Socialism is a big deal these days. Bernie Sanders overwhelmingly swept the under-30 vote by running as a “democratic socialist,” and his ideas live on in some of Hillary Clinton’s proposed policies. YouGov, a major online research firm, found that nearly as many under-30s had a positive view of socialism than they did of capitalism. Democrats were even more favorable to socialism, which ranked even with capitalism at 43 percent. Clearly, cultural attitudes toward socialism in America are changing.
Before I can explain why this shift has occurred and analyze its potential consequences, I must first clarify what is meant by socialism. The New Oxford American Dictionary defines it as “a political and economic theory of social organization that advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.” However, this does not exactly fit the policies proposed by Sanders or other current liberal figures. No mainstream candidate, to my knowledge, is currently proposing that the “community as a whole,” that is, the government, should seize control of the means of production, distribution, and exchange. Rather, in America, as in many Western and Northern European countries, socialism has come to mean a political system incorporating an extensive welfare system and policies of income redistribution. In this ideology, the wealthy owe a debt to society to subsidize the less well-off, a transfer carried out by the government via tax rates that increase with income and entitlement programs that distribute that money to others.
A good number of you are probably thinking that this political system seems pretty good. It sounds reasonable, even moral, for those with more to contribute to those who are lacking. The rich have more money than they need, right? They can afford to help out those worse-off than themselves. I will first say that this kind of thinking is not what our country was founded on. With the obvious exception in the institution of slavery, the United States has historically been about reaping the fruits of your own labor and succeeding by your own efforts.
Abraham Lincoln condemