Explaining Socialism's Moral Decay By Bryan Caplan

I’m now finishing up a new introduction for a reissue of Eugen Richter’s Pictures of the Socialistic Future. In writing it, I identified three distinct answers to the question: “How could a movement founded to liberate workers from capitalist oppression end up shooting them in the back when they tried to flee the Workers’ Paradise?”

1. The Actonian “power corrupts” story

2. The Hayekian “worst get on top” story

3. The Richterian “born bad” story

Here’s my summary:

Lord Acton and F.A. Hayek have inspired the two most popular

explanations for the crimes of actually-existing socialism. While Acton

never lived to see socialists gain power, their behavior seems to perfectly

illustrate his aphorism that, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power

corrupts absolutely.” For all their

idealism, even socialists will do bad

things if left unchecked. Hayek, with

the benefit of hindsight, suggested a slightly different explanation: Under

socialism, “the worst get on top.” On

this theory, the idealistic founders of socialism were gradually pushed out by

brutal cynics as their movement’s power increased. Richter’s novel advances a very different explanation for

socialism’s “moral decay”: The movement was born bad. While the early socialists were indeed “idealists,”

their ideal was totalitarian. Their overriding

goals were to engineer a new society and a New Socialist Man. If this meant treating workers like slaves – depriving

them of the freedom to choose their occupation or location, forbidding them to

quit, splitting up families without their consent, and imposing draconian

punishments on dissenters – so be it.

What weight would you attach to these three theories – and why? Am I missing any important alternative explanations?