Consider the island nation of Cuba, a nation under communist rule for sixty years, and its progressive defenders/apologists. Cuba, we are told, is a wonderful place. It has a near-100% literacy rate, and it has allegedly superb medical care for its citizens. In fact, the medical excellence it generates is so purportedly wonderful that it has been exported to places like Brazil and Venezuela.
This is interesting and relevant in the context of the current blitzkrieg of woke-socialism being laid upon us by the progressive firebrands attempting to take over the Democratic Party. To them, the level of government largesse bestowed upon the “oppressed” classes and identity groups of America (at the expense of American taxpayers, present and future) is woefully inadequate, and they’ve made no secret of the fact that they envision a nation where the promised outcomes of socialism are finally realized. They’ve come clean with the fact that their “Green New Deal” is about transforming the American economy and society more than it is about saving the planet.
This “revelation” is available and obvious to anyone who’s paying attention. It’s all there in the Green New Deal’s policy points, and in the Democratic Socialism platform. It promises all sorts of largesse to the people, and justifies that largesse by declaring that those things are ‘basic human rights.’
Among those rights are:
- Health Care
- Housing
- Food
- Education
- Income
There are more. There’s stuff about “access” to clean air, clean water, and nature, some more particular declarations regarding employment benefits (e.g. paid family and sick leave), some language about “clean” campaign finance (they want to take control of the political process itself, no surprise) and so forth.
Here I could delve into the “negative rights” vs “positive rights” explanation that’s the standard (and correct) response to this business of government providing or guaranteeing the aforementioned ‘basic human rights,’ but I’ve done that before, and if you know the terms, you don’t need them explained again. Instead, I’ll make it simpler, with a phrase/meme that’s been percolating in my social media feed the last few days:
Nothing that requires the labor of others is a basic human right.
Everything the Democratic Socialists insist is a basic human right involves the fruit of someone else’s labor. Medical care is provided by doctors, nurses, technicians, assistants, and all the people who create and maintain the infrastructure of a medical system, including construction workers, janitors, administrators, accountants, lawyers, et al. If health care is a “right,” then those people are obligated to work without compensation in fulfillment of that right. That’s known as slavery, and it is a blatant violation of their rights.
The dodge is, of course, that all those people are to be paid. Even Cuba pays her doctors. She pays them slave wages, unfortunately, to the tune of $67 a month at the high end. Many doctors have to work side jobs, either treating patients on the sly or doing tourism-related stuff that gets them access to foreign wealth. And, many end up making some extra coin by taking on foreign assignments, such as those in Brazil and Venezuela.
They don’t get paid by Brazil and Venezuela, though. The Cuban government gets paid, and gives a pittance of that external income to the doctors it farms out.
Herein lies the blueprint for understanding the outcome of the Democratic Socialists’ vision. It applies not just to health care, but to every other good and service that exists in a nation and an economy. In guaranteeing the labor of others as a “right” you are entitled to, they are declaring you to be a vassal of the State, to be paid what the State decides, and to work under the terms, conditions, and needs of the State. It’s the embodiment of Marx’s “From each, according to his ability…”
Dissemblers and socialistic scolds will pretend that this is not how their system would work, or the inevitable outcome it will produce. They tell us that all these “rights” can be paid for simply by drawing a bit more in taxes from people who can afford to pay more in taxes, as if that’s somehow not requiring the labor of others. By shifting the appropriation of another’s labor to “the rich,” to people that they simultaneously vilify as “taking” from the workers, they create a veneer of justification for their declaration of all these rights. That’s nonsense, of course, but people are willing to believe in nonsense if it’s twisty and wordy and “erudite” enough, as long as it gets them to their desired conclusions.
That’s where the next dodge comes into play, the head-scratching gobbledygook of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the face and voice of the current American socialist movement, offered an insight into her thought process when she was still a candidate:
People often say, like, how are you going to pay for it and I find the question so puzzling because ‘How do you pay for something that’s more affordable? How do you pay for cheaper rent?’ You just pay for it. We’re paying more now.
Here she shows some of the linguistic jiujitsu that’s gotten her so much fame and notoriety by selling past the close, by treating the unproven (and easily discounted by history) notions that government-provided housing and health care will be cheaper, but errs in concluding with something so naive and grade-school-ish as “you just pay for it.” Since then, she’s gotten better at the game, and doesn’t make that same mistake any more.
She and her crowd have armed themselves with a lot of word salad to use in defense of their promises. They’ve taken to pushing MMT, which basically says that, since government has a monopoly on the money supply and that its debt and taxes are denominated in the money it prints, it can print all it wants to, and use taxation of the wealthy as a way to lever against inflation.
As George Orwell observed, “some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.”
