Preface

When a socialist says he wants to give you “the ABC’s of socialism,” you can be sure that’s as far into the alphabet as he’ll want to go. Happy talk, vague promises, political programs, perhaps an angry, envy-soaked tirade or two against the rich—but not much at all about where all that leads. That part always gets a little embarrassing.

Hence this anthology. The essays herein take you beyond the surface appeal of socialism’s message so you can understand both its underlying motivations and its practical results. After all, no system of political, economic, or social organization should be judged by simply what its advocates say it’ll do. That’s pretty shallow thinking, not much deeper than slogans and bumper stickers. It’s far more instructive to judge a system by the premises on which it’s based and the outcomes it actually produces.

This immediately presents an important, definitional issue: What is socialism? The first chapter in this collection deals with that matter, and later chapters expand upon it. For now, this much ought to be obvious: However you choose to define it, you know it involves government. A lot of government. Much more than just about anybody faces today, in spite of all the growth in government we’ve already had and all the shortcomings (even disasters) it’s given us along the way.

If you’re a person of peace and goodwill, one who wants the best for every deserving individual, then this ought to give you pause.

It’s a good bet that no matter where you are on the political spectrum—socialist, liberal, conservative, libertarian, anarchist, or something else—you want men and women in government to be honest, humble, fair, wise, independent, responsible, incorruptible, mindful of the future, and respectful of others. You want them to be men and women of peace and goodwill just like you, right?

You may be holding profoundly contradictory views without realizing it. This is the bottom line: The bigger government gets, the less likely it will attract men and women who possess those traits we all say we want.

Have you noticed how mean and nasty campaigns for high office have become? Lies and distortions are common political fare these days. Why would a genuinely good person subject himself to the ugliness of it all? Increasingly, genuinely good people don’t bother, so we are left all too often with dirt bags and demagogues in government. So we really need to think about what history often tells us is the worst of both worlds: Big Government run by Bad People.

Lord Acton famously stated more than a century ago that “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” He nailed it, though I would add a corollary of my own: “Power attracts the corrupt.” Does socialism somehow and miraculously counteract that?

In spite of all the good intentions of many socialists, it’s probably too much to expect people to stay good and honest when you task them with forcibly redistributing several trillion dollars every year and regulating almost every corner of other people’s lives. That kind of power can make a sinner from a saint in no time.

Power may well be the most corrosive, character-destroying, society-demolishing weapon in Evil’s arsenal. But in the name of doing good, socialists always want more of it, and they want it nicely concentrated in the hands of those who say they know best.

So don’t judge socialism by its velvet glove and ignore the iron fist within it. Look beyond its ABC’s and get to the end of it all—its XYZ’s. This anthology will provide you the XYZ’s that socialists conveniently forget to mention.

—Lawrence W. Reed

President

Foundation for Economic Education

Atlanta, Georgia

February 26, 2018

Socialism: Force or Fantasy?

Lawrence W. Reed

Have you ever tried to nail Jell-O to the wall? It’s easier than getting a socialist to stand pat on what socialism is, which makes socialism an endlessly moving target.

Marx called for the abolition of private property and state ownership of the means of production. He labeled it “scientific socialism.”

“But that’s not what we mean!” today’s socialist dreamers proclaim.

Lenin established the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). He put the Soviet state in charge of every aspect of life for “the good of the people.” Stalin, his mass-murdering successor, declared that Soviet socialism would perfect the “workers’ paradise” promised by socialist intellectuals.

“But that’s not what we mean!” today’s socialist dreamers proclaim.

Hitler and his minions “planned” the German economy, called themselves socialist and even named their political organization the National Socialist German Workers Party.

“But that’s not what we mean!” today’s socialist dreamers proclaim.

Fifteen different republics within the Soviet empire all proclaimed themselves dedicated to socialism (until all of their socialist regimes collapsed in 1989–91).

“But that’s not what we mean!” today’s socialist dreamers proclaim.

More Failed Examples of Socialism

Dozens of regimes in Africa and Asia from the 1950s on committed themselves to the socialist utopia, embracing socialism proudly by name. Every single one of them elicits the same proclamation from today’s socialist dreamers: “But that’s not what we mean!”

Socialists all over the world rejoiced in the rise to power of socialist Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. “This is what we mean!” seemed to be their mantra as he expropriated and nationalized and redistributed. Barely 15 years later with the country now a total basket case, you have to press today’s socialist dreamers to get them to say anything at all. But when you finally get them to talk, once more we hear the familiar refrain: “But that’s not what we mean!”

Today’s socialist dreamers, Bernie Sanders being among the more prominent, are on a kick about Scandinavia. “That’s what we mean!” they proclaim. Then more-studious observers of that part of the world point out that Scandinavian countries have no minimum wage laws; lower taxes on business and more school choice than the United States; trade-based, globalized economies; and few if any nationalized industries.

The prime minister of Denmark recently declared, “I know that some people in the US associate the Nordic model with some sort of socialism. Therefore, I would like to make one thing clear. Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy.” So, today’s socialist dreamers say, “Well, that’s not what we mean.” They advocate hikes in the minimum wage, higher taxes on business, little if any school choice, and massive intervention in commerce.

A Better Life for Mankind

Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the USSR, offered one of the most expansive views of who’s a socialist. “Jesus was the first socialist,” declared Gorbachev, because he was “the first to seek a better life for mankind.”

Gorbachev’s silly claim clearly gets us nowhere: I’m as anti-socialist as it gets, and I, too, seek a better life for mankind (it’s one of the many reasons I’m not a socialist).

Further, as I explained in “Rendering Unto Caesar: Was Jesus a Socialist?” Jesus never advocated the redistribution of wealth by force or by the political process. The caring and sharing he suggested was all voluntary—that is, from the heart and not from somebody else’s pocket at gunpoint. He rebuked people for envy and theft and praised the man who invested his money to earn the greatest return. If Jesus was a socialist, then I’m Torquemada.

Socialists are so intellectually slippery that they could crawl through a barrel of pretzels without knocking the salt off. It’s socialism until it doesn’t work; then it was never socialism in the first place. It’s socialism until the wrong guys get in charge; then it’s everything but. Under socialism, do you shoot the cow or just milk it 24/7? One thing I know for sure: When the milk runs out, socialists will blame the cow. Maybe the reason why socialists don’t like personal responsibility is that they don’t want to be held personally responsible.

Oxford Dictionaries—whose slogan is “Language Matters”—defines socialism as “a political and economic theory of social organization that advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.” It offers these terms as synonyms: leftism, welfarism, progressivism, social democracy, communism, and Marxism.

Maybe now we’re getting somewhere. Sounds precise, right? Hardly. What is meant by “the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole”? Should a convenience store have to put to some public vote the decisions about what to stock the shelves with or whom to hire for the night shift?

And what about this “regulated by the community as a whole” stuff? Have you ever known a regulatory body to be everybody in town or all 325 million people in the country? Don’t such bodies end up being some handful of people with political power?

Even with a dictionary at hand to look up the word socialism, I still find myself scratching my head and asking, “What the hell is it, anyway?” Maybe it’s imaginary—something that somebody hopes it is even if it never turns out that way when it’s tried. Or maybe it’s like pornography, which Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously said he couldn’t define, but “I know it when I see it.”

Exclusionary Solidarity

In his July 2015 article, “The Whitest Privilege,” National Review writer Kevin D. Williamson came as close to explaining socialism-in-theory as I’ve seen in a while:

Socialism and welfare-statism, like nationalism and racism, are based on appeals to solidarity—solidarity that is enforced at gunpoint, if necessary. That appeal is more than a decent-hearted concern for the downtrodden or the broad public good. It is, rather, an exclusionary solidarity, a superstitious notion that understands “body politic” not as a mere figure of speech but as a substantive description of the state and the people as a unitary organism, the health of which is of such paramount importance that individual rights—property, freedom of movement, freedom of speech, freedom of association—must be curtailed or eliminated when they are perceived to be insalubrious.

The socialist countries that seem to work—like Sweden, Norway, and Denmark—do so not because of the socialism they have but because of the capitalism they haven’t yet destroyed. Go full socialism and you get Venezuela. Or worse yet, North Korea.

Socialism Equals Force

It all comes down to persuasion versus force. Everything else is trivial. Here’s what I mean:

Under capitalism, two Girl Scouts show up at your door and ask, “Would you like to buy some cookies?” You get to say yes or no.

Under socialism, two Girl Scouts show up at your door with an armed SWAT team behind them. They say, “You’re gonna eat these damn cookies and you’re gonna pay for ’em, too.”

Some socialists say that they are simply advocating “sharing,” and since socialism’s advocates have good intentions, it must be voluntary and beneficial, too. Except that it never is. If it were voluntary, it wouldn’t be socialism, and if it were beneficial, you wouldn’t need force to create it and sustain it.

Today’s socialist dreamers think and act as if they just arrived from an alternate universe. A $19 trillion national debt means that the federal government hasn’t spent enough to solve our problems. Stealing money that belongs to others through taxation is perfectly alright if you spend it on good things. People become much more honest, fair, competent, and compassionate once they get elected to office. If you force employers to pay someone more than their services are worth, they will hire them anyway and just eat the difference. Regulations always do good because their advocates mean well. Civilizations rise and become great because they punish success and subsidize failure, then they collapse when they embrace freedom and free enterprise. Each person is entitled to whatever he wants other people to pay for, like free college and birth control.

