tells us that the masses do not benefit when ambition is punished, ownership is forbidden, prices are falsified, choices are eliminated, and power is concentrated in the hands of planners. They may receive promises of equality, but equality imposed through force generally means equal shortages for ordinary people and special privileges for those doing the imposing.
Communism fails the masses because it treats individuals as interchangeable units in a collective machine, ignoring the fact that individuals have different abilities, desires, priorities, and levels of ambition. They are not chess pieces waiting to be moved by enlightened officials with degrees in art history. While economic freedom can be untidy and unequal, it allows people to learn, exchange, invent, accumulate, fail, recover, and improve their lives without first obtaining permission from political elites.
The bottom line to communism is that it offers cradle-to-grave security by taking control of people’s lives. Sooner rather than later, however, the masses discover that the real product of the system was control and that they are not the beneficiaries of that control. Sorry, Karl, but people work to improve their personal circumstances, not those of their neighbors.
Robert Ringer is an American icon whose unique insights into life have helped millions of readers worldwide. He is also the author of two New York Times #1 bestselling books, both of which have been listed by The New York Times among the 15 best-selling motivational books of all time.
From robertringer.com