Why do working-class Americans hate socialism? The proletariat instinctually understands socialism’s flaws better than liberal intellectuals.

While I agree that leftist elitism is a barrier; however, the scientific consensus of Nobel Prize winning economists condemns socialism as an inferior ideology as well.

For example, health insurance is the only proper way to provide healthcare in a capitalist society because socialized healthcare cedes power to Government that is lost forever. For any organization, how can Liberals rationally prefer Government management over the free-market (especially since former socialist governments have factually murdered hundreds of million of people)?

We capitalists keep winning the actual economic wars when socialist nations crumble one after another, but the left wins the propaganda war because most bourgeois intellectuals are too ‘feelings” driven to rationally understand the factual superiority of the free-market.

Why is the left – today - silent about the economic (human) destruction going on in Venezuela?

The left is irrationally incapable of understanding (completely knowing on every intellectual and emotional level) that it is ALWAYS best to limit government power. So the most murderous ideology in world history, as presented by Marx, will continue reaping perpetual havoc and destroying individual human lives leading to socialist caused famines and mass murders (collective destruction)!

History cannot insert its lessons into a leftist ideologue’s mind. Allen Bloom’s “the Closing of the American Mind” deals with our elite intellectuals’ shortcomings.

Like so many rightists, Ralph7, you are an exceeding dull philosopher. (I'd deploy a meaner adjective-substantive pair if I weren't striving like hell to be polite here.) Gabba gabba hey, on and on with the same impoverished Hayekian/Randian/Hannityean talking points, not an idea in your slavish little heads. Stalinists got nothin' on you guys when it comes to duckspeak (speaking of EB).

You adduce "... the factual superiority of the free-market [hyphen sic]." Are you kidding me? "Factual"? Look, pal: physics is factual (more strictly, falsifiable); societal arrangements (capitalism, socialism) are arbitrary -- at least up to the point that they crash into physics. On arrival at that terminus a quo, either physics governs or the society is destroyed. And here's some physics for you: we live inside a closed life-support system surrounded by trillions upon trillions of unbridgeable kilometers of useless void. Resource allocation -- socialism by any other name -- or mass death: one or the other will one day be enforced on us by brute physical reality, because the dumb-guy misinterpretation of Condorcet that imagines continual heightening of the Shrub's infamous pie to be an objective material possibility is just flat wrong.

Something's eventually gotta give, and the choices will be: to face -- ahem -- facts and try preemptively managing the distribution through informed and com-/dispassionate electoral consensus; to delay so long that submission to a dictatorial management regime that may or may not be disinterested enough to get the job done but will most decidedly be no friend of human liberty is unavoidable; or perish in our hundreds of millions when, to appropriate my favorite line from the works of the great sage Tex Avery, we run out of the stuff. And trust me: we will, and soon rather than late, run out of the stuff, and woe betide us if we haven't made provision against the day.

A quibbling aside on a detail of your uninteresting modus of argumentation: why do the critics of socialism always advert for examples to the populist or undemocratic and in any case teratological forms of the system -- like Chavez's creeping caudillismo -- and ignore the acceptably successful social-democratic versions seen in NW Europe? Faulting the lurching and illiberal character of the socialist solutions hewed to by peoples deranged by colonialism and poverty while ignoring the sociopolitically enlightened countercases posed by models developed in nations lucky enough to harbor a citizenry so comfortable, secure and well-educated as to imagine a certain minimum equity to be the common due of all strikes me as rather intellectually dishonest. And in the matter of that vile little "socialist" who is the Bolivarian-authoritarian Chavez: he and the greater number of his partisans derive from what once was nonironically called "peasant stock." So did you inadvertently omit from your thesis about the working classes' instinctive suspicion of big, actively redistributionist government a limitation of that propensity to the said classes in American (or Anglo-Saxon, or European) culture -- or did it just never occur to you that your windy universalizing was mere parrot's polemic, all words and no notions beyond prejudice?

As I said, an exceeding dull philosopher. But you will be heeded and seconded by your half-bright ilk. Sigh.