Maybe all this nonsense springs from one fundamental, definitional flaw: If it’s not the use of force to shape society the way you want it, then socialism is nothing more than a nebulous fantasy. It’s a giant blackboard in the sky on which you can write anything your heart desires and then just erase it when embarrassing circumstances arise.

Either way, I don’t want any part of it, but it always seems to want a part of me.

Socialism’s Prescient Critics

Philip Vander Elst

There is a good case to be made that the birth and spread of totalitarian socialism defines the twentieth century more than anything else. That is not what most schoolchildren are taught or what most people in the West believe, but it is a justifiable conclusion. Not only was totalitarian socialism directly responsible for provoking the bloodiest war in history; it has also been the biggest single cause of internal repression and mass murder in modern times.

According to The Black Book of Communism (1999), at least 94 million people were slaughtered by communist regimes during the twentieth century. This is a truly colossal figure, yet that’s the lowest estimate. Professor R.J. Rummel, in his landmark study, Death by Government (1996), puts the death toll from communism at over 105 million—and his detailed calculations do not include the human cost of communism in most of Eastern Europe or in Third World countries like Cuba and Mozambique. Even so, his figure is double the total number of casualties (military and civilian) killed on all sides during World War II.

The full horror of this totalitarian socialist holocaust cannot, of course, be adequately conveyed by these grim statistics. Behind them lies a desolate landscape of economic collapse, mass poverty, physical and mental torture, and broken lives and communities. In fact, nothing illustrates the destructive impact of totalitarian socialism more vividly than the tsunami of refugees it has generated in every continent on which it has taken root. Between 1945 and 1990, over 29 million men, women, and children voted against communism with their feet in Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America (for details and sources see my book Idealism Without Illusions: A Foreign Policy for Freedom, 1989). Had it not been for the landmines, border guards, and barbed wire lining their frontiers, the world’s communist states would have been emptied of their populations long before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

Totalitarian Logic

What provoked this vast tide of human despair? What was it that made life intolerable for most of the inhabitants of these socialist countries? The greatest Russian writer of the last century has given us the answer. To quote Alexander Solzhenitsyn:

Socialism begins by making all men equal in material matters. . . However the logical progression towards so-called ‘ideal’ equality inevitably implies the use of force. Furthermore it means that the basic element of personality—those elements which display too much variety in terms of education, ability, thought and feeling—must themselves be leveled out. . . Let me remind you that ‘forced labour’ is part of the programme of all prophets of Socialism, including the Communist Manifesto [1848]. There is no need to think of the Gulag Archipelago as an Asiatic distortion of a noble ideal. It is an irrevocable law. (Warning to the Western World)

It was, therefore, always predictable that by requiring the abolition of private property and the family, and monopolistic State ownership of agriculture and industry, the socialist pursuit of equality would necessarily produce the evil fruit of totalitarianism. One-party rule, the secret police, the imprisonment and torture of dissidents, concentration camps, mass executions, the political indoctrination of the young, the persecution of religious minorities—all these horrors have been the inevitable result of that concentration and monopolization of power that invariably corrupts the ruling elites and bureaucracies of all full-blown socialist societies. As an eminent Russian-born political scientist, the late Tibor Szamuely, wrote a generation ago in a pamphlet that should be read by the citizens of every civilized democracy: “How could it be otherwise? . . . How can there be any freedom when one’s livelihood from cradle to grave depends totally upon the State, which can with one hand give and with the other take away?” (Socialism and Liberty, 1977).

Unfortunately, left-wing intellectuals and other critics of free enterprise have always been reluctant to acknowledge the totalitarian logic of socialism, wedded as they are to a benevolent vision of the State and the dream of using its power to create a more just society. Consequently, despite all the evidence to date, many of them still pursue the phantom of “democratic socialism,” believing that democratic institutions can be relied on to prevent socialism from degenerating into tyranny.

The great classical-liberal thinkers of the nineteenth century, by contrast, harbored no such illusions. Every single one of them discerned the incompatibility of state socialism with the maintenance of free and democratic institutions. They did so, moreover, long before the advent of the socialist tyrannies of the twentieth century.

One of the earliest warnings was sounded by John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) more than 50 years before the Russian Revolution. In a now-famous passage in his essay On Liberty (1859), Mill declared:

If the roads, the railways, the banks, the insurance offices, the great joint-stock companies, the universities and the public charities, were all of them branches of the government; if, in addition, the municipal corporations and local boards, with all that now devolves on them, became departments of the central administration; if the employees of all these different enterprises were appointed and paid by the government, and looked to the government for every rise in life; not all the freedom of the press and popular constitution of the legislature would make this or any other country free other than in name.

As Mill understood, you cannot maintain freedom of speech and of the press, or freedom of assembly and association, if all the means of communication—newsprint, meeting halls, radio stations, and more—are in the hands of the State. It is equally impossible, in such conditions, for opposition parties to win elections, particularly since a State-controlled economy prevents them, in any case, from acquiring the capital to finance their campaigns. That is why democratic socialism is a contradiction in terms. Either socialism must be diluted or abandoned for the sake of democracy, or democracy (as well as liberty) will be sacrificed on the altar of socialism.

The Truth about Pre-Revolutionary Russia

What is so tragic about the Russian Revolution is that the triumph of communism in October 1917 aborted the embryo of a developing liberal society. As Szamuely points out,

[F]ew people in the West are aware of the extent of freedom in Tsarist Russia before the Revolution, in the early part of our century. It enjoyed full freedom of the press—censorship had been abolished, and even Bolshevik publications appeared without restrictions—full freedom of foreign travel, independent trade unions, independent courts, trial by jury . . . a parliament, a Duma with MPs representing parties of every political shade, including the Bolsheviks.

By the early 1920s, by contrast, all this had been swept away. To quote Solzhenitsyn’s summary of the first period of communist rule under Lenin:

It dispersed the [democratically elected] Constituent Assembly. . . It introduced execution without trial. It crushed workers’ strikes. It plundered the villagers to such an unbelievable extent that the peasants revolted, and when this happened it crushed the peasants in the bloodiest possible way. It shattered the Church. It reduced 20 provinces of our country to a condition of famine. (Solzhenitsyn: The Voice of Freedom, 1975)

Democratic socialists may object at this point that prerevolutionary Russia was not as free and democratic as Britain or the United States and that the cause of socialism was compromised by the Bolsheviks’ violent seizure of power. But even if Lenin had triumphed in a peaceful election, his subsequent takeover of the economy and nationalization of all previously independent institutions would eventually have produced the same totalitarian outcome.

The inherently despotic nature of socialism, so vividly confirmed by the history of the Russian Revolution and all subsequent socialist revolutions, was clearly perceived by Mill’s great Italian liberal contemporary, Joseph Mazzini (1805–1872). In an essay on “The Economic Question” written in 1858 and addressed to the workers of Italy, Mazzini not only defended private property as an institution essential to human progress and well-being; he also denounced socialism with passion:

The liberty, the dignity, the conscience of the individual would all disappear in an organization of productive machines. Physical life might be satisfied by it, but moral and intellectual life would perish, and with it emulation, free choice of work, free association, stimulus to production, joys of property, and all incentives to progress. Under such a system the human family would become a herd. . . Which of you would resign himself to such a system? (The Duties of Man, 1961)

In addition, Mazzini pointed out, the establishment of a socialist society would, ironically, create the very worst form of inequality, because universal State ownership would require the establishment of an all-powerful ruling bureaucracy. “Working-men, my Brothers,” he asked, “are you disposed to accept a hierarchy of lords and masters of the common property? . . . Is not this a return to ancient slavery?”

The prophetic discernment of the nineteenth-century classical-liberal critics of socialism is again very apparent in the writings of Frédéric Bastiat (1801–1850), the leading French economist and free-trade activist of his generation. A constant critic of statism in general, and socialism in particular, Bastiat summarized his objections in The Law, a short but lucid pamphlet published in 1850—the same decade, curiously enough, during which Mill and Mazzini raised their warning voices.

In this comprehensive analysis, Bastiat offered many valuable insights, of which three deserve particular mention. The first drew attention to a fatal contradiction within the ideology of democratic socialism, one which continues to characterize many of the attitudes of present-day European leftists and American “liberals.” On the one hand, complained Bastiat, socialists are passionately committed to the cause of democracy, insisting that all adults are responsible individuals who should have the vote and an equal share in all political decision-making; yet on the other, they consider the same sovereign people incapable of running their own lives without the intervention and supervision of all-powerful State officials. Bastiat wrote,

When it is time to vote, apparently the voter is not to be asked for any guarantee of his wisdom. His will and capacity to choose wisely are taken for granted. . . But when the [socialist] legislator is finally elected—ah! then indeed does the tone of his speech undergo a radical change. The people are returned to passiveness, inertness, and unconsciousness; the legislator enters into omnipotence. Now it is for him to initiate, to direct, to propel, and to organize.

As well as being arrogant, socialists were also deeply misguided, argued Bastiat, because they confused society with the State, and altruism with collectivism. As a result, he predicted, their economic program would only undermine the spirit of true fraternity and impoverish society, since moral and social progress depends on individual creativity and voluntary cooperation, not government planning and coercion. Finally, Bastiat pointed out, by concentrating all resources and decision-making in the State, socialism only offered a recipe for permanent social conflict and revolution, since it would arouse expectations that could never be satisfied, and encourage everyone to live at each other’s expense through the tax and benefit system.

