Today In “Are You Freaking Kidding Me?”

The original Mother Jones was a shit-kicking radical socialist labor organizer who once said: “If they want to hang me, let them. And on the scaffold I would shout, ‘Freedom for the working class!'” Today’s Mother Jones magazine, on the other hand… well, it sometimes seems like the staff are having an internal contest to see who can make old Mary Harris Jones rotate the fastest in her grave. Just have a look at this new piece from Kevin Drum called “Socialism Is The New Black,” which repeats nasty right-wing caricatures of socialists without engaging substantively with a single thing we have said. Featuring a picture of—who else?—Vladimir Lenin, the article suggests that both the socialist comedy podcast Chapo Trap House and the serious socialist think tank the People’s Policy Project are equally risible and irrelevant.

Drum first quotes from a scathing review of Chapo’s new book. After laughing heartily at Chapo’s suggestion that someday we might have a “three-hour workday,” he looks at Matt Bruenig’s new proposal for a social wealth fund (which, incidentally, is the subject of the latest Current Affairs podcast episode). Bruenig has a serious policy plan, and it’s not an especially radical one: As he points out in his paper, the state of Alaska already has a scheme very similar to the one he proposes to introduce for the country as a whole. He certainly envisages social ownership of wealth on a much larger scale than the Alaska model, but to summarily dismiss a type of public ownership that literally exists in 2018 in a deep-red state is to mimic the childish right-wing perspective that sees anything promising to democratize the economy as tantamount to Leninism.

Look at how Drum write about the PPP social wealth fund paper:

This proposal certainly sounds more sensible than the Chapo House nonsense, but I wonder. How much difference is there, really, between [the two]? The details are different, and Bruenig at least pretends to have a path for getting there, but you’re not going to like either one if you have a soft spot in your heart for private enterprise. Which I do. Government-run enterprises are almost inevitably run badly and government controlled paychecks are almost inevitably corrupt beyond all imagining. Still, would that be worse than the immense amount of wealth and income inequality that we put up with today? That requires a bit of thought. No, wait. It doesn’t. It would be worse. A lot worse. I think I’ll stick with social democracy aka regulated capitalism, thankyouverymuch.

Let me make a couple of quick points in response:

“Government-run enterprises are almost inevitably run badly.” This is simply propaganda. As Bruenig himself pointed out in Current Affairs, there is no reason why a state enterprise can’t be run efficiently and effectively if you design it well. (The Norwegians do it successfully.) In fact, that should be obvious: Modern corporations separate ownership and control, meaning that those who own the enterprise do not manage it day to day. The managerial decisions one makes if the state is the biggest shareholder are not necessarily much different from the ones one makes if a group of random rich people people are the biggest shareholder. If you retained the incentive structure that managers had when the company was under private ownership, the main thing that would change is where the profits went. State enterprises are frequently dysfunctional, but this is a problem arising from poor institutional design and can be corrected through aligning incentives well. People who are on the left should not be repeating the right-wing myth that publicly-owned institutions are doomed to be poorly run. “Government controlled paychecks are almost inevitably corrupt beyond all imagining.” Okay, here’s the part where I have to go I’m sorry, but are you freaking kidding me? 20 million people work in the public sector. There are librarians, postal workers, refuse collectors, professors, health inspectors, city planners, soldiers, firefighters, and dogcatchers. All of their paychecks are “government-controlled.” Honestly, how can you even call yourself a liberal with this kind of talking point? This is Koch Brothers material. Millions of people work for local, state, and federal government. But according to Drum, a paycheck “controlled” by the government is “almost inevitably” not just corrupt, but “corrupt beyond all imagining.” Drum doesn’t cite a shred of evidence for this, or back it up with any argumentation.

The social wealth fund proposal is clear and detailed. It explains how similar proposals have worked elsewhere and what one would look like in the United States. Drum does not respond to any of it. Instead, his argument runs as follows: Bruenig’s idea involves bringing large amounts of wealth under public control. Chapo Trap House’s idea involves bringing large amounts of wealth under public control, and because Chapo Trap House (a comedy podcast) offers few details, their idea is nonsense. Bruenig’s idea is therefore also nonsense, and anyone with a “soft spot in your heart” for private enterprise should dismiss it out of hand without even considering it in detail. (By the way, you may have a soft spot in your heart for private enterprise, but I can assure you that private enterprise doesn’t have a soft spot in its heart for you.)

I don’t want to insult your intelligence by pointing out the many ways in which this chain of reasoning is pitifully weak. Instead, I’ll simply encourage you to read the People’s Policy Project proposal and listen to our podcast about it, and then judge for yourself whether you think Drum’s dismissal, and his picture of Lenin, is a fair response. And I’ll ask you to consider the irony of the fact that those who most loudly condemn socialists as illogical and divorced from facts decline to respond to the case we make with logic or facts. Poor Mother Jones must be starting to feel dizzy by now.

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