Thanks Bay.
Lucy: if done properly, a socialist government would both provide for the less fortunate and give an incentive (as well as opportunities) to rise by personal means.
Socialism gives rise to state corporatism. Big government, big business, big unions. Bureacracies grow and become self serving. Rank, power and prestige are given by the buraucracy. Efficiency is lost because of a plethora of checks and balances put into place to control the bureaucratic decision making process. Quasi government agencies run peoples lives and decide on people’s societal arrangements without recourse to the strings of the representative process. Democracy is eroded because the decision making process is more and more prescribed. Government is through regulation, not legislation. Governments no longer listen to constituents, but to large lobby groups who can afford the expense of long and costly submissions. Unionism becomes more and more coercive and has the ear of big government and a say in the running of government departments. Seek out and read what Anne O Krueger wrote in a landmark paper entitled '
The Political Economy of the Rent-Seeking Society’ published in 1974 in the
American Economic Review. Rent-seeking theory explains a range of corrupt or otherwise objectionable behaviour commonly observed in the interface between markets, governments and statutory laws and regulations, Managers regiment life across the board through the promulgation of rules and regulations. Personal decision making is subverted. Personal responsibility is likewise subverted. People are rendered servile. Society becomes soulless. It is common in all socialist economies and was grossly manifest in Communist Russia. Personal responsibility in government is subjugated by rules and regulations. Committees make decisions based on consensus and leadership is forgone in the name of consensus. Croneyism runs rampant and people rise and thrive through largesse, through who they know.
At the beginning of the century, something like nine million out of twelve million workers in Britain contributed to saving through friendly societies. The rise in state sponsored pensions stifled thrift. By the 1970s Great Britain was deply in debt with unfunded pension liabilities dragging at the Exchequer. Welfare is the central component of a managed state, because it exploits and cultivates a class of beneficiaries or pensioners who are dependent on the government, not to mention an apparatus distributing these benefits which has, of course, an interest in its continuance and expansion, that is, a self serving bureaucracy. Government as bringer of justice as fairness complements an assumption about government implicit in the entire conception of the managed state. It is that governments are not only wiser than their citizens, but also morally superior. They take the wider view. They help the poor, whereas the citizens are engaged in pursuing selfish pleasures.What piffle!
What kind of subject, one might ask, would want to have lawyers, judges, governments ‘steering’ his or her behaviour? The answer, of course, irresistibly suggests the presence of natural slavery in our midst, a suggestion supported by the way in which governments increasingly interfere in family life, health judgements, sexuality, cultural subsidy and many other areas which were in earlier and more vigorous times left to the individual citizen. What used to be the five year plans of the Soviet world have become the ‘national strategies’ of ours.
Pope Leo XIII in his 1891 Encyclical “
Rerum Novarum”, stated that socialism does not help the poor. It reduces everyone to the same lowest common denominator of poverty and misery, while at the same time drying up the very sources of capital.