The Second Generation of Anti-Socialist Critics

The intellectual assault on socialism mounted by Bastiat, Mazzini, and Mill in the middle of the nineteenth century was renewed by the next generation of classical-liberal thinkers in response to the rapid growth of socialist militancy throughout Europe during the 1880s and 1890s. During this period, its four leading figures in Britain—Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), Charles Bradlaugh (1833–1891), Auberon Herbert (1838–1906), and William E.H. Lecky (1838–1903)—condemned socialism with unsparing severity and prophetic insight.

“We object that the organization of all industry under State control must paralyze industrial energy and discourage and neutralize individual effort,” wrote Bradlaugh in 1884 (A Selection of the Political Pamphlets of Charles Bradlaugh, 1970). Lecky agreed with him, and wrote in 1896:

The desire of each man to improve his circumstances, to reap the full reward of superior talent, or energy, or thrift is the very mainspring of the production of the world. Take these motives away . . . cut off all the hopes that stimulate, among ordinary men, ambition, enterprise, invention, and self-sacrifice, and the whole level of production will rapidly and inevitably sink. (Democracy and Liberty)

And so it has proved in the twentieth century, as anyone who reads David Osterfeld’s “Socialism and Incentives” (The Freeman, November 1986) or Kevin Williamson’s book The Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism (2011) can see.

Bradlaugh’s and Lecky’s objections to socialism were of course not confined to its material destructiveness. They, too, like their classical-liberal predecessors, perceived its hostility to freedom and the family. Bradlaugh even predicted that the imposition of socialism would require the ideological reconditioning of the entire population—a phenomenon that has proved characteristic of all communist regimes, notably China before and during the Cultural Revolution, and North Korea today.

Herbert Spencer and Auberon Herbert showed equal foresight in their wide-ranging critiques of socialism. They not only underlined its incompatibility with liberty as eloquently as all their other comrades-in-arms; they also anticipated the terrible violence and cruelty to which it would give rise. In a passage horribly vindicated by the seemingly endless pattern of socialist revolution, dictatorship, and civil war in so much of the post-colonial Third World, Herbert declared in 1885:

In presence of unlimited power lodged in the hands of those who govern . . . the stakes for which men played would be so terribly great that they would shrink from no means to keep power out of the hands of their opponents. (The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State)

With similar prescience, Spencer wrote in 1891:

The fanatical adherents of a social theory are capable of taking any measures, no matter how extreme, for carrying out their views: holding, like the merciless priesthoods of past times, that the end justifies the means. And when a general socialistic organization has been established, the vast, ramified, and consolidated body of those who direct its activities, using without check whatever coercion seems to them needful . . . [will exercise] a tyranny more gigantic and more terrible than any which the world has seen. (The Man versus the State)

It is a historic tragedy that all these warnings fell on deaf ears. Will they be heeded by those pressing for world government in the twenty-first century?

Snowstorms or Snowflakes?

Lawrence W. Reed

There are two basic prisms through which we can see, study, and prescribe for human society: individualism and collectivism. These worldviews are as different as night and day, and they create a great divide in the social sciences. That’s because the perspective from which you see the world will set your thinking down one intellectual path or another.

No Two Alike

I think of it as the difference between snowstorms and snowflakes. A collectivist sees humanity as a snowstorm, and that’s as up-close as he gets if he’s consistent. An individualist sees the storm, too, but is immediately drawn to the uniqueness of each snowflake that composes it. The distinction is fraught with profound implications.

No two snowstorms are alike, but a far more amazing fact is that no two snowflakes are identical either—at least so far as painstaking research has indicated. Wilson Alwyn Bentley of Jericho, Vermont, one of the first known snowflake photographers, developed a process in 1885 for capturing them on black velvet before they melted. He snapped pictures of about 5,000 of them and never found two that were the same—nor has anyone else ever since. Scientists believe that changes in humidity, temperature, and other conditions extant as flakes form and fall make it highly unlikely that any one flake has ever been precisely duplicated. (Ironically, Bentley died of pneumonia in 1931 after walking six miles in a blizzard. Lesson: One flake may be harmless, but a lot of them can be deadly).

Contemplate this long enough and you may never see a snowstorm (or humanity) the same way again.

Dr. Anne Bradley is Vice President of Economic Initiatives at the Institute for Faith, Work and Economics. At a recent FEE seminar in Naples, Florida, she explained matters this way:

When we look at a snowstorm from a distance, it looks like indistinguishable white dots peppering the sky, one blending into the next. When we get an up-close glimpse, we see how intricate, beautiful, and dissimilar each and every snowflake is. This is helpful when thinking about humans. From a distance, a large crowd of people might look the same, and it’s true that we possess many similar characteristics. But we know that a more focused inspection brings us nearer to the true nature of what we’re looking at. It reveals that each of us bears a unique set of skills, talents, ambitions, traits, and propensities unmatched anywhere on the planet.

This uniqueness is critical when we make policy decisions and offer prescriptions for society as a whole; for even though we each look the same in certain respects, we are actually so different, one to the next, that our sameness can only be a secondary consideration.

Primary Uniqueness

The late Roger J. Williams, author of You Are Extra-Ordinary and Free and Unequal: The Biological Basis of Individual Liberty (as well as several articles in The Freeman), was a noted biochemistry professor at the University of Texas in Austin. He argued that fingerprints are but one of endless biological characteristics unique to each of us, including the contours and operation of our brains, nerve receptors, and circulatory systems.

These facts offer a biological basis for the many other differences between one person and the next. Einstein, he noted, was an extremely precocious student of mathematics, but he learned language so slowly that his parents were concerned about his learning to talk. Williams summed it up well more than 40 years ago when he observed, “Our individuality is as inescapable as our humanity. If we are to plan for people, we must plan for individuals, because that’s the only kind of people there are.”

Proceeding one step further, we must recognize that only individuals plan. When collectives are said to “plan” (e.g., “The nation plans to go to war”), it always reduces to certain specific, identifiable individuals making plans for other individuals. The only good answer to the collectivist question, “What does America eat for breakfast?” is this: “Nothing. However, about 315 million individual Americans often eat breakfast. Many of them sometimes skip it, and on any given day, there are 315 million distinct answers to this question.”

Collectivist thinking is simply not very deep or thorough. Collectivists see the world the way Mr. Magoo did—as one big blur. But unlike Mr. Magoo, they’re not funny. They homogenize people in a communal blender, sacrificing the discrete features that make us who we are. The collectivist “it takes a village” mentality assigns thoughts and opinions to amorphous groups, when, in fact, only particular people hold thoughts and opinions.

Collectivists devise one-size-fits-all schemes and care little for how those schemes may affect the varied plans of real people. Any one flake means little or nothing to the collectivist because he rarely looks at them; and in any event, he implicitly dismisses the flakes because there are so many to play with. Collectivists are usually reluctant to celebrate the achievements of individuals per se because they really believe that, to quote President Obama, “You didn’t build that.”

Take individuals out of the equation and you take the humanity out of whatever you’re promoting. What you’d never personally inflict on your neighbor, one on one, you might happily sanction if you think it’ll be carried out by some faceless collective entity to some amorphous blob on behalf of some nebulous “common good.” The inescapable fact is that we are not interchangeable. Cogs in a machine are, but people most emphatically are not.

If this point is lost on you, then watch the 1998 DreamWorks animated film Antz. The setting is an ant colony in which all ants are expected to behave as an obedient blob. This is very convenient for the tyrant ants in charge, each of which possesses a very unique personality indeed. The debilitating collectivist mindset is shaken by a single ant who marches to a different drummer—namely, his own self—and ultimately saves the colony through his individual initiative.

Marx, Mother Theresa, and Lessons

Karl Marx was a collectivist. Mother Theresa was an individualist. One dealt with people in lumps. The other one treated them as individuals. The lessons in that clear-cut dichotomy are legion. They are ignored only at great peril.

If your answer is the latter, then you understand what the philosopher and historian Isaiah Berlin meant when he wrote in 1958, “But to manipulate men, to propel them toward goals which you—the social reformers—see, but they may not, is to deny their human essence, to treat them as objects without wills of their own, and therefore to degrade them.”

The Significance of Mises’s “Socialism”

Peter J. Boettke

That Ludwig von Mises was one of the greatest economists of the twentieth century should never be doubted. Mises never worked in scientific or popular obscurity, despite the various mythologies that are told on both left and right. Prior to World War I, Mises had established himself as a leading economic theorist among the younger generation in German-language economics, and, in fact, in Continental Europe more widely, with The Theory of Money and Credit (1912). During the subsequent interwar years of the 1920s and 1930s, Mises’s reputation as a theorist and methodologist spread internationally.

Leading economic thinkers in England (such as Lionel Robbins) and in the United States (such as Frank Knight) came to closely study Mises’s contributions to economic science and engage his ideas critically. During this time, Mises’s reputation as an outstanding teacher and mentor of young economists grew as the success of his students—such as F.A. Hayek, Fritz Machlup, Oskar Morgenstern, Gottfried Haberler, Felix Kaufman, and Alfred Schutz—spread out from the German-language scientific community throughout Europe and eventually to the international scientific community. In fact, as Henry Simons once remarked in his review of Omnipotent Government in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, “Professor Mises, patriarch of the modern Austrian School, is the greatest living teacher of economics—if one may judge by the contributions of his many distinguished students and proteges.”

