Unrealistic socialism

socialism vs capitalism

In a perfect world with perfect people, we all would be socialists. But we’ve seen countless examples (the collapse of the Soviet Union, the economic crises in Cuba, etc) of how this socialist utopia really fails to deliver this “fair world” and instead of taking poor people out of misery, it just does the complete opposite and puts more people into misery. But what the socialist doctrine fails to understand is that, firstly, humans are inherently an individual (or selfish) species. This doesn’t at all discards that we live for each other, and true happiness is found when we find ourselves immersed in something bigger than ourselves, to be dedicated for something other than ourselves. We certainly need to reconcile this view that happiness is found in the intersection of various life’s but also that we are the most important moral agents of our life. No one really is a socialist, everyone wants (and can) to be wealthy and wants to be recognised according to the work they put in. As Milton Friedman puts it, “The only way in which you can effectively redistribute the wealth is by destroying the incentives to have wealth”. Socialism unable’s (and acknowledges) the creation of wealth and therefore it prevents progress from happening, socialism is the rejection of creativity or all other forms of humanism and it’s an anti human philosophy. If we had adopted socialism during the majority of our history, it would be impossible to build this life support system from us by us. Every society (either socialist, capitalist or anything else) is runned on greed, we now more than ever (specially in the west) have an aspiration to progress. We can see this everywhere, citizens aren’t just expecting the next president to “not mess up”, people want to see improvements in their country and individual life’s. The same happens with companies, the board will demand of the CEO great results and will expect new innovations, if it’s not satisfied with the work of CEO, then the CEO will be fired. By not recognising (and not allowing!) that some individuals give more to society than others, socialism treats us like a bunch of irrational fools who expect nothing more day after day (which is false since we all are greedy). The socialist doctrine that people will gladly, blindly and willingly accept working during their entire life to just have the same faith as anybody else, regardless of the amount of effort, dedication or sacrifice is delusional and sick. Of course that people poor from spirit (and wallet as well ahahah) would advocate for this, but if we think clearly, what’s the system which will offer those unlucky people that borned without good positions, whats the system that will offer them the greatest opportunity? Capitalism. The world runs on individuals pursuing their self interests, and every, every single person acts from self interest (regardless of the system/state). So now, we gotta think, which is the state that rewards self interest? Capitalism. Every socialist society is ultimately a static society. As David Deutsch points out (in the beginning of infinity) “from the point of view of every individual in such a static society, its creativity-suppressing mechanisms are catastrophically harmful. Every static society must leave its members chronically baulked in their attempts to achieve anything positive for themselves as people, or indeed anything at all, other than their meme-mandated behaviours. It can perpetuate itself only by suppressing its members self expression”. Adopting a socialist ideology will reject the idea that people are creative beings and this is indeed a basic human need. If we follow this system, then we become confined with the finite (which denies that the potential growth of knowledge is infinite, that progress is unbounded, that humans are fallible and therefore we shall always be correcting our errors and criticising our theories indefinitely, etc) and capitalism is quite the opposite. The “founders” of capitalism (much likely Adam Smith) didn’t really imaged a utopia, they just wanted to find a state that allowed human flourishing (infinite).

I wrote a blogpost some time ago on capitalism (and explaining why I like it):