Not Today, DSA

Speaker 2

I'm Phil Magnus, take care.

Speaker 1

They are a political and activist organization, not a not a party. So while it's still small, you know, it's growing. And I really want to know why. Why? Why?

Speaker 2

Well, on top of that, you have a succession of surveys that have come out in recent months that have all pointed that the reputation of socialism is ascendant. It used to be like if you ask this question, do you have a favorable or unfavorable opinion of socialism? And suppose that's like 1985, the middle of the Cold War. ⁓ The vast majority of Americans would have a deeply unfavorable opinion of it for a good reason. They looked at the Soviet Union, this horrific institution that had a horrible human rights record, ⁓ oppressive society, was militaristic, was bent on conquest of other parts of the world. That was not popular. And yet here we are some 35 years past the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. and these ideas are now ascendant in popularity. And the other breakdown you see when you look at the survey data, it's especially ascendant among young people. So one of the most recent polls showed that if you ask young people if they have a favorable or unfavorable opinion of socialism, turns out like majorities now have a favorable opinion of socialism. You ask the same question about capitalism and... They've inverted. Capitalism is in decline in its opinion among young people.

Speaker 1

Something they will say is, well, yeah, all the bad stuff that have that, that was socialism. This is democratic socialism. Well, actually they don't say that. They don't say that all the bad things that happened were socialism because not. Yeah, exactly. They find a way to say, ⁓ no, we're different. This is democratic socialism, but also we are going to defend everything that happens under socialist government.

Speaker 2

real socialism. has real socialism, has never been tried, and whenever there's an atrocity that has predictable consequences, every time there's a past attempt at socialism, and it ends in death, starvation, genocide, all of the things that we know these horrific regimes of the past have led to, which by the way were predicted. before those regimes were launched. mean, it's no surprise that the Soviet Union turned into this authoritarian hellhole where they're murdering tens of millions of people. That was predicted and yet it happened. And then those that were celebrating it at the time now want nothing to do with its reputation. So it's no longer real socialism. So this is a recurring. avoidance of that legacy that has played out in the socialist Marxist world basically since Marx himself lived back in the mid to late 1800s.

Speaker 1

Yeah, and I wonder if it's kind of a question of branding. You there's almost like you have this meeting with like all of these, you know, marketers and they're saying, well, people like democracy, democratic people like that. This will make it sound really good.

Speaker 2

And they also do kind of another sleight of hand here, because if you ask them what's an example of an actually existing democratic socialist society, they'll say, aha, well, it's just like Denmark or Norway. It's this innocuous, usually the Scandinavian countries, they brand them as democratic socialism as their ideal. But then the sleight of hand is then they do a pivot and it's like, okay, well, what kind of policies do you want to implement? And it's, well, the workers must rise up and seize the means of production as Karl Marx predicted and usher in the age ⁓ of the socialist state that withers away and brings about true communism, which is not Denmark at all. What Denmark is, is a very highly advanced economy with capitalist institutions. It has free trade, relatively low regulatory environment, generally business friendly in that respect. but it has a large welfare state. it's like the branding exercise is how do we convince people that democratic socialism is Denmark with a large welfare state, but then we get into policy and try to implement it. And what they really want is Venezuela under Nicholas Maduro seizing the oil fields to redistribute to the masses.

Speaker 1

you are these ideologies, is it cyclical by generation? Is it every, you know, 10 years or so they sort of come back around again?

Speaker 2

There's an element of that. see it plays out, you know, the old joke is that young people are very idealistic, so they're already disposed to socialism because they're voting with their heart. And then they see it in practice, and as they become older, they become like us. We're more curmudgeonly and skeptical of those types of things. You know, that's a pattern that does play out, but I think there's something more to it. I think there's a... more pronounced historical amnesia today than at any point in recent memory about ⁓ actually existing socialist regimes and the downsides, the horrors of them. From 1917 onward, the Soviet Union was a real threat, a tangible threat in the world. And even though it had its cheerleaders, ⁓ there were communist parties in the United States that had cheerleaders at the time, think most people looked upon it in horror and were like, no, we do not want that example. what no longer exists. And now young people today were born in, ⁓ like a college student today was born sometime in the mid 2000s. They have no memory of events that proceeded in 1991 because they weren't there.

Speaker 1

Well, it's something I found too, is when you meet, you know, even young people whose, families escaped, say like Cuba or, you know, recently Venezuela. I mean, the idea of just take Venezuela, the millions of people who fled, you know, you think that would be a sign like, When it comes to, you know, Cuba, they'll say that, well, you know, everyone who fled Cuba, they were all the capitalists who were oppressing everyone. You know, they were, you know, they were pretty much slave owners. And that's why, that's why they left.