Being an exceedingly dull philosopher, I take solace in being right. Nietzschean moral relativity is too simple-minded for my tastes because there are some absolutes. Not everything is anarchistically relative.

We can both agree that my views are not original, but then nor are yours. Keynes, Trotsky, Krugman and Marx’s ideas just don’t excite me the way they do you. However, I did enjoy the Ramones reference, but you can also attribute my philosophy to Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Jean-Baptiste Say, John Stuart Mill, Richard Cantillon, Joseph Schumpeter and Ludwig von Mises; however, most of views on economics come from Allan Greenspan (who thinks capitalism’s superiority is so clear that all detractors must be irrational) and Noble Prize winning economist, Milton Friedman, who considers the free-market’s superiority to be a proven fact.

Yes, we can agree that Physics is a hard science with proven theorems, but economic researchers have reached a consensus using scientific methods as well, and we capitalists hold the consensus view.

Economics is not a zero sum equation, with us all eating the same pie. Our ability to consume energy is as unlimited as the Universe. With the mutually beneficial snowball effect of capitalism we can eventually consume, and capitalize, on every form of energy from fusion to fission.

Socialized Europe has a “mixed economy” where lower corporate tax rates attract capital (and keep jobs in the region), are countered by redistributive income taxes. We are arguing for less taxation in every sector of the economy. We are willing to accept inequality and creative/destruction of capitalism as a tradeoff for more economic growth and liberty. We consider constitutionally guaranteed individual and property rights to be inalienable from human rights. Ceding our individual rights to the Government, the collective, the UN or whatever Soviet group you like, will facilitate yet another progressive nightmare.

I do consider you to be am intelligent person, but your cognitive abilities (perhaps idiosyncratic neuroses) keep you from being rational. Smart people with cognitive gaps are ultimately dangerous ideologues; however, people with common sense instinctually counteract most flawed views.

Just a quick response to this bit:

"For example, health insurance is the only proper way to provide healthcare in a capitalist society because socialized healthcare cedes power to Government that is lost forever. For any organization, how can Liberals rationally prefer Government management over the free-market"

The problem with the current free market healthcare system is that it leaves millions of people uncovered. Maybe in fifty years or so the market would figure out a way to cover everyone profitably, maybe not, but that's beside the point. The point is that if a person has to choose between ceding a little power and having affordable healthcare, or keeping that same amount of power and having insanely expensive healthcare that there's no way in hell they can pay for without insurance but the insurance costs too much too, plenty of perfectly rational people will choose the former. It's self-preservation. Also, to the minds of some, I'm sure the idea of having something as important as healthcare in the hands of elected officials who can be held directly accountable for their actions is preferable to being left to the tender mercies of the capitalist machine (Not my mind, really, but I thought I'd put it out there anyway).

Ralph7, you might want to get more up to date on your economic theory. It is assuredly not the case that economic theory has settled that a market economy (a pure capitalist model) is inherently superior to all other economic systems. Friedman was a brilliant guy, but not the last word on the subject by any means. Economists working with the analytical tools pioneered by Kenneth Arrow (Nobel 1972), John Harsanyi (Nobel 1994), and others have shown that neither an all-market system nor an all-planning system can optimize resource allocation. For optimal results, you need both markets (to provide their very useful signals to individual participants for scarcity constrained choices) and planning/regulation (to deal with the fact that markets require perfect information to optimize outcomes, when perfect information is in reality never available).

This work helps us understand why all current capitalist economies have very signficant governmental regulatory elements. It also helps us understand why markets can get so screwed up sometimes, as the U.S. credit markets have been from July last year and continuing. There has been a very significant lack of adequate information in the credit markets (as to what investment portfolios contain the toxic securitized mortgage instruments, in what amounts and with what risk quality); that information failure would most readily be remedied by a regulatory response mandating certain increased disclosures by market participants (It would really be nice to know with more precision what you are buying when you invest in bonds, or a bond fund.)