It is important to remind the reader of Mises’s status as an economic thinker because this book, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, played a major role in establishing that reputation. In his article “Bertil Ohlin,” Paul Samuelson speculated that, had the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences been established when the other prizes were, Mises would have been one of the early recipients.

Even though that recognition would elude him in his lifetime, Mises was named a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association in 1969 and received his native country’s highest honor for scientific achievement. But Mises’s status as an eminent economist is also evidenced by the fact that he is invoked in various well-known and iconic works, such as Albert Hirschman’s The Passions and the Interests or John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society, as the quintessential twentieth century representative of the laissez-faire position.

Samuelson’s speculation is based on Mises’s contributions to technical economics in value theory, capital theory, and monetary theory. The acknowledgments from the likes of Hirschman and Galbraith are due to Mises’s contributions to social philosophy. What is most fascinating about Socialism is that both these aspects of Mises’s body of thought are on full, and brilliant, display. As Hayek has pointed out in his forward to Socialism, this book changed the minds of an entire generation of economists. Simply put, Socialism is as bold and brilliant of a book as has ever been penned in the fields of economics and political economy.

A Classic in Our Time

Though the book first appeared in English in 1932, Henry Hazlitt eventually published a review in the New York Times on January 9, 1938, and states, “No open-minded reader can fail to be impressed by the closeness of the author’s reasoning, the rigor of his logic, the power and unity of his thought.” Hazlitt goes on to argue that Mises provides the most damaging analysis of the socialist philosophy available in the literature. He stresses that Socialism, while grounded in technical economics, tackles a wider literature and addresses all the arguments that have been marshaled against capitalism and in favor of socialism. And, in Hazlitt’s judgment, Mises “does this with such power, brilliance, and completeness that this book must rank as the most devastating analysis of socialism yet penned.” Socialism, Hazlitt declares, is “an economic classic in our time.”

There are two reasons why this judgment is reached—historical context and analytical acuteness. The intellectual zeitgeist of the early twentieth century exhibited a revolutionary fervor for the idea of socialism. As Mises states in the very first sentences of this book,

Socialism is the watchword and catchword of our day. The socialist idea dominates the modern spirit. The masses approve it. It expresses the thoughts and feelings of all; it has set its seal upon our time.

Socialism as a social philosophy was able to tap into a dream-aspiration that was deeply embedded in the human psyche. Socialism promised to rid the world of social ills and usher in an era of peace and harmony. The promise made was that “Paradise on Earth” was within our collective will. The exploitation of man by man would be abolished, and, for the first time in human history, a just social world would be in the grasp of mortals here on earth. Religious and secular thinkers alike were intellectually seduced by the socialist vision of ending exploitation by transcending alienation and realizing true social harmony as class warfare would disappear.

In his memoirs, Notes and Recollections, Mises discusses how he arrived at his analysis and why he stressed the strictly scientific nature of his argument in his examination of socialism and systems of social cooperation more generally.

In my publications on social cooperation I have spent much time and effort in dispute against socialist and interventionists of all varieties and trends. . . . It has been objected that I failed to consider the psychological aspects of the organization problem. Man has a soul, and this soul is said to be uncomfortable in a capitalist system; and that there also is willingness to suffer reduction in the living standards in exchange for a more satisfactory labor and employment structure for society.

But, Mises insists,

It is important, first, to determine whether this argument—let us call it the “heart [or emotional] argument”—is incongruent with the original argument which we may call the “head [or intellectual] argument” still being promoted by socialist and interventionists. The latter socialist argument endeavors to justify its programs with the assertion that capitalism reduces the full development of productive capabilities; production is less than the potential. Socialist production methods are expected to increase output immeasurably, and thereby create the conditions necessary for plentiful provision for everybody.

Mises concludes this discussion by stressing again the role that reason plays in human affairs:

To judge the heart argument, it is of course important to inquire into the extent of the reduction in economic well-being brought about by adopting a socialist production system. . . . [Socialists argue that] Economics is . . . unable to settle the dispute.

But,

I dealt with this problem in a way that discredits the use of the heart argument. . . . I have never denied that emotional arguments explain the popularity of anti-capitalist policies. But unsuitable proposals and measures cannot be made suitable by such psychic nonsense.

Mises’s analysis of systems of social cooperation is based on a strict scientific approach of means-ends analysis. While he may have severely disagreed with the ends sought by collectivists, Mises did not focus his efforts as an economist in that direction. He was deeply committed to the ideal of value-free economic science. In that vision of scientific analysis, the economist’s task is to concentrate their critical analysis of the effectiveness of chosen means to the attainment of given ends.

Arguing from the Head to Appeal to the Heart

With regard to socialist proposals, this meant that the examination was about whether collective ownership of the means of production (the means chosen) would be effective at realizing the ends sought (the rationalization of production and the ensuing burst of productive capacity that would enable the social harmony promised). As I just pointed out, Mises did not engage the “heart argument” directly, but instead sought to address the “head argument” to temper the appeal of the “heart.”

All the dream-aspirations in the world cannot curtail the fundamental problem with socialist organization that Mises had scientifically dissected. Hazlitt pinpointed this in his review:

The greatest difficulty to the realization of socialism in Mises’s view, in short, is intellectual. It is not a mere matter of goodwill, or of willingness to cooperate energetically without personal reward. “Even angels, if they were endowed only with human reason, could not form a socialistic community.”

Socialism must forego the intellectual division of labor that economic calculation enables under a private-property market economy. As Mises puts it in Liberalism,

This is the decisive objection that economics raises against the possibility of a socialist society. It must forego the intellectual division of labor that consists in the cooperation of all entrepreneurs, landowners, and workers as producers and consumers in the formation of market prices. But without it, rationality, i.e., the possibility of economic calculation, is unthinkable.

Capitalism, in other words, is able to solve the problem of economic calculation and achieve the complex coordination of exchange and production activity.

The argument Mises provides is straightforward. Without private ownership in the means of production, there will not be a market in the means of production. Without a market for the means of production, there will not be monetary prices established on the market (which reflect the exchange ratios, or relative trade-offs people are willing to make). And, without monetary prices, reflecting the relative scarcities of different goods and services, there will be no way for economic decision-makers to engage in rational economic calculation.

Rational economic calculation is impossible in a world without private property rights and the monetary prices that emerge within the competitive market process. By definition, socialism eliminates the basis of the market economy, i.e., private property in the means of production; the system must find some other mechanism to serve the role that economic calculation plays in the market process. Without the ability to engage in rational economic calculation, economic decision-makers will be stumbling and bumbling in the dark. As Mises puts it, without economic calculation, “all production by lengthy and roundabout processes would be so many steps in the dark.”

The reason why this objection is so decisive is because it requires the reader to consider explicitly how much they take for granted, given that they live within a market economy where so much of the necessary foundation for social cooperation under the division of labor is simply part of the background of our mundane economic existence. But besides exploding popular fallacies, one of the other main tasks of the economist is to unlock the mystery of the mundane to students and citizens.

The Role of Economic Calculation

John Maynard Keynes famously argued in The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money that within the capitalist economy, economic decision-makers were ensnared in the “dark forces of time and ignorance.” According to Keynes, the speculative nature of our future economic endeavors is prone to significant coordination problems when savings and investments are decoupled, and economic instability can result in mass unemployment.

Unlike the socialist critique of capitalism that is the subject of Mises’s Socialism, Keynes’s critique of the macroeconomic instability of capitalism is a variant of the interventionist critique that Mises deals with in works such as Human Action. But putting aside their critical and significant difference, Mises does not actually deny the situation that Keynes identified.

Economic decision-makers in a capitalist economy must always act with respect to production in an uncertain world and within the complexities of a modern monetary economy. Realizing the great benefits from social cooperation under the division of labor depends on the ability of the social system to coordinate the dispersed activities of thousands, perhaps millions, of individuals. But this is precisely why Mises put so much emphasis on economic calculation.

The private property market economy generates prices that guide decisions, and profit-and-loss accounting provide the necessary feedback to the shuffling and reshuffling of resources and time among alternative opportunities. Monetary calculation is never perfect in guiding us through the sea of economic change, but it does enable us to navigate those sometimes-turbulent waters. It provides a guide amid the bewildering throng of economic possibilities. It enables us to extend judgments of value which directly apply only to consumption goods—or, at best, to production goods of the lowest order—to all goods of higher orders.

In short, the ability to engage in economic calculation allows us to pierce through that dark fog of time and ignorance, and organize economic activity in as rational a manner as is humanly possible. Absent that ability to rationally calculate, rational economic organization is not possible.

Economic calculation is what enables decision-makers within the market as a whole to sort through the numerous array of technologically feasible projects and select only those projects that are economical. As Mises puts it,

But the real business of economic administration, the adaptation of means to ends only begins when such a decision is taken [i.e., choosing between alternatives, including alternative methods of production]. And only economics calculation makes this adaptation possible. Without such assistance, in the bewildering chaos of alternative materials and processes, the human mind would be at a complete loss. Whenever we had to decide between different processes or different centres of production, we would be entirely at sea.

The economic problem is not one of ascertaining the technological possibilities and efficiency of certain machinery of production. Instead, the economic problem is one of coordinating the plans of individuals within the economy through time, and to do so in such a way that the production plans of some mesh with the consumption demands of others, and the mutual gains from exchange tend toward exhaustion.