Speaker 2

it.

Speaker 1

You can't look to Venezuela, a country that's lost, I think it's like a quarter of the country fled and say they were all evil capitalists who were trying to oppress people.

Speaker 2

Again, it's back to these sleight of hand arguments that they make. When there's a newly ascendant socialist society, and we've seen this play out dozens of times before, all the intellectual elites gravitate to it, on the left especially. And they point to it and say, ah, that's our future. They've figured it out. This is going to usher in the new era of equality for mankind. It happened after the Soviets took over in 1917 and established the Soviet Union. Lenin and the Bolsheviks come into power. All these Western intellectuals flocked to the Soviet Union over the first few years it exists. And they come back home and say, well, I've seen the future. This is what we have to do here in America, or this is what we have to do in Britain. And then it all goes to hell. it all falls apart and those very same people are kind of like, I don't want to be involved in that anymore. It wasn't real socialism. Same thing happened when Mao took over in China. You have these Western intellectuals, they go visit there. Some of them quite famous. W.E.B. Du Bois, the civil rights activist in the United States, becomes a Marxist later in life and he tours like Maoist China. Joan Robinson, the British economist. becomes a fan girl ⁓ of Chairman Mao himself and writes all these books about how he's ushering in the wonderful new age. And what's really happening is genocide and famines happening in the background. And they pretend like it doesn't exist. And then the next generation, when that becomes more evident, they pretend as if these apologies never occurred. When Hugo Chavez seized power in Venezuela, the famous left-wing economist Joseph Stiglitz travels down there and meets with him to negotiate that they were trying to set up a ⁓ currency reserve system to compete against the dollar. And it was all based in ⁓ Venezuela. It was going to be the anchor of this, this oil republic that had now instituted democratic socialism. There's pictures of Stiglitz meeting with Chavez and he comes home and he says, this is the future. A decade later, he won't even talk about Venezuela because it's basically a dysfunctional society that went the route that most communist and socialist states do into oppression, into mass murder, into political corruption, and into authoritarian figures that will not cede their power to anyone else because that's the livelihood of their regime now. And suddenly Venezuela is no longer socialism.

Speaker 1

So I wanted to know, you what is the difference between... know, socialist and democratic socialist. So I checked out the DSA website and this is from a couple of days ago from its website. What is democratic socialism? they say capitalism is a system designed by the owning class to exploit the rest of us for their own profit. We must replace it with democratic socialism, a system where ordinary people have a real voice in our workplaces, neighborhoods, and society. We believe there are many avenues that feed into the democratic road to socialism. Road to social, interesting. Our vision pushes further than historic social democracy and leaves behind authoritarian visions of socialism in the dustbin of history. So here, you know, it's kind of what we've been talking about. They don't want you to think about all of the death and destruction and famine, etc, etc. They want to push that back into the dustpan of history. And yet, if you bring up, say Venezuela, if you bring up Cuba, say for example, Cuba, every single problem that Cuba has will be blamed on the United States. I find it so interesting that Cuba's having such a hard time economically, and they have been for a while now, and the blame is put squarely on the shoulders of the United States. And yet, it was only a few years ago that the Cuban government allowed their own citizens to start even the smallest of businesses.

Speaker 2

Exactly.

Speaker 1

It was illegal to have a small business. And let me tell you, if you're looking for variables and what's getting in your way of becoming economically successful, not allowing somebody to open up a fruit stand, making that illegal might be one of the big problems that you have.

Speaker 2

Yeah, communism has always blamed its problems on somebody else. Soviet Union used to do this. They blamed the Western European powers in the United States for not sharing capitalism with them, which is kind of ironic. You supposedly have this perfect socialist economy in Cuba, and yet the only reason it's failing is because the capitalist countries won't do capitalism with it. And that suddenly becomes the point of blame, the scapegoat. I actually don't think that the sanctions on Cuba do very much as a core of the problem. They're like leverage around the edge for foreign policy reasons behind them. But the core of it is actually the dysfunctional economy that the socialist state itself has adopted by basically banning people from organic business transactions as private citizens. You know, the interesting thing, you read that passage off the Democratic Socialist website. And they say we're seeking to replace capitalism as if it was this insidious system designed in the back room, a boardroom of a company, and imposed on society. This is a complete misunderstanding of how ⁓ our modern economy emerged. mean, it would say ground up, bottom up, organic set of interpersonal exchanges to find capitalism, not some imposed system from the top down. And I think this really speaks to the error of the mindset that socialists of all type tend to have. Just because they view themselves as centrally planning their own system, they assume that everything else, everyone else that they're competing against, must also be centrally planning their system.