The great days of the U.S. economy after WWII were built in important part on the information-increasing regulations (transparency requirements) imposed by the securities acts legislated in the Roosevelt administration.

This is not to say that regulation cannot be overdone as well as underdone. The point precisely is that neither extreme (just let the markets do their work vs. rationally allocate everything according to plan or consensus) works best.

Blue Kansas – Politicians are proposing that those of us with insurance and incomes cover the uninsured, Robin Hood. However, if we were to take the profit incentive from medicine, we would also remove the incentive to create new drugs and medical treatments. Capital is invested only in businesses that have the potential to generate wealth. The poor do not create jobs or wealth, businessmen (and women) with capital do.

Asymmetrical information is an old market concept. Games Theory or Nash’s Equilibrium has been used by many economists to address this issue. Transparency enhancing regulations counteract asymmetrical market relationships. Just about everything else limits economic growth.

Not every idea needs a moderate compromise. (“Everything is relative” is too simple of an idea.) With free-market being perfect health (and absolute liberty) and communism representing death (oppression and slavery to the State), we don’t need some cancer in the economy.

Because you are an elitist leftist you feel that your ilk is wise and intelligent enough to regulate the market. All condescending Maoists and Soviets thought they were smarter than the market too. However, no mater how superior you feel you intelligence to be, you are not smarter than the market. Let it be. Go back to creating laws that limit my tobacco, fat, salt intake and other individual rights. But keep your misdirected taxes and regulations off me and all individual Americans.

Coming in late on this thread. Could I get a quick primer from someone on what class of people are in the category of uninsured? If someone says 47 million, are there any illegal people counted? are we being told to insure single women/men with several kids they cannot take care of and never bothered to get even a minimal education to get along in this world?

Lest you think I'm hard-hearted, I do believe we should watch out for children below 18, the infirm, and workers hit with a job loss who need time to get back into the game and guess what--we do for the most part. Let's look to only solve real problems government should review (whatever they really are in this case such as medical fraud for instance) and not make gooey blanket statements covering exhaustive "rights" for nearly 15% of our country.

People who work hard should not be looked at as wallets for those who make the choice to not take seriously the responsibility of giving life and caring for the lives they bring in to this world.

I get Ralph7's philosphy and believe it would very closely resemble the view of our forefathers if I understand it--look to do what is necessary to take care of yourself (best done under capitalim)and take a hard look at all the unintended consequences before you accept the fact that government (socialism) is an answer, not the least of which in this case is the potential for substandard care through limited choices and depleted motivation of the healthcare profession.

Ralph7:

For example, health insurance is the only proper way to provide healthcare in a capitalist society because socialized healthcare cedes power to Government that is lost forever. For any organization, how can Liberals rationally prefer Government management over the free-market (especially since former socialist governments have factually murdered hundreds of million of people)?

Question: do you consider the way healthcare is provided in mainland Europe to be socialist or free-market? They are single-payer. They are universal. But they do work through private insurance companies and private hospitals. So what do you call them, aside from cheap and efficient solutions to a problem that bedevils the US?

Ralph7:

We capitalists keep winning the actual economic wars when socialist nations crumble one after another, but the left wins the propaganda war because most bourgeois intellectuals are too ‘feelings” driven to rationally understand the factual superiority of the free-market.

Seems like you've missed the last century. Socialism is about plugging the holes in free markets by properly regulating and intervening where the incentives of the free market yield undesired results (such as exploding healthcare costs, rising numbers of uninsured and dropping quality). Those noble-prize winning economists can tell you that free markets have to be properly regulated and incentivized, and that free markets can and do fail without it.

Ralph7:

Why is the left – today - silent about the economic (human) destruction going on in Venezuela?

Venezuala is a dictatorship that is essentially a large oil company. Why doesn't the right complain bitterly about the horrible excesses of ultra-capitalist Russia? Do you all still believe Bush's "I saw into his soul" crap?

Ralph7:

The left is irrationally incapable of understanding (completely knowing on every intellectual and emotional level) that it is ALWAYS best to limit government power.

Then why is the right so busy funding the military, or telling women whether or not the can have an abortion?

Libertarianism is kinda cute as a salon ideology, far away from reality. Pretty much like communism, when it gets to that. Not surprisingly, a lot of leading libertarians are converted communists. The particular hatred of communism in the libertarian movement makes perfect sense - they're too close for comfort. Real politics is dirty, difficult and never ideologically sound. That's where most socialist countries are these days.

I'm sure you know that most industrialized countries are largely socialist societies. And that most people in the developed world live in countries with socialist things, such as cheap, universal healthcare and cheap, universal education. The US, Russia and China are the countries that most embody the unadulterated capitalist spirit. Lovely trio they make, don't they?

Socialism in Europe: I recommend you read, "The Path to Sustainable Growth - Lessons from 20 Years Growth Differentials in Europe" <link> and <link>, and read the “Index of Economic Freedom” at <link> where you will see a linear correlation with economic growth and economic freedom.

Furthermore, you may notice higher unemployment rates in Socialist Europe? Labor unions actually price manufactures into being less globally completive and increase unemployment rates thereby harming the least educated people the most. Unions hinder the company’s ability to fire, hire and derive profits. Lower hiring rates and the eventual destruction of the company are the inevitable results of overzealous unionization.

Both Russia and China model their economies after the US because communism failed. The Chinese only stopped dying from socialist caused famines because Chinese dictators rejected redistribution and endorsed the free-market. Communist Stalin and Lenin murdered 12 million Russians.

Socialism in America: Many who have actually lived under the horrors of socialism become libertarians. Many Hollywood leftists, and democratic candidates, only embrace socialism from the safe haven of a capitalist nation.

Obama and Socialism: Unfortunately, many Americans are turning away from the system that brought liberty and wealth. Obama narcissistically leads America to this destruction, and his personality cult was attracting independents; however, his views, wife and associates have revealed his Obama to be just another bigot.

Abortion: Some on the right actually think fetuses are humans and deserve to live.

Military: My problem with cutting defense is the same historical problem that Emperor Asoka of India and the Toltec of Mexico faced. After becoming the dominant cultures in their regions, both Asoka and the Toltecs unilaterally disarmed and were then summarily conquered. If a nation is rich, it must be powerful too.

Socialism in Europe: I recommend you read, "The Path to Sustainable Growth - Lessons from 20 Years Growth Differentials in Europe" <link> and <link>, and read the “Index of Economic Freedom” at <link> where you will see a linear correlation with economic growth and economic freedom.

Sorry, I don't take the Heritage Foundation seriously when it comes to economy - they're an ideological think tank. After all, it all depends on how you define economic freedom: do you count only how free a business owner is to maximize his wealth, or do you also count how limited a child in a poor family is in his/her choices and chances in life? Poverty is an economic prison.

BTW, De Vlieghere (main author of your "recommended reading") is a Flemish Liberal politician that is still pretending the Laffer curve is real. As James Tobin (Noble price economics) said: [t]he "Laffer Curve" idea that tax cuts would actually increase revenues turned out to deserve the ridicule with which sober economists had greeted it in 1981. 'nuf said. This guy is a joke.

Furthermore, you may notice higher unemployment rates in Socialist Europe?

Actually, not so fast. First of all, the US undercounts unemployment because benefits are low and social stigma high. Second, people that "stop looking" are no longer counted. Most European countries keep people on the rolls much longer than the US does. Third, the US does not count its huge prison population as unemployed.

For those reasons it is easier to look at employment rates, which are not that different between the US and Europe, and the difference is easily accounted for by the following two facts:

1. More people stay in school and go on to higher education in Europe than in the US.

2. People retire several years earlier in Europe than in the US.

Those two effects reduce the employment rate of the active population, accounting for the difference between the employment rates in both types of economy.

Both Russia and China model their economies after the US because communism failed.

Indeed, which is why the US, Russia and China are the world's most capitalist societies right now. Not a great endorsement for the US model, is it?