“Without calculation,” Mises writes,

economic activity is impossible. Since under Socialism economic calculation is impossible, under Socialism there can be no economic activity in our sense of the word. In small and insignificant things rational action might still persist. But, for the most part, is would no longer be possible to speak of rational production. In the absence of criteria of rationality, production could not be consciously economical.

Economic Practicality

The political economists—classical as well as modern—do address questions of the conditions that constitute a “good society.” But they insist that there are technical economic principles that must be incorporated into the analysis of philosophical assessments of social systems.

Critics of economics say that economists know the price of everything but the value of nothing. Nothing, perhaps, is so intellectually dangerous in the policy sciences as an economist who knows only economics, except, I would add, a moral philosopher who knows no economics at all.

Mises is in some fundamental sense asking a very basic question: “Look comrades, these plans for a rationally planned economy that ushers in a new world order are beautiful and all that, but can you explain to me precisely how the chickens will end up on the workers’ dinner tables so they will be fed?”

In other words, how is this economic system going to work at a very basic level to deliver the goods and services in a reasonably efficient manner? The “rationalization” of production cannot possibly be a project rife with endemic waste caused by confusion. But that is precisely what Mises is challenging the socialist idea with. The consequences of their chosen means (collective ownership in the means of production) mean that they will be unable to realize their stated end (rationalization of production and the harmony of social relations) precisely because the means are incoherent with regard to the ends sought.

The dream-aspiration of socialism crashes against the hard rock of economic reality. Nobody has stated the ultimate disillusionment that socialism must result in more clearly than Mises, because, ironically, nobody has stated the aspirations as sympathetically and demonstrated the implications of economic critique so forcefully as Mises.

It is important to always remember the distinction Mises used between “heart arguments” and “head arguments,” and we must always learn to temper our “heart” with the rational analysis of the “head” if we want to make progress in the sciences of man. Mises is a master economic theorist and critical thinker at his best, doing what great economists do.

With that in mind, the readers should prepare themselves for an amazing intellectual adventure with Socialism. Mises’s critique is comprehensive and addresses not only the hard-boiled socialism of Marxism and central planning of the Soviet variety, he also addresses syndicalism and cooperatives, as well as Christian socialism. Basically, every form of socialism that has been advocated is addressed and shown to be wanting on its own terms. And, while he would revisit the various attempts to refute his “impossibility” thesis at greater length in Human Action, Mises does anticipate and counter several of the most important ideas of the economics of socialism within Socialism. In the process, he deals not only with the critical ideas of monopoly, instability, and inequality, but also the proper role of equilibrium in economic theorizing, the role of mathematics in economic analysis, and the suitability of efforts to employ pseudo or artificial markets to solve the coordination problem that socialist planning must confront.

The Capitalist Market Achievement

Embedded in this devastating critique of socialism is a nuanced and brilliant defense of the private-property, free-market economy. Mises’s understanding of the market economy was refined through this diagnosis of the efforts to critique the capitalist system made throughout socialist and interventionist thought. What socialism cannot achieve, capitalism achieves every day.

By thoroughly studying the implications of why a system that abolished private ownership in the means of production would prove unworkable due to the inability to engage in economic calculation, Mises was able to highlight why property, prices, profit, and loss are such essential institutions to the coordination of economic activity within a capitalist system. Prices without property are an illusion, and entrepreneurship without profits is game-playing.

The problem with socialism is neither managerial motivation nor incentivizing labor, however difficult those problems may be. The problem is one that will confront even the well-meaning and self-motivated: absent the context of the competitive market economy, the knowledge necessary to engage in the required economic calculations will be absent. In critiquing those who believe they have found a substitute for the competitive market process, Mises inadvertently sows the seeds for a mature understanding of the entrepreneurial market process. In short, one of the key characteristic contributions of the modern Austrian school of economics to twentieth-century economic science takes shape in the debate over socialist calculation.

But hasn’t this debate really been dead since 1989 and 1991?

Soviet-style central planning is perhaps not the rallying call it once was, but, as Mises shows throughout Socialism, the ideas that socialist thinkers deployed in criticizing capitalism permeate our intellectual culture, including the economics profession. Criticisms of monopoly power, capitalist speculation, and unequal income distribution exist throughout. And the offered remedies often—not always—demonstrate the same incomprehension of the intricate web of economic activity that is strung together by the incentives, information, and innovation that are produced by property, prices, profit, and loss.

The functioning of the system as a whole mechanism is often overlooked. The reader of Socialism will be surprised, as they go through the book, how many old ideas of socialist thinkers have become presumptions in our political dialogue, and how many of Mises’s astute criticisms of popular fallacies apply to today in the realm of public policy.

Mises’s Technicalities

One final note on Mises’s use of language. The careful student of Mises will not see the word “praxeology” in Socialism; instead, the word “sociology” is used. Don’t be alarmed. Mises was a practicing praxeologist throughout his career. In 1922 (and then again in 1932 when the book appeared in English) Mises did not yet use the term praxeology. He still thought he was working within the broadly speaking Weberian tradition of interpretative sociology for the general theory of human action and the more narrowly developed branch of that broader science—economics—where he is following in the footsteps of Menger and Böhm-Bawerk. Mises was compelled to shift to the term praxeology and abandon the Weberian terminology of sociology to capture his understanding of the general science of human action because of the way that sociology had developed during the interwar years under the influence of Durkheim.

The careful student of Hayek and his critique of socialism may also wonder where Mises’s critique of rational constructivism and defense of spontaneous order is in his critique of socialism. But the failure to see his argument against constructivism and in support of spontaneous order is to not read the text closely. Of course, there are differences between Mises and Hayek—in fact, significant ones that should be debated. But their similarities in thought on the fundamental issues in sociology and economics, and the problems raised in the socialist-calculation debate, should be acknowledged and are important to stress.

As mentioned already, the critical idea to Mises in social organization is cooperation under the division of labor. Without economic calculation, the economic system cannot achieve the complex coordination of the division of labor, and thus cannot realize the benefits of social cooperation. Mises’s emphasis on the intellectual division of labor is later elaborated on in Hayek’s discussion of the division of knowledge in society. The presentations no doubt differ in emphasis, but there should be little doubt that they are in the same intellectual vein.

A similar argument can be made for Mises and Hayek on the spontaneous order of the market economy. Mises’s analytical focus is on the purposive nature of human action, whereas Hayek can be read as focusing on the unintended consequences of human action. But the careful student of Hayek must remember that he stressed the phraseology of the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, “Of human action, but not of human design”—and Hayek constantly drew inspiration in this endeavor from Carl Menger, who argued that the most important problems in the social sciences are associated with asking the question, “How can it be that institutions which serve the common welfare and are extremely significant for its development come into being without a common will directed toward establishing them?”

The careful student of Mises is directed to closely read the section in Socialism where he contrasts organism and organization. Organization is the direct design and administration of the social order, whereas organism refers to the unplanned order. As Mises says,

Organization is an association based on authority, organism is mutuality. The primitive thinker always sees things as having been organized from outside, never having grown themselves, organically. (emphasis added)

But, Mises continues,

In recognizing the nature of organism and sweeping away the exclusiveness of the concept of organization, science made one of its great steps forward. With all deference to earlier thinkers one may say that in the domain of Social Science this was achieved mainly in the eighteenth century, and that Classical Political Economy and its immediate precursors played the chief part.

In other words, it is Adam Smith and his contemporaries who made possible the scientific advancement of sociology and economics that Mises is working within, and contributing so vitally to, with his analysis in Socialism.

Mises was indeed among the greatest economic thinkers of the twentieth century. His contributions are justly recognized in value theory, capital theory, monetary theory, comparative economic systems, and the methodology of economic science. Each new generation must read his works anew and focus on how his work remains such a vital contribution to the “extended present” that constitutes the conversation over the centuries in the “worldly philosophy.”

Mises rises above others precisely because he was both an astute technical economist and a bold social philosopher. Socialism puts those skills on display on every page. I have been reading this book since I was a college student in the early 1980s, and I have been teaching the book every year since I started my college teaching career in the late 1980s. I learn something new every time I read it. I encourage the reader to do the same. As Henry Hazlitt said in his review, Socialism is an “economic classic in our time.” My only modification would be that the test of time has demonstrated that it is, in fact, an economic classic for all time.

Where Are the Omelets?

Lawrence W. Reed

On ne saurait faire une omelette sans casser des oeufs.

Translation: “One can’t expect to make an omelet without breaking eggs.”

With those words in 1790, Maximilian Robespierre welcomed the horrific French Revolution that had begun the year before. A consummate statist who worked tirelessly to plan the lives of others, he would become the architect of the Revolution’s bloodiest phase—the Reign of Terror of 1793–94. Robespierre and his guillotine broke eggs by the thousands in a vain effort to impose a utopian society based on the seductive slogan “liberté, égalité, fraternité.”

But, alas, Robespierre never made a single omelet. Nor did any of the other thugs who held power in the decade after 1789. They left France in moral, political, and economic ruin, and ripe for the dictatorship of Napoleon Bonaparte.

As with Robespierre, no omelets came from the egg-breaking efforts of Lenin, Mao, Pol Pot, Adolf Hitler, and Benito Mussolini, either.

The French experience is one example in a disturbingly familiar pattern. Call them what you will—leftists, utopian socialists, radical interventionists, collectivists, or statists—history is littered with their presumptuous plans for rearranging society to fit their vision of “the common good,” plans that always fail as they kill or impoverish other people in the process. If socialism ever earns a final epitaph, it will be this: “Here lies a contrivance engineered by know-it-alls and busybodies who broke eggs with abandon but never, ever created an omelet.”