Speaker 1

Yeah, and I also find it interesting. The website seems to have been updated because I remember taking a screen grab from a while back when explaining what is democratic socialism. They said they want social ownership and democratic control of utilities and key industries, including water, gas, electric, telecommunications, media, media. and internet service. They didn't repeat it. They didn't repeat it twice. I repeated it for emphasis. Media and internet service providers and other critical sectors of the economy through direct government support, public banks and pension funds at every level of government nationalize and socialize. That's what they talk about. And yeah, just want everyone out there to just think, what does media look like when it is

Speaker 2

it.

Speaker 1

centrally planned. Who gets to talk? Because I don't think you guys will be hearing much of Phil Magnus. I don't think you'd be hearing much of Lou Perez. And maybe that's what you want. Maybe of our listeners just want us to shut up. But we're very fortunate to be living in the system as imperfect as it is now, where we are able to broadcast to you Happy Hour Econ every week and do it without fear of a knock on the door in the middle of the night.

Speaker 2

And this is a, again, a repetition of a recurring pattern. Socialists are all for free speech until they get in charge and somebody else is criticizing them. And we know all these historical regimes that are not real socialism but actually were at the time that they were started, one of the very first patterns is they seize the radio stations and the newspaper presses to control the flow of information because anything that questions the wisdom of the socialist regime or the socialist system is now subversive. It's now an agent of undermining the success of that regime that's baked into it because Karl Marx predicted it would work this way. And you're going against the prediction. That means you are a subversive agent and you are therefore eligible to be silenced. So it looks very innocuous. like, ⁓ well, we want to control the radio stations or the internet or the ⁓ news media. ⁓ And it's because we want to give access to the people and ensure that ⁓ our information gets to them. But ⁓ again, you don't get dissenting voices on that because the dissenting voice becomes a disruption and a violation of the experiment itself.

Speaker 1

word that you hear a lot is seize. They want to seize the means of production. They never seem to talk about building. They never seem to talk about creating. And what I find really interesting, again, as imperfect as the system we live under now is, you have the right to go with your comrades and build a business, to go out there and try to build something and compete with. everybody else under the other system under democratic socialism, you don't have that right. And I would really be interested to see as a test, as a challenge, the 100,000 card carrying members of the DSA. I want to see what businesses you come up with. want to see what services you provide. I want to see what it looks like when a bunch of comrades get together to compete and to try to voluntarily sell an idea or service to the public and let the public decide which way they want to go.

Speaker 2

It's the, no one is stopping any of these democratic socialists from going out there and creating the vegan socialist grocery cooperative collective farm. And maybe they would grow something that somebody else would buy and maybe not. I don't know the answer to that, but nothing is stopping them from doing it. But that's not their objective. They are coming from a viewpoint that views society as a competitive contest over control of material goods, material possessions. And this is baked deep into Marxist theory. It's conflict over material access, control to the means of production. And when you are starting with that as your epistemic origin point, everything that derives from it, ownership of anything, must have been either seized or taken or gotten through an illicit means. And then they look around at society and they say, well, the haves inappropriately and illegitimately acquired what they have by depriving the have-nots. And we are the have-nots, so therefore it's just for us to go take it back from the haves. Which is, not really supported in history. Yes, there are atrocities in history, there's theft in history, but that doesn't mean that all around us is simply the product of theft. ⁓ It's just really a miscalculation and a misdiagnosis of the world around them. Because if you think everything is acquired by theft and coercion, then theft and coercion and the other direction becomes your only mechanism to right the situation. And therefore they think they're just as socialists in taking things from other people.

Speaker 1

Everyone out there to think about just all the things that happen in your daily life and how much of those things, those choices that you're making, do you want to leave up to a vote, especially a vote from people you have never met before, possibly people who you loathe, people who loathe you. And what does that world look like? And I thought there was a great example of a professor named Richard Wolf, who is a socialist. And in this video, Richard Wolf was asked a question about, know, in his socialist world, how does one go about acquiring a PS five, PS five being a gaming system under

Speaker 2

your system of worker cooperatives, would I still get my PlayStation 5? Absolutely. You'd have to struggle a little bit for it. You'd have to workers. You'd have to talk about the distribution.

Speaker 1

to talk to your fellow. of income.

Speaker 2

You'd have to compare your desire for PlayStation against all the other interests of all the other people. It wouldn't be something you worked out on your own with your particular boss in any way. would have to be a democratic decision. You'd have to come to terms with that, the way you do democratic decisions now in our society to the extent that we

Speaker 1

have them, you would basically have to go to your fellow workers and plead your case for why you need a PS five station. PlayStation. Let's not even talk about how in a world where you have to plead your case for PlayStation, there would not be a PlayStation to begin with.