Intellectuals, and motivated reasoners. Since MMT adds pseudo-intellectual heft to the Democratic Socialists’ promises that they can fulfill the satisfying of all these “rights,” people who want to believe the fantasy are given enough to dodge the cognitive dissonance that should keep them from going down that rabbit hole.
If MMT, or socialism itself, could work, it would have worked already, and those nations whose economies collapsed under socialism, whose societies suffered poverty, misery, and oppression under collectivist governments, and whose currencies suffered runaway inflation from non-stop printing presses would be examples of what to do, rather than cautions as to what not to do (and, no, the Scandinavian nations are not examples of MMT or the “Democratic Socialism” that Bernie and AOC are selling).
And, Cuba’s doctors would not be treated as indentured servants, working in foreign lands to enrich the oppressive government to which they are indentured.
A government cannot create wealth out of thin air, so it cannot give the things the socialists promise as “rights” without taking the fruit of other people’s labor. Just as requiring doctors, construction workers, cooks, farmers, teachers, and all the other workers of the nation to provide their labor in service to other people’s “rights” is wrong, taking money from people who’ve earned it to pay all those folks in service of those “rights” is wrong.
Loading ...
Those Socialist Economies only collapsed because the sanctions (etc.) imposed by the USA.
in other words they couldn’t make it without support from the most successful capitalist countries
‘Nothing that requires the labor of others is a basic human right.’ Amen.
As to housing, that’s why I volunteer for Habitat for Humanity – the beneficiaries are required to put sweat equity and monetary equity into their ‘at cost’ home and then homestead in their neighborhood for a number of years to help build a local community. It seems to work!
At first I wanted to comment on the gross misconceptions about wealth and how these lead to the rampant misunderstanding of socialism vs but I got stuck with the proposition that
“Nothing that requires the labor of others is a basic human right.”
I want to agree and like that but I keep stumbling on the most basic of the basic human rights: life, which requires the labor of the mother. Have you dealt with that?
I figured it was implicit in the context of the debate that we are discussing rights from the perspective of government and governance.
Unlike some, I don’t subscribe to a “natural rights” postulate (or proof, if you prefer), preferring instead to start with the question “do I own myself and the fruits of my labor?” and derive a political philosophy from my “yes” response to that question.
The question you raise is a deep rabbit hole, and I’ll leave it for another day :).
It sure is a deep rabbit hole but it can be fun peeking into it.
You say you’ve written on . Can you lead me to your more complete comments on the subject? That’s a subject I’ve always found fascinating because in my opinion just about everyone gets it backwards.
Which subject?
Sorry, I seem to have trouble getting my computer to keep me signed in. I’m not anonymous 🙂
Hmm, my quote disappeared. On positive and negative rights and the Constitution.
Hmm it looks like your site ate my first comment (it was extremely long) so I guess I’ll just sum it up what I had written and say, I’m thoroughly enjoying your blog. I as well am an aspiring blog writer but I’m still new to the whole thing. Do you have any tips and hints for inexperienced blog writers? I’d genuinely appreciate it.|
Thank you for visiting and reading.
As for advice? Practice. Just write, and write, and keep writing. It’s a skill and a craft, like any other, that benefits from repetition. I’ve written nearly a million words here, and I only started this blog after many years of writing and arguing in other forums. It’ll take time for you to “find your voice,” even if you’ve already got a good, solid foundation of opinions and guiding principles.
Oh, and one more thing: realize that you’re going to get pushback and disagreement, and that some of it will be of a personal nature. Don’t let insults and personal attacks bother or discourage you – they only have as much power as you are willing to grant them, and I refuse to grant strangers the power to upset me.
A meme I recently saw reads:
Q: If someone brings you a gift and you don’t take it, to whom does it belong?
A: The one who offered it:
Conclusion: It’s the same with insults: If you refuse to accept them, they belong to the one who offered them.
Hi Peter,
You wanted material. Here is some. If you use it my short bio is that
Xavier is a Mexican citizen who has lived most of his life in this country except for a stint as an executive back home after graduating from MIT and Harvard. Afterwards he had a twenty year career at the World Bank following his lifelong interest in understanding what makes some societies more successful than others. The last fifteen years he has been adding to and synthesizing that knowledge.
Xavier
Dealing With Social Breakdown
I doubt that we are ever going to deal effectively with lone shooters, especially if policing breaks down like it did in Parkland. We can, however, ameliorate the problem, including especially in inner cities where the real mass shootings occur: One hundred just in Chicago the weekend of El Paso and Dayton.
What is required jumps out, at least at me, from a model of the dynamics of social change and development that I have been working on and off for most of my life. I presented the bare bones of it before in a comment to “Whence Morality?” Here it is again in three paragraphs.