Every collectivist experiment of the twentieth century was heralded as the Promised Land by statist philosophers. “I have seen the future and it works,” the intellectual Lincoln Steffens said after a visit to Uncle Joe Stalin’s Soviet Union. In the New Yorker in 1984, John Kenneth Galbraith argued that the Soviet Union was making great economic progress in part because the socialist system made “full use” of its manpower, in contrast to the less efficient capitalist West.

But an authoritative 846-page study published in 1997, The Black Book of Communism, estimated that the communist ideology claimed 20 million lives in the “workers’ paradise.” Similarly, The Black Book documented the death tolls in other communist lands: 45 to 72 million in China, between 1.3 million and 2.3 million in Cambodia, 2 million in North Korea, 1.7 million in Africa, 1.5 million in Afghanistan, 1 million in Vietnam, 1 million in Eastern Europe, and 150,000 in Latin America.

Vast and Incompetent Bureaucracies

Additionally, all of those murderous regimes were economic basket cases; they squandered resources on the police and military, built vast and incompetent bureaucracies, and produced almost nothing for which there was a market beyond their borders. They didn’t make “full use” of anything except police power. In every single communist country the world over, the story has been the same: lots of broken eggs, no omelets. No exceptions.

F.A. Hayek explained this inevitable outcome in his seminal work, The Road to Serfdom, in 1944. All efforts to displace individual plans with central planning, he warned us, must end in disaster and dictatorship. No lofty vision can vindicate the use of the brute force necessary to attain it. “The principle that the end justifies the means,” wrote Hayek, “is in individualist ethics regarded as the denial of all morals. In collectivist ethics it becomes necessarily the supreme rule.”

The worst crimes of the worst statists are often minimized or dismissed by their less-radical intellectual brethren as the “excesses” of men and women who otherwise had good intentions. These apologists reject the iron fist and claim that the State can achieve their egalitarian and collectivist goals with a velvet glove.

But whether it is the Swedish “middle way,” Yugoslavian “worker socialism,” or British Fabianism, the result has been the same: broken eggs, but no omelets.

Have you ever noticed how statists are constantly “reforming” their own handiwork? Education reform. Health care reform. Welfare reform. Tax reform. The very fact that they’re always busy “reforming” is an implicit admission that they didn’t get it right the first 50 times.

The list is endless: Canadian health care, European welfarism, Argentine Peronism, African postcolonial socialism, Cuban communism, on and on ad infinitum. Nowhere in the world has the statist impulse produced an omelet. Everywhere, it yields the same: eggs beaten, fried, and scrambled. People worse off than before, impoverished and looking elsewhere for answers and escape. Economies ruined. Freedoms extinguished.

It is a telling conclusion that statists have no successful model to point to, no omelet they can hold up as the pièce de résistance of their cuisine. Not so for those of us who believe in freedom. Indeed, economists James Gwartney, Robert Lawson, and Walter Block in their survey, Economic Freedom of the World: 1975–1995, conclude that:

No country with a persistently high economic freedom rating during the two decades failed to achieve a high level of income. In contrast, no country with a persistently low rating was able to achieve even middle income status. . . The countries with the largest increases in economic freedom during the period achieved impressive growth rates.

Perhaps no one explained the lesson of all this better than the French economist and statesman Frédéric Bastiat more than 150 years ago:

And now that the legislators and do-gooders have so futilely inflicted so many systems upon society, may they finally end where they should have begun: May they reject all systems, and try liberty; for liberty is an acknowledgment of faith in God and His works.

Why Socialism Is Impossible

Richard M. Ebeling

In the nineteenth century, critics of socialism generally made two arguments against the establishment of a collectivist society. First, they warned that under a regime of comprehensive socialism the ordinary citizen would be confronted with the worst of all imaginable tyrannies. In a world in which all the means of production were concentrated in the hands of the government, the individual would be totally and inescapably dependent on the political authority for his very existence.

The socialist state would be the single monopoly provider of employment and all the essentials of life. Dissent from or disobedience to such an all-powerful state could mean material destitution for the critic of those in political authority. Furthermore, that same centralized control would mean the end to all independent intellectual and cultural pursuits. What would be printed and published, what forms of art and scientific research permitted, would be completely at the discretion of those with the power to determine the allocation of society’s resources. Man’s mind and material well-being would be enslaved to the control and caprice of the central planners of the socialist state.

Second, these nineteenth-century anti-socialists argued that the socialization of the means of production would undermine and fundamentally weaken the close connection between work and reward that necessarily exists under a system of private property. What incentive does a man have to clear the field, plant the seed, and tend the ground until harvest time if he knows or fears that the product to which he devotes his mental and physical labor may be stolen from him at any time?

Similarly, under socialism man would no longer see any direct benefit from greater effort, since what would be apportioned to him as his “fair share” by the state would not be related to his exertion, unlike the rewards in a market economy. Laziness and lack of interest would envelop the “new man” in the socialist society to come. Productivity, innovation, and creativity would be dramatically reduced in the future collectivist utopia.

The twentieth-century experiences with socialism, beginning with the communist revolution in Russia in 1917, proved these critics right. Personal freedom and virtually all traditional civil liberties were crushed under the centralized power of the Total State. Furthermore, the work ethic of man under socialism was captured in a phrase that became notoriously common throughout the Soviet Union: “They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work.”

The defenders of socialism responded by arguing that Lenin’s and Stalin’s Russia, Hitler’s National Socialist Germany, and Mao’s China were not “true” socialism. A true socialist society would mean more freedom, not less, so it was unfair to judge socialism by these supposedly twisted experiments in creating a workers’ paradise. Furthermore, under a true socialism, human nature would change, and men would no longer be motivated by self-interest but by a desire to selflessly advance the common good.

In the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, the Austrian economists, most notably Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich A. Hayek, advanced a uniquely different argument against a socialist society. They, Mises, in particular, accepted for the sake of argument that the socialist society would be led by men who had no wish to abuse their power and crush or abrogate freedom, and further, that the same motives for work would prevail under socialism as under private property in the market economy.

Even with these assumptions, Mises and Hayek devastatingly demonstrated that comprehensive socialist central planning would create economic chaos. Well into the twentieth century, socialism had always meant the abolition of private property in the means of production, the end of market competition by private entrepreneurs for land, capital, and labor, and, therefore, the elimination of market-generated prices for finished goods and the factors of production, including the wages of labor.

Yet, without such a competitively generated system of market prices, Mises argued, there would be no method for rational economic calculation to determine the least-cost methods of production or the relative profitability of producing alternative goods and services to best satisfy the wants of the consuming public. It may be possible to determine the technologically most efficient way to produce some good, but this does not tell us whether that particular method of production is the most economically efficient way to do it.

Mises explained this in many different ways, but we can imagine a plan to construct a railway through a mountain. Should the lining of the railway tunnel be constructed with platinum (a highly durable material) or with reinforced concrete? The answer to that question depends on the value of the two materials in their alternative uses. And this can be determined only through knowing what people would be willing to pay for these resources on the market, given competing demand and uses.

Prices Encapsulate People’s Valuations

On the free market, private entrepreneurs express their demand through the prices they are willing to pay for land, capital, resources, and labor. The entrepreneurs’ bidding is guided by their anticipation of the demand and prices consumers may be willing to pay for the goods and services that can be produced with those factors of production. The resulting market prices encapsulate the estimates of millions of consumers and producers concerning the value and opportunity costs of finished goods and the scarce resources, capital, and labor of the society.

But under comprehensive socialist central planning, there would be no institutional mechanism to discover these values and opportunity costs. With the abolition of private ownership in the means of production, no resources could be purchased or hired. There would be no bids and offers expressing what the members of society thought the resources were worth in their alternative employments. And without bids and offers, there would be no exchanges, out of which emerges the market structure of relative prices. Thus socialist planning meant the end of all economic rationality, Mises said—if by rationality we mean an economically efficient use of the means of production to produce the goods and services desired by the members of society.

Given that nothing ever stands still—that consumer demand, the supply of resources and labor, and technological knowledge are continually changing—a socialist planned economy would be left without the rudder of economic calculation to determine whether what was being produced and how was most cost-effective and profitable.

Neither Mises nor Hayek ever denied that a socialist society could exist or even survive for an extended period of time. Indeed, Mises emphasized that in a world that was only partly socialist, the central planners would have a price system to rely on by proxy, that is, by copying the market prices in countries where competitive capitalism still prevailed. But even this would only be of approximate value since the supply-and-demand conditions in a socialist society would not be a one-to-one replica of the market conditions in a neighboring capitalist society.

Socialist and even some pro-market critics of Mises have sometimes ridiculed his supposed extreme language that socialism is “impossible.” But by “impossible,” Mises simply meant to refute the socialist claim in the Nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that a comprehensive centrally-planned economy would not merely generate the same quantity and quality of goods and services as a competitive market economy, but would far exceed it. Socialism could not create the material paradise on earth the socialists had promised. The institutional means (central planning) that they proposed to achieve their stated ends (a greater material prosperity than under capitalism) would instead lead to an outcome radically opposite to what they said they wanted to achieve.