Speaker 2

Yes, yeah. So assume there was even a PlayStation, and this is the thing about socialist systems, is they make the allocation of scarce resources susceptible to political decisions. Well, what do we know about the political world? It's an extremely inefficient way to allocate anything. Every time you do that, it's like the DMV. or worse it's in the Soviet Union, you know, how did you get a car in the Soviet Union? They had cars, but you had to put your name on a list. Yeah, that list was often many years out from the delivery of the car, and then you get a really, like a bad Soviet or Eastern European pile of junk delivered to you. And it's not really fulfilling the need in a way that anyone would like or desire. There are also recurring issues of shortages because you've obliterated price signals over who even wants a PlayStation or do they want a PlayStation or some other gaming system. You have no way of knowing that if it's submitted to the worker collective and assuming they could even build one, which is doubtful, but ⁓ you know, in that type of a scenario, well, what becomes the allocation mechanism for scarce goods instead of a price mechanism, it means standing in line at the store. ⁓ or happening to be there on the day that the shipment is delivered and you are cousins with the guy who is chosen by the Soviet state to run the store and he gives you a PlayStation out the back door instead of having to stand in line. These are extremely unfair. allocation mechanisms, especially compared to a functional marketplace where you are paying the ask for price and you come together on a mutually agreed upon trade or exchange with the store owner.

Speaker 1

And something else is if I have a ⁓ democratic voice to decide details about your life, I'm going to be saying no to a lot of the stuff that you want to do. lot of your interests are not my interest. A lot of things that you might be into, I consider a waste of money. And now when we have a big pool of, okay, this is, you know, we could only fund X, Y, and Z. It's going to come down to what my preferences are. And I believe it was Connor, Yeah, who had written a really good piece, eloquently talking about how the rights and the desires of minorities under a democratically socialist system isn't necessarily going to be a good life. Because if you happen to be somebody who is, again, who has a very specific thing that you're into that makes your life worthwhile,

Speaker 2

the way. ⁓

Speaker 1

The masses can deny you that just by voting on it.

Speaker 2

There are no means to have a clear expression of your own personal subjective preferences and tastes, especially if your tastes diverge from the majority. If you want something that's not being produced in the marketplace, even as a minority participant in the marketplace, you have leverage, have sovereignty as an individual consumer to seek out that good. If you're dependent on the Soviet state to deliver it or the Democratic Socialist state of Denmark, which isn't really socialist, but they think it is, if you're dependent on a state agency to deliver that, they will cater toward whatever the majority opinion happens to be as expressed through the political mechanisms of that state. And the irony there is it's often not quite majoritarian after all. Nicolas Maduro just rigged an election a couple of years ago after losing at like a landslide vote to keep himself in power. He basically said, I'm going to shirk the will of the majority because me as the democratic socialist that I am, I embody the majority, whether they realize it or not, whether they know it or not. So this is another pattern in Soviet style. systems of government and all derivative systems of socialism as they come into power purporting to speak on behalf of the masses, the people, the obvious majority. And yet when they get into power, they rule as minority interests, very extreme small minorities on ideological ground. And even if the masses of the country are against them, well, that's where you get killing fields and gulags and genocide camps. like, the majority is against us, so they must also be done. undying the true worker majority interests, so therefore we must eliminate them.

Speaker 1

Yeah. So it kind of goes from this idealistic tyranny of the majority to, the tyranny of one guy.

Speaker 2

Yeah, exactly. Of Chairman Mao or Stalin or Pol Pot or Maduro. There's a reason they always devolve around like single party and single person dictatorships.

Speaker 1

Yeah, and this idea that they embody the revolution. So everything counter to whatever they're proposing is counter revolutionary, therefore can be eliminated.

Speaker 2

Exactly, exactly. And it's a license to eliminate the inconveniences of anyone that would challenge you.

Speaker 1

I am worried about where things are going. ⁓ And I do wonder how can persons of liberty, if you will, as I would describe Phil and I, what is it that we can do to kind of push back or to show?

Speaker 2

We have a harder sell on our side because they're offering unicorns and magical equality and these lofty promises, whereas we're just trying to say, leave me alone and you'll get great things and I'll do great things and you can do great things and no one will get in your way. So we have a much harder sell on that. I think one of the things we need to do though is a better, ⁓ we have to come better at is actually telling the story of how socialism's performed in practice. In other words, denied the democratic socialists of today the ability to shirk their own history by saying, wait a minute, you're just the latest iteration of people promising unicorns, but really delivering gulags.

Speaker 1

Well, I hope that this episode of Happy Hour Econ has been a unicorn delivered straight to your brain. Thank you all for listening. We will be back next week.