I (Eric) read George Orwell's Animal Farm in about a day or two while we were at Theresa's house over Christmas. Of course I'd heard of the book, but I didn't know what it was about before picking it up. It's a short book and a very quick read. A few pages in I asked my wife, "is this book about Communism?" She said yes while looking at me like I had come from another planet.
I'm not going to rehash the whole book, you can find that all over the place online, but I'll briefly summarize it. It starts out with a wise, old, respected pig named Old Major lecturing all the animals in a farm about their sorry lot as slaves to the humans. He speaks of a future revolution, in which the pigs are no longer slaves and live in peace and equity one with another. This revolution comes quicker than expected (although Old Major is already dead) and the animals kick out the humans and run the show themselves. They start out all as equals and living "from each according to his ability and to each according to his need." Everything is great until it becomes obvious that the pigs are smarter than the other animals and begin making all the decisions. The real problems come when one pig, Napoleon, casts out his main rival and begins totalitarian rule (by degrees) over the farm animals. Eventually he becomes no better (probably worse) than the human overlords.
It's very obviously about Stalinist Russia. But the thing that surprised me most is that the author was a devoted democratic socialist. He agreed with the ideals of socialism, just not Stalin's totalitarian implementation of it. I'd like to discuss this briefly.
I didn't finish the book, but I read part of Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom. In the beginning he makes a very good case for capitalism being the only economic system that is consistent with personal freedom. I'm kind of tired of the old argument for socialism being that "nobody has done it correctly." Note that wherever socialism is tried, the state ends up abridging the social freedoms of the people. Russia, Cuba, China, Germany, Venezuela, and pretty much any country truly devoted to state control of production has always reduced such important personal liberties as freedom of speech or religion. Perhaps people would display some intelligence and realize that when you give a government complete control over property and the means of production they are incapable of exercising restraint on this power and not letting it extend to personal liberties ("power corrupts...yada yada yada"). The same can be said of the opposite approach as well (government with the power to control personal morality cannot be expected to constrain itself to inhibit further encroachment on liberties), which is why I generally find myself more closely aligned with libertarians on many (but not all) issues.
But, back to Animal Farm and George Orwell, it's pretty absurd to assume, knowing what we know about people and their self-interest, that a democratic socialist government is possible. As soon as one half of the country recognizes that their hard work and effort and money is just being handed out in huge amounts to those less capable they will chose to leave, or to vote to get rid of socialism as the economic system. I imagine that's partly why Germany had to build a wall to keep it's citizens in the country. It's also probably why the United Order didn't work among the LDS. I think for something like that to work, one would have to have implicit faith and trust in the character of every member in the society to do all within his power to contribute. Not to mention the altruistic motives and love of fellow man that the main contributors would need to have. For those Mormon's reading this, that's probably why the attempt seems to be indefinitely delayed until the time when those are the only people remaining.
This wasn't the main point of the book, however. The book showed very adeptly, and usually accurately, how bad totalitarianism is. In the end he made the pigs abandon all signs of the noble concepts of the revolution and tried to make them seem just like humans. I think the humans represented the system of royalty that ruled Russia before the Revolution, which of course was not a truly free, democratic society either. It makes me very grateful that I live in a place that championed the ideas of personal liberty and limited government and, for the most part, is still the standard bearer of the message. I just wish we'd stick to it a little better.
2 comments:
"it's pretty absurd to assume, knowing what we know about people and their self-interest, that a democratic socialist government is possible. As soon as one half of the country recognizes that their hard work and effort and money is just being handed out in huge amounts to those less capable they will chose to leave, or to vote to get rid of socialism as the economic system."
That is funny, here in northern Europe, and maybe also in Spain and Italy, we do have social democratic countries, and we like to think it works really well compared to the feared "American situations".
The Christian notion of sharing with the people who have less, and taking care of eachother as basic responsibility stands very opposed to your assumption of absurdness of the system. Our care-societies have been broken down partly under American cultural influences, and I fear that may be happening nowadays also to our democratic systems under the influence of 9/11.
I hope we can go back to our social democratic societies of some decades ago.
I suppose I should qualify my statement. I know especially in Europe, and also in America to a lesser degree, there are elements of socialism. 70% of our budget goes toward entitlements of some form. What I was talking about was a full socialist society with no private ownership and everything controlled by the state. I think, given the choice, it is still pretty absurd to assume that a majority of people would choose to live under that system. I could be wrong though, or maybe it could take time for them to see how poorly such a system would perform. I know the current "progressive" systems work because it's a small percentage of the population that's so rich that they contribute a lot but don't have enough votes to make a difference.
"The Christian notion of sharing with the people who have less, and taking care of eachother as basic responsibility stands very opposed to your assumption of absurdness of the system."
That's exactly right. I think, as a Christian it is our duty to take care of others. But I think it should be a decision we have the right to make, individually, not collectively. In other words, I don't think it's morally correct to force someone to donate money to the poor, using the power of the state, because 51% of people said they should.
Personally I donate a significant portion of my income to programs that work in helping those less fortunate than myself. I just don't believe the government should be involved in doing anything other than protecting people's rights, especially when they have to use the threat of force to extract money for other purposes.
Your system may (or may not) work better in raising the poverty level. I really don't know. It seems logical that free markets produce a wider income disparity, although they also seem to produce so much more prosperity that it's conceivable the overall standard of living is better. But, in my mind, that's beside the point. The issue is government infringing on people's rights to make their own decisions.
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