Mises emphasized that a socialist society also would lack the consumer-oriented activities of private entrepreneurs. In the market economy, profits can be earned only if the means of production are used to serve consumers. Thus in their own self-interest, private entrepreneurs are driven to apply their knowledge, ability, and “reading” of the market’s direction in the most effective way, in comparison to their rivals who are also trying to capture the business of the buying public.

Certainly, incentives motivate the private entrepreneur. If he fails to do better than his rivals, his income will diminish and he may eventually go out of business. But the private entrepreneur, as much as the central planner, would be “flying blind” if he could not function within a market order with its network of competitive prices.

Thus, for Austrian economists like Mises, economic calculation is the benchmark by which to judge whether socialist central planning is a viable alternative to the free-market economy. Without market prices, there can be neither economic calculation nor the social coordination of multitudes of individual consumers and producers with their diverse demands, localized knowledge, and appraisements of their individual circumstances.

Central Planning versus Rational Planning

The pricing system is what gives rationality—an efficient use of resources—and direction to society’s activities in the division of labor, so that the means at people’s disposal may be successfully applied to their various ends. Central planning means the end to rational planning by both the central planners and the members of society since the abolition of a market price system leaves them without the compass of economic calculation to guide them along their way.

In the Soviet Union, for example, the older criticisms of collectivism were verified. The Total State did create a cruel, brutal, and murderous tyranny. And the abolition of private property resulted in weakened and often perverse incentives, in which individual access to wealth, position, and power came through membership in the Communist Party and status within the bureaucratic hierarchy.

In reality, the rulers of the communist countries had other ends than that of the material and cultural improvement of those over whom they ruled. They pursued personal power and privilege, as well as various ideologically motivated goals. They artificially set prices for both consumer goods and resources at levels that had no relationship to their actual demand or scarcity. As a consequence, the degree of misuse of resources was such that virtually all manufacturing or industrial projects in the Soviet Union used up far more raw materials and labor hours per unit of output than anything comparable in the more market-oriented Western economies.

The chaos of the Soviet economy was centered on the lack of a real price system and, therefore, a method of economic calculation. There could not be a real price system in the Soviet Union because it would have required the reversal of the very rationale for the socialist system on which the Soviet rulers’ power was based—government control and central planning of production. And they could not set their network of artificial prices at levels comparable to those in some Western countries because it would have made clear just how misguided their entire planning and distribution process actually was.

Thus, along with the inherent irrationality of the central planning system due to the lack of real prices were the weakened incentives for the ordinary Soviet citizen to be industrious and creative in the official economy, as well as the perverse incentives of the political system in which personal gain was achieved through a near-total disregard for the interests of the wider society. That the Soviet planners had agendas other than serving consumers only further distorted the system. Just how misdirected and inefficient the use of resources were under socialism only became clear after the Soviet Union collapsed and a limited market economy emerged in Russia.

The End of Civilization

In his arguments against socialist central planning, Mises often couched his reasoning in rhetoric that warned of the end of civilization as we know it if the collectivist road were followed. In the 1930s and 1940s, when Mises most forcefully raised these fears, he was far from being alone in this dire warning, given the brutality and violent tyranny then being experienced in Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union.

But Mises’s more fundamental point was that the very nature of a socialist system threatened the economic and cultural standard of well-being that Western man had come to take for granted over the preceding hundred years. With every passing day, a socialist system would be less like the market society that preceded it. The allocation of resources, the utilization of capital, and the employment of labor would have to be modified and shifted from previous uses to new ones. If nothing else, the “priorities” of the “workers’ state” would be different from those under decentralized, profit-oriented decision-making. Should a new public hospital be constructed in a particular location, or should the limited resources be assigned to building additional public-housing complexes in a different part of the country? Should a piece of land in a particular area be used for a new “people’s recreational facility” or should it become the site of a new industrial factory?

If a new housing complex is chosen for construction, should it be made mostly of brick and mortar, or of steel and glass? Should the efforts of some scientists be employed for additional cancer research or for possible development of a tastier and longer-lasting chewing gum? What represents the more highly valued use for various resources that can be employed making different types of machines, which could then be used either to produce more books on religion and faith or to increase the productivity of workers in agriculture? Would a new technological idea be worth the investment in time, resources, and labor, even though its payoff may be years away (assuming it worked as initially conceived)?

Without prices for finished goods and the factors of production to provide the information and signals to guide the decision-making, each passing day would mean more such decisions were made in the dark. It would be analogous to sea travelers in the ancient world before the invention of the sextant or the compass. Every movement out of sight of land—the known and the familiar—would be into uncharted waters with no way of knowing the direction or the consequences of the course chosen. Better to stay close to the shore than to explore unknown seas. And if the journey on the open sea under cloud-covered skies is undertaken, it is uncertain where it will lead or whether the shortest and best course has been selected.

It is for reasons such as this that Mises referred to economic calculation as “the guiding star of action under a social system of division of labor. It is the compass of the man embarking upon production.” Thus, even if the rulers of a socialist state were completely benevolent and concerned only with the well-being of their fellow men, without economic calculation a collectivist society potentially faced what Mises titled one of his books, planned chaos.

Thus, the establishment of a comprehensive system of socialist central planning would be equivalent to going back in time, before the institutions of private property and market competition had enabled the utilization of prices for rational decision-making.

Luckily, the attempt to create socialism in the twentieth century made enough of an impression that it seems unlikely that such a dramatic abolition of the fundamental institutions of the market economy will be tried again anytime soon. The dilemma of our own time is that governments, through regulation, intervention, redistribution, and numerous controls, prevent the market and the price system from functioning as they should and could in a free society.

Rendering Unto Caesar: Was Jesus a Socialist?

Lawrence W. Reed

Regardless of your religious beliefs, Larry Reed proves it takes a wild leap of imagination to view Jesus as a Progressive Socialist. This is a critically important issue because secular Progressives would like to control the moral high ground by capturing religion to support their elitist, statist ideology, which would allow them to do even more damage to genuine human flourishing. —John A. Allison,

Former President and CEO, Cato Institute,

Former Chairman and CEO, BB&T Corporation

On June 16, 1992, London’s Daily Telegraph reported this astonishingly bold remark by former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev: “Jesus was the first socialist, the first to seek a better life for mankind.”[1]

Perhaps we should cut Gorbachev some slack here. A man who climbed his way to the top of a stridently atheist empire with a sorry track record on human rights was probably not a Bible scholar. But surely he knew that if socialism is nothing more than the seeking of “a better life for mankind,” then Jesus could hardly have been its first advocate; he would, in fact, be just one of several billion of them.

You don’t have to be a Christian to appreciate the errors in the Gorbachev canard. You can be a person of any faith or no faith at all. You just have to appreciate facts, history, and logic. You can even be a socialist—but one with open eyes—and realize that Jesus wasn’t in your camp.

Let’s first define the term socialism, which the Gorbachev comment only obfuscates. Socialism isn’t happy thoughts, nebulous fantasies, mere good intentions, or children sharing their Halloween candy with one another. In a modern political, economic, and social context, socialism isn’t voluntary like the Girl Scouts. Its central characteristic is the concentration of power to forcibly achieve one or more (or usually all) of these purposes: central planning of the economy, government ownership of property, and the redistribution of wealth. No amount of “we do it all for you” or “it’s for your own good” or “we’re helping people” rhetoric can erase that. What makes socialism socialism is the fact that you can’t opt out, a point eloquently made here by David Boaz of the Cato Institute:

One difference between libertarianism [a personal choice and liberty-based system] and socialism is that a socialist society can’t tolerate groups of people practicing freedom, but a libertarian society can comfortably allow people to choose voluntary socialism. If a group of people—even a very large group—wanted to purchase land and own it in common, they would be free to do so. The libertarian legal order would require only that no one be coerced into joining or giving up his property.[2]

Government, whether big or small, is the only entity in society that possesses a legal monopoly over the use of force. The more force it initiates against people, the more it subordinates the choices of the ruled to the whims of their rulers—that is, the more socialist it becomes. A reader may object to this description by insisting that to “socialize” something is to simply “share” it and “help people” in the process, but that’s baby talk. It’s how you do it that defines the system. Do it through the use of force, and it’s socialism. Do it through persuasion, free will, and respect for property rights, and it’s something else entirely.

So was Jesus really a socialist? More to the main focus of this essay, did he call for the state to redistribute income to either punish the rich or to help the poor?

I first heard “Jesus was a socialist” and “Jesus was a redistributionist” some forty years ago. I was puzzled. I had always understood Jesus’s message to be that the most important decision a person would make in his earthly lifetime was to accept or reject him as savior. That decision was clearly to be a very personal one—an individual and voluntary choice. He constantly stressed inner, spiritual renewal as far more critical to well-being than material things. I wondered, “How could the same Jesus advocate the use of force to take stuff from some and give it to others?” I just couldn’t imagine him supporting a fine or a jail sentence for people who don’t want to fork over their money for food-stamp programs.

“Wait a minute!” you say. “Didn’t Jesus answer, Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s when the Pharisees tried to trick him into denouncing a Roman-imposed tax?” Yes indeed, he did say that. It’s found first in the Gospel of Matthew, 22:15–22, and later in the Gospel of Mark, 12:13–17. But notice that everything depends on just what truly did belong to Caesar and what didn’t, which is actually a rather powerful endorsement of property rights. Jesus said nothing like “It belongs to Caesar if Caesar simply says it does, no matter how much he wants, how he gets it, or how he chooses to spend it.”