In a nutshell, my larger model starts with the proposition that development and growth are driven by change, that at the core of change is specialization, and that specialization requires new rules to coordinate the various new parts. Not only are hunting and gathering, and agriculture classic examples, but specialization happens even in machines. Thus the steam engine was the product of separating and specializing the heating and cooling cycles, and the key to success, which took Watt more than ten years, was developing the rules, mechanism and equipment to coordinate the two.
With progress we have had continuous specialization and an explosion of rules to coordinate the growing number of entities at the product, company, and government level. I hypothesize that the different religions grew as the simpler set of rules groups could share to live and work together. It explains why some are more rigid than others, including within Christianity, and why some are able to lead the societies in which they reside to be more successful or not.
My model also explains change as a process. Since my basic training is in chemical engineering, I’ve broken down successful change into seven dynamic Unit Operations, a concept I took from CE. These are (1) change; (2) reconcile differences; (3) develop new rules; (4) relieve stress; (5) discard failure and obsolescence; (6) learn, modify, readjust; (7) homogenize, train, educate. That is not necessarily the internal order but at the end there is always a need to homogenize if a society is to remain together.
Aside from the growing speed of change overtaking the ability of our political process to reconcile differences and write sensible rules, the breakdown of the homogenizing process screams out very loudly, especially among our children, who go through huge changes growing up. It used to happen primarily in the home where the best role models were, but it was also heavily influenced by the church, school and the community. It doesn’t mean that learning and homogenizing was robot-like as of course there would be some generational breaks, but it did mean that at least the most basic rules of behavior, especially our morality, would remain fairly similar.
As I look around I see so many breakdowns that I can barely count them but far and away the two most significant are the breakdown of the family with its role models; and the slow retreat from the main source of morality: Religion, and I say this as an agnostic. Like it or not that has been the main source of rules to keep groups together. Then there is a third one that I find rather surprising it went away because it was part of my safety net when my father, my main roll model, passed just as I turned into my teen years: organized sports and extracurricular activities, first in the streets, yes, in the streets, and then in school through my second year of college.
Let me explain what the street was like for me. I grew up in Mexico City before going to school in the U.S. at sixteen. My father had brought me up to be extremely independent, including giving me and my brother little motorcycles, designed for paratroopers during the war, when I was about nine or ten. I was fourteen when he died and my mother bought me a real motorcycle.
In Mexico there weren’t any organized sports in school, although I did join the equivalent of ROTC, so with my new motorcycle I joined a group of relatively well off kids that had formed a motorcycle club. Most of the time we were fairly loose but we did have occasional group activities led by a very Good Samaritan who was gas station manager in the community we ran around in. He had a really cool twin engine BMW and rode with us on weekends. I’ve always wondered whether one or more of our parents had contracted him to look after us.
The point is that in my day healthy kids grew up learning the rules of social behavior all throughout their young lives, and, crucially letting off steam. Please go back to step four of my process of change. It is to relieve stress. Growing up is not just about learning and role models. We all have experienced how stressful change can be, and there is nothing more stressful than the changes we go though growing up. Kids need to relieve that stress and it is why organized sports are so important. Maybe I was lucky to have attended very good schools, including prep school in New York, but I was kept busy with sports throughout my second year of college.
Kids no longer have that, much less doing chores like they use to in the olden days. We are now spoiled, are going soft, and many don’t have a father as a role model. More than 70% of black kids, 50% of Hispanics, and one third of whites are born to single parents. Now imagine what those numbers are really like in the inner cities, where kids don’t even have a mother during the afternoon after school.
In the inner city one can form gangs and have wars, thus lone wolves are probably fewer than in the whiter suburbs where kids are more like to keep to themselves. Of course I’m speculating but that’s what my experience suggests. Someone could try to validate it with the vast data now available. In the meantime remember that the real problem is in the hundreds of shootings, and sometimes ghastly killings by gangs like MS13 in inner cities.
So what do we do about it? That will depend on how much we value a functioning society and remember that today we are going downhill. What we need are organized sports and activities, and role models to run them like i had growing up. The funds and organizational capabilities required are vast so the private sector needs to be mobilized.
Maybe there is even a market solution although I can’t think of one right now, short of the government giving kids, all kids, stipends for use only to pay quotas for participating and making participation obligatory. Somehow we have to get loners to participate—I was one of those but I also wanted a degree and to learn badly so I had to follow the rules and do my time. And about Good Samaritans, many former athletes already do this kind of work and can provide the seed around which these kinds of activities centers can be built and operated.
The answer then is that we have to spend many billions to create adequate facilities for sports and other activities. I’ve always been impressed by the facilities that my alma mater, MIT, created for its ten thousand plus community. In inner cities there is enough rat infested housing that needs to be razed anyway and the land can be used for our kids. Look, we go around spending billions in new stadiums to entertain adults, why can’t we do the same for our children? They are the future and if we don’t catch them before they fall into downward spirals of bad, our society faces a bleak future.
…