Socialism

by Kristian Niemietz

[B]y concentrating power so that it can be used in the service of a single plan, it is not merely transformed, but infinitely heightened. By uniting in the hands of some single body power formerly exercised independently by many, an amount of power is created infinitely greater than any that existed before, so much more far-reaching as almost to be different in kind. It is entirely fallacious to argue that the great power exercised by a central planning board would be ‘no greater than the power collectively exercised by private boards of directors’. There is, in a competitive society, nobody who can exercise even a fraction of the power which a socialist planning board would possess. To decentralize power is to reduce the absolute amount of power [emphasis added].

In a hunter-gatherer society, economic activity is mostly a zero-sum game. The sharing of the spoils is an inherently political act, and the way the spoils are divided reflects power dynamics within the group, as well as moral judgements and notions of desert. The group must work out who ‘deserves’ how much. If Foster is right, our economic intuitions are a legacy of the tribal age. Most anti-capitalist arguments, then, no matter how much complex-sounding sociological jargon they may use, are really just sophisticated rationalisations of primitive urges.

In contrast, there have been two far less well-known novels which critique socialism from a classical liberal perspective. These are Eugen Richter’s Pictures of the Socialistic Future (1891; English translation from 1893) and Henry Hazlitt’s Time Will Run Back (1952, revised version from 1966) (see Makovi (2015) for a summary). Both novels describe a version of socialism under idealised conditions, assuming away many of the problems that socialist societies actually faced (or in Richter’s case, would face in the future).