The fact is, one can scour the Scriptures with a fine-tooth comb and find nary a word from Jesus that endorses the forcible redistribution of wealth by political authorities. None, period.

“But didn’t Jesus say he came to uphold the law?” you ask. Yes, in Matthew 5:17–20 he declares, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.”[3] In Luke 24:44, he clarifies this when he says, “Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms.” He was not saying, “Whatever laws the government passes, I’m all for.” He was speaking specifically of the Mosaic law (primarily the Ten Commandments) and the prophecies of his own coming.

Consider the eighth of the Ten Commandments: “You shall not steal.” Note the period after the word “steal.” This admonition does not read, “You shall not steal unless the other guy has more than you do” or “You shall not steal unless you’re absolutely positive you can spend it better than the guy who earned it.” Nor does it say, “You shall not steal, but it’s OK to hire someone else, like a politician, to do it for you.”

In case people were still tempted to steal, the tenth commandment is aimed at nipping in the bud one of the principal motives for stealing (and for redistribution): “You shall not covet.” In other words, if it’s not yours, keep your fingers off of it.

In Luke 12:13–15, Jesus is confronted with a redistribution request. A man with a grievance approaches him and demands, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.” Jesus replies thusly: “Man, who appointed me a judge or an arbiter between you? Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.” Wow! He could have equalized the wealth between two men with a wave of his hand, but he chose to denounce envy instead.

“What about the story of the Good Samaritan? Doesn’t that make a case for government welfare programs or redistribution?” you inquire. The answer is an emphatic “No!” Consider the details of the story, as recorded in Luke 10:29–37: A traveler comes upon a man at the side of a road. The man had been beaten and robbed and left half-dead. What did the traveler do? He helped the man himself, on the spot, with his own resources. He did not say, “Write a letter to the emperor” or “Go see your social worker” and walk on. If he had done that, he would more likely be known today as the “Good-for-nothing Samaritan”—if he were remembered at all.

The Good Samaritan story makes a case for helping a needy person voluntarily out of love and compassion. There’s no suggestion that the Samaritan “owed” anything to the man in need or that it was the duty of a distant politician to help out with other people’s money.

Moreover, Jesus never called for equality of material wealth, let alone the use of political force to accomplish it, even in situations of dire need. In his book, Biblical Economics, theologian R.C. Sproul, Jr., notes that Jesus “wants the poor to be helped” but not at gunpoint, which is essentially what government force is all about:

I am convinced that political and economic policies involving the forced redistribution of wealth via government intervention are neither right nor safe. Such policies are both unethical and ineffective. . . . On the surface it would seem that socialists are on God’s side. Unfortunately, their programs and their means foster greater poverty even though their hearts remain loyal to eliminating poverty. The tragic fallacy that invades socialist thinking is that there is a necessary, causal connection between the wealth of the wealthy and the poverty of the poor. Socialists assume that one man’s wealth is based on another man’s poverty; therefore, to stop poverty and help the poor man, we must have socialism.[4]

To Sproul’s comment I would add this addendum: sometimes a person becomes wealthy wholly or in part because of his political connections. He secures special favors or subsidies from government or uses government to disable his competitors. No consistently logical thinker who favors liberty and property rights, whether he’s Christian or not, supports such practices. They are forms of theft, and their source is political power—the very debilitating thing that progressives and socialists advocate more of.

Legitimate wealth is derived voluntarily. It comes from the creation of value and mutually beneficial, voluntary exchange. It does not spring from political power that redistributes in reverse, taking from the poor and giving to the rich. Economic entrepreneurs are a boon to society; political entrepreneurs are another animal entirely. We all benefit when a Steve Jobs invents an iPhone; but when the Cowboy Poetry Festival in Nevada gets a federal grant because of Senator Harry Reid, or when Goldman Sachs gets a bailout at taxpayer expense, millions of us get hurt and have to pay for it.

What about the reference in the book of Acts to the early Christians selling their worldly goods and sharing communally in the proceeds? That sounds like a progressive utopia. On closer inspection, however, it turns out that those early Christians did not sell everything they had and were not commanded or expected to do so. They continued to meet in their own private homes, for example. In his contributing chapter to the 2014 book For the Least of These: A Biblical Answer to Poverty, Art Lindsley of the Institute for Faith, Work, and Economics writes,

Again, in this passage from Acts, there is no mention of the state at all. These early believers contributed their goods freely, without coercion, voluntarily. Elsewhere in Scripture we see that Christians are even instructed to give in just this manner, freely, for “God loves a cheerful giver” (2 Corinthians 9:7). There is plenty of indication that private property rights were still in effect.[5]

It may disappoint progressives to learn that Jesus’s words and deeds repeatedly upheld such critically important, capitalist virtues as contract, profit, and private property. For example, consider his parable of the talents (Matthew 25:14–30; see one of the recommended readings below). Of several men in the story, the one who takes his money and buries it is reprimanded while the one who invests and generates the largest return is applauded and rewarded.

Though not central to the story, good lessons in supply and demand, as well as the sanctity of contract, are apparent in Jesus’s parable of the workers in the vineyard (Matthew 20:1–16). A landowner offers a wage to attract workers for a day of urgent work picking grapes. Near the end of the day, he realizes he has to quickly hire more and to get them, he offers for an hour of work what he previously had offered to pay the first workers for the whole day. When one of those who worked all day complained, the landowner answered, “I am not being unfair to you, friend. Didn’t you agree to work for a denarius? Take your pay and go. I want to give the one who was hired last the same as I gave you. Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous?”

The well-known “Golden Rule” comes from the lips of Jesus himself, in Matthew 7:12. “So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.” In Matthew 19:19, Jesus says, “love your neighbor as yourself.” Nowhere does he even remotely suggest that we should dislike a neighbor because of his wealth or seek to take that wealth from him. If you don’t want your property confiscated (and most people don’t), then clearly you’re not supposed to confiscate somebody else’s.

Christian doctrine cautions against greed. So does present-day economist Thomas Sowell: “I have never understood why it is ‘greed’ to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else’s money.” Using the power of government to grab another person’s property isn’t exactly altruistic. Jesus never even implied that accumulating wealth through peaceful commerce was in any way wrong; he simply implored people to not allow wealth to rule them or corrupt their character. That’s why his greatest apostle, Paul, didn’t say money was evil in the famous reference in 1 Timothy 6:10. Here’s what Paul actually said: “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.” Indeed, progressives themselves have not selflessly abandoned money, for it is other people’s money, especially that of “the rich,” that they’re always clamoring for.

In Matthew 19:23, Jesus says, “Truly I tell you, it will be hard for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of heaven.” A redistributionist might say, “Eureka! There it is! He doesn’t like rich people” and then stretch the remark beyond recognition to justify one rob-Peter-to-pay-Paul scheme after another. But this admonition is entirely consistent with everything else Jesus says. It’s not a call to envy the rich, to take from the rich, or to give “free” cell phones to the poor. It’s a call to character. It’s an observation that some people let their wealth rule them, rather than the other way around. It’s a warning about temptations (which come in many forms, not just material wealth). Haven’t we all noticed that among the rich, as is equally true among the poor, you have both good and bad people? Haven’t we all seen some rich celebrities corrupted by their fame and fortune, while others among the rich live perfectly upstanding lives? Haven’t we all seen some poor people who allow their poverty to demoralize and enervate them, while others among the poor view it as an incentive to improve themselves and their communities?

When the first version of this essay appeared in January 2015, several “progressive” friends raised Romans 13:1–7 as evidence contrary to my thesis. (Similar sentiments are expressed in 1 Peter 2:13–20 and Titus 3:1–3.) In the Romans 13 passage, the apostle Paul urges submission to the governing authorities and warns against rebellion. He also says that if you owe taxes, pay your taxes. So a socialist or “progressive” of today might say this blesses all sorts of things including redistribution, a welfare state, or whatever the state wants to do either for you or to you. This is quite a leap.

Here, as in all other parts of the Bible, context is important. Paul was speaking to early Christians in an environment seething with anti-Roman feeling. He undoubtedly did not want the growth of Christianity to be sidetracked by violence or other provocations against the Romans that would be brutally repressed. He was attempting to set the people’s sights on what he regarded as higher things of greater immediate importance.

But it’s a larger error to extrapolate what Paul said to justify one particular view of the role of government, namely a “progressive” or “socialist” one. Suppose the “governing authorities” run a minimal state with Constitutional strictures and guarantees of personal liberties and private property. Suppose, furthermore, that the rules of that arrangement clearly advise the governed, “We protect you from aggressions against your rights and property but we don’t otherwise give you free stuff. You’re entitled to your liberties; to engage in private, voluntary charity and commerce, to deal with each other peacefully; to live as you choose so long as you each do no harm to another. But we in government will not rob Peter to pay Paul.” There is nothing in Romans 13:1–7 that says these “governing authorities” are owed any less respect than if they were welfare-state redistributionists.

So clearly, the verses of Romans 13:1–7 assert the legitimacy of government per se but do not ordain what today’s “progressives” and socialists demand. The Bible, in fact, is full of stories about people who bravely and righteously resisted the overreach of governments. Does anyone really believe that if Jesus had been preaching just before the exodus of the Jews from Egypt, he would have declared, “Pharaoh demands that you stay, so unpack those bags and get back to work?”

Norman Horn, a chemical engineer, research scientist, and founder of LibertarianChristians.com, notes t