8 Who, Whom?

One of the most common objections to free-market competition is that it is blind. But we picture justice as a lady with a blindfold on. The beauty of the free-market is that rewards and penalties aren’t given according to someone’s views about the merits or demerits of different people, but they are based on their capacity and luck. The choice open to us is between a system where the will of a few people decide who gets what, and one that depends at least partially on the ability and enterprise of the people concerned and partly on unforeseeable circumstances.

It is true that under competition, a poor man will have less probability of becoming rich than another who starts with inherited property. But a competitive system is the only one where it depends solely on him and not on the favors of the mighty.

Socialists typically advocate for an ideal of justice, but transferring all property to the state puts the state in a position to dictate all other outcomes. Giving the state power isn’t a transfer of power, it is a manufacture of a new power which no one in a competitive society holds. As long as property is divided among many owners, no one has exclusive power to determine the income and position of particular people. It is only that division of property ownership that nobody has complete control over us, and we can therefore decide what to do with ourselves.

Inequality is much more readily borne, and affects the dignity much less, if it is determined by impersonal forces than when it is due to design.  

Once government sets itself to plan for the sake of justice, then it is responsible for everybody’s fate and position. At that point, all our efforts directed towards improving our situation will not be directed towards bettering ourselves, but influencing the favor of the authority in power.

As the coercive power of the state will alone decide who will have what, the only power worth having will be a share in the exercise of this directing power. Lenin himself introduced the phrase: Who, Whom? Who directs and dominates whom? These necessarily become the central issues decided by the supreme power.

Socialism, if it attempted to provide absolute equality, would at least have a clear goal stated. But it only promises a ‘more fair’ distribution. All that really tells us is that they plan on taking from the richest as much as possible. But how does one answer the questions about what a “fair wage” is, or what a “just price” is? We can only go by what we already know, and that’s part of the competitive system. But once planning is instantiated, everything down the line is affected too, and we can’t understand what a fair price or wage is… all we have is what has been determined by the will of the planners.

Socialists will not see the problem as long as this remains a theoretical exercise. But as soon as one attempts to put socialism into practice, the problem comes to the fore. When competing interests are involved, there is no way to keep everyone happy. Socialists have always recognized the need for a defined set of values in which the citizens would have to be properly indoctrinated. It was these efforts to produce a mass movement that the Fascists and Nazi’s made such effective use of. They didn’t need to invent much, the socialists had already done much of the work. They had been priming the people’s to accept a planned society with definitive aims.  

But where the socialists divided society into proletariat and bourgeois, that couldn’t hold. As they gained more power, the new lower-middle class that came into existence wanted it’s part in the new system too. Here’s where the Nazi’s and Fascists took the Marxist aim of using the state to create a totalitarian system, and they morphed the doctrine from class consciousness, to race and national consciousness.

Those doctrines were encouraged as society woke up to the fact that democratic and international socialism were aiming at incompatible ideals.