Socialism in America: Many who have actually lived under the horrors of socialism become libertarians. Many Hollywood leftists, and democratic candidates, only embrace socialism from the safe haven of a capitalist nation.

You're confusing socialism and communism. There are quite a few people that escaped communism and became libertarians, but libertarians are actually thin on the ground in the ex-communist countries of western Europe.

Somehow you seem to think that the US is a fully capitalist society. The US made many socialist changes to its capitalist model, which is why it has not fallen too far behind the rest of the industrialized world. The creation of socialist constructs like social security, medicare, medicaid and the constant expansion of these things under Republican presidents (W among them) come to mind.

Western European economies are socialist. People like De Vlieghere embrace capitalism from the safe haven of a socialist nation, and ignore the problems that are so apparent in the capitalist trio.

Obama and Socialism: Unfortunately, many Americans are turning away from the system that brought liberty and wealth. Obama narcissistically leads America to this destruction, and his personality cult was attracting independents; however, his views, wife and associates have revealed his Obama to be just another bigot.

You seem to think that Europe isn't wealthy or free. Perhaps you should travel there. Or is the tanking dollar making that too hard? The US has been running up debt internally (household lending, government deficits) and externally (trade imbalance, government deficits) in order to keep its economy going. That's not a sustainable model.

Abortion: Some on the right actually think fetuses are humans and deserve to live.

Yes, but they don't believe that once the fetus is born it deserves to have a chance at a healthy life and a good education.

The US has a huge abortion rate, and the only thing the GOP can think of is to expand the power of the state to regulate it (despite clear proof that this does not work to reduce the number of abortions significantly). On the other side, socialist western Europe has the lowest abortion rate in the world.

Fact is, on most "moral" issues like abortion, teen pregnancy, violent crime etcetera the socialist societies beat the pants of the US. Perhaps that just goes to show that morality begins with a concern for the poorest among us.

Military: My problem with cutting defense is the same historical problem that Emperor Asoka of India and the Toltec of Mexico faced. After becoming the dominant cultures in their regions, both Asoka and the Toltecs unilaterally disarmed and were then summarily conquered. If a nation is rich, it must be powerful too.

As long as you agree that this means your basic premise is wrong: some things do require central government, and cannot be done by the private sector. So please, come off the high ideological horse and act a little more in accordance with reality.

"Economics is not a zero sum equation, with us all eating the same pie. Our ability to consume energy is as unlimited as the Universe. With the mutually beneficial snowball effect of capitalism we can eventually consume, and capitalize, on every form of energy from fusion to fission."

Economics most certainly is a zero-sum equation. It might not have been during Adam Smith's day, because there were still unexplored lands and untapped resources. You could always go somewhere else. That isn't the case anymore. As it stands now, the world is a closed system for the first time in human history. We've found everything we're going to find here.

Of course, the Earth has always been a closed system, no matter how new this principle is to us. In this closed system, geothermal and solar are the only real types of energy. We've been very lucky to have coal and oil, but you must understand that in utilizing them, we are essentially strip-mining the concentrated essence of a hundred million years of photosynthesis. And even then, the energy delta (while positive) is a lot smaller than most people probably think when extraction, refinement, and supply chain inputs are factored in. This is not a renewable resource. Once it’s gone, it isn’t coming back soon enough to do us any good.

The laws of thermodynamics will not be denied. Energy has to come from somewhere, and nothing is ever free. In most cases, from bio-diesel to fusion, the energy input during production far exceeds the energy output, making these items counterproductive as an energy source. The sun is a giant gravity-powered fusion reactor, but we cannot feasibly duplicate that on Earth.

I’m afraid that until we’re able to terraform Mars and mine the asteroid belt for mineral resources, we’re just stuck here, and the rate at which we’re burning through our natural resources is absolutely unsustainable by any scientific measure. Consumer capitalism was a noble theory a few hundred years ago, but it cannot survive in a closed system and that is what we have become. We need to figure out something new. Perhaps not socialism as we understand it, but something.

Then again, Europe seems to be doing quite well under a mostly socialist system with little or no loss of personal freedom and standard of living. Some of their methods might make good stopgap measures until we figure out something that works better. But it's suicide to pretend that we can keep this up forever.

Greetings. I'm an American naval officer currently stationed in Europe and I must concur with you regarding the state of this continent. From what I've seen, we could learn something here. :-)

Ralph7:

Why do working-class Americans hate socialism? The proletariat instinctually understands socialism’s flaws better than liberal intellectuals.

First, this premise fails to offer a definition of the 'working class' today, neither is there a measure to ascertain the level of comprehension of 'socialism' for this class.

Ralph, you seem unwilling to admit that communism and socialism essentially can be distinguished from each other.

Second, the first thing mental picture which emerged upon reading this thesis was: Rush Limbaugh.

Limbaugh and ritewing pundits have dominated mass media punditry for a typical stereotype of the 'working class' since the end of the Fairness Doctrine. The ritewing and Limbaugh have been highly effective at certain tactics, including placating base human motives: prejudice, greed, intolerance, while injecting polemic, purist, libertarian concepts. The classic myth painted by the ritewing in the 1980s was that of the welfare mother, a black woman, driving to the welfare office in a cadillac and having babies just to obtain welfare checks. However, it is not mentioned that the majority of welfare recipients were white, many living in rural all-white regions. This polemic: racial prejudice, intolerance of the poor, mispercieved widespread government fraud, contributed to the rise of the GOP into Congress and welfare reform.

And one needs only to listen to Limbaugh and hear his punditry attack relatively small examples of Democratic political inproprieties but ignore massive examples of corporate fraud of the government, such as health care.

Ralph7:

For example, health insurance is the only proper way to provide healthcare in a capitalist society because socialized healthcare cedes power to Government that is lost forever. For any organization, how can Liberals rationally prefer Government management over the free-market (especially since former socialist governments have factually murdered hundreds of million of people)?

In human history, the profit motive is hardly the primary motivation for innovation and advancements in medical treatments, cures and medical care. In fact, the combination of 'profit motive' and 'health care' have historically resulted in 'charlatans': snake oil salesmen, voodoo doctors, quacks. Instead, the humanitarian motive is the primary motivation.

I am not a socialist or communist, but one could argue that the capitalist model pertaining to health care has allowed oligopolies in economies of consolidation of pharmeceutical and medical research and development. The vast majority of doctors are unable to produce research into treatments and cures because they are inundated with the work of their practices, incumbered by the free market. In contrast, the massive disparity of wealth between the majority of doctors and pharmeceutical and medical firms with their 100s of billions forms oligopolic consolidation. This is hardly Adam Smith's idea of a free market, given his fear of economies of consolidation. So one could argue there is too little research and development in medical treatment and cures because of this oligopolic consolidation.

As well, the profit motive may generate research and development, but R & D is usually less than 20%, if not 10% of the big pharmeceutical and medical firms' budgets. Vast amounts of revenue is allocated to financial investments divorced from the the actual health care industry. Moreover, it is known in medical ethics that profound conflicts exist wherein private industry is often seen treating only so far as to allow for the patient to live, rather than curing the ailment or solving a problem. Hence, the profit motive serves to draw out a disease, disorder, ailment allowing for the patient to live with it without treatment actually curing it. Take the medicine for the next 40 years of your life, and you live.

This is a kind of immoral, unethical, evil, diabolical motivation contrary to the humanitarian motive, contrary to ethical standards of most human societies, yet it is spreading within the private health care and pharmeceutical industry.

And this doesn't even touch on the collapse of the existing medical care system.

Well, medicare works very well for me. What is the relation between creating new drugs and medical technics and health insurance companies? None!

By the way, in most europeans countries one can choose his doctor and hospital. No waiting required.

Capitalism is great idiot. Look at the successions of boom and bust leading to the great depression. Lear nothing, forget nothing cretin.