Blurts & Spasms

Speaking as a socialist, I think it’s a pretty stupid statement. But it exemplifies what has happened to our political landscape: the reduction of complex concepts into propagandizing sound bites. It’s how elections are won, and both Reagan and Thatcher were arguably brilliant at jingoistic oversimplification en masse. At the same time, of course, their neoliberal ideologies failed - and continue to fail wherever they are implemented. But such facts don’t discourage pro-capitalist folks from continuing to promote supply-side or trickle-down economics, austerity measures, destruction of social safety nets, and the aggressive obliteration of successful and/or popular government programs. Ironically, the most successful economies in the world are mixed economies - where socialized public sector controls and enterprises coexist with the private sector - rather those economies that lean more towards laissez-faire capitalism.

Now at the heart of the sentiments expressed by this silly sound bite is a profound conviction that welfarism, mixed economies and “The Nanny State” are all antagonistic to both wealth production and wealth accumulation. This is a primary tenet of the neoliberal belief system, and drives resentment of regulatory “government interference” in markets, a general mistrust of government bureaucracy, a constant anti-tax drumbeat, and apoplectic frothing-at-the-mouth over Keynesian economic policies or New Deal styled progressivism. But is this sentiment justified? Part of it is, sure - the interference with obscene concentrations of accumulated wealth is real. But this neatly sidesteps the reality of how much of that wealth is generated: that is, by callous rent-seeking activities, financialization of the economy, the exploitation of cheap labor and perpetuation of wage slavery, wanton destruction and depletion of natural resources, and complete disregard for any and all negative externalities. In other words, the feudal lords of neoliberalism want to oppress, exploit and despoil everyone and everything around them to amass their profit, and then prevent any crumbs from falling from the master’s table onto the floor for the rest of us. It’s a pretty nasty way of looking at the world, IMO, but it gets transmuted into the type of leadership and rhetoric that Thatcher exemplified, and into quips such as “taxation is theft.”

At the other end of the spectrum, we could say “The trouble with capitalism is that eventually you run out of other people’s labor.” But here again, this is a gross oversimplification.

My 2 cents.

From Quora post: https://www.quora.com/What-do-Socialists-think-of-the-statement-The-trouble-with-Socialism-is-that-eventually-you-run-out-of-other-peoples-money/answer/T-Collins-Logan