In a fantasy libertarian paradise, each citizen works hard out of enlightened self-interest. No one uses force on anyone else, since my rights stop where your nose begins. If you accumulate a whole bunch of property, bully for you! If I fail in business or some other endeavor and suddenly have no money for food, clothing or medical care, too bad for me. Maybe some of my enlightened neighbors, out of self-interest, will help me out with voluntary donations. And maybe they won’t. Under communism, the opposite is true. Each citizen works to his or her maximum capacity in order to benefit society as a whole, and society as a whole owns the major means of production, including farms, factories, and mines. No one goes without the basics of life, and the idea of any one person owning a yacht disappears, because no citizen needs a private yacht when he or she can freely use state-owned boats for anything from fishing to partying. Under either system, everyone is happy and fair and treats other members of society with respect.

But both philosophies suffer from a problem. That problem is human nature. I’m sorry, but there are hardly any instances in human history (or pre-history) where applying an essentially utopian political or economic philosophy has resulted in a utopia. In the modern world, we have Somalia as an example of extreme libertarianism in practice, and North Korea as an example of extreme communism in practice.

“But…but…but,” the libertarians stammer, “we don’t want anarchy like Somalia. We believe in having enough government to serve as referee in disputes, and we don’t believe violence is a valid basis of society.” I hear you, folks. Unfortunately, plenty of people do not hear you, and in a situation where government is weak, will inevitably exert their will through force. It doesn’t take a high percentage of the population to believe that power comes from the barrel of a gun to destroy even the rosiest libertarian paradise. And, as we have witnessed in the U.S. over the past few decades, many of the people who talk loudest about deregulation and freeing themselves from burdensome laws essentially want to be able to steal from their fellow citizens without risking prison sentences when they do.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the street, the communists are apoplectic with rage at the very idea that any sane person could conflate their inevitable workers’ paradise with North Korea’s brutocracy. Or Cuba’s repressive regime. Why, those countries don’t represent communism any more than Somalia represents libertarianism! True. But in real life, communist revolutions have almost always led to dictatorships of one sort or another. And, as a little-noted side effect, endless, mind-numbing speeches by the dictators. Even mild communists like Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez (who calls himself a Bolivarian and denies being a doctrinaire communist) can go on TV and spout drivel for hours on end, and has enough control over the airwaves that you can’t necessarily change the channel and catch a soccer game or telenovela instead.

Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it’s the other way around.

Under a truly libertarian capitalist system, if some people become so wealthy that they can afford personal airliners while a few miles away, others live in
grinding poverty, that’s fine. Under the Soviet Russian (communist) regime, party leaders have always had sumptuous dachas where they lived in luxury, far from the prying eyes of ordinary citizens who typically lived in crowded communal housing.

In other words, neither system serves most people very well, although adherents of both philosophies will spend as many hours as you let them (and then some) telling you why theirs is better for you than the other one.

As an American, what I really want is the best parts of both systems. I want the income security of communism, or at least of its milder cousin, socialism, while at the same time I want libertarian-style personal freedoms. I realize that taxes are the price we pay for civilization, so I am happy to have you pay taxes to support our government. (I also believe I should be exempt from most of them, just as I’m fine with laws that restrict any of your behavior I may not like, but none that restrict my behavior.)

Do I sound spoiled, hypocritical, cynical, or all three?

Or do I just sound like a normal American?

The reality is that no system will work perfectly as long as it is run by human beings. Private industry screws up all the time, and big companies often turn into impenetrable, inefficient bureaucracies — as do government agencies that don’t get constant oversight from concerned citizens. Even science-fictional computers running a large society are likely to screw up, since they would be built and programmed by fallible humans.

So what is the solution?

I’ m a mild believer in what some call the Third Way. Neither leftists or rightists (in old-fashioned politics-speak) like or respect moderation. I do. Nobody goes away happy, but we manage to generally keep everyone’s unhappiness level low enough that we transfer power after elections without blood in the streets, and tend to have excesses of socialist-leaning presidents and Congresses muted by the libertarian-leaning ones that almost inevitably follow them — and vice versa.

This kind of compromise is the American way. Our founding fathers didn’t agree on everything. They compromised, and our Constitution was the result of that compromise. Let’s carry on that tradition!

(Now we will all rise and sing the national anthem together.)

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 14th, 2010 at 6:39 pm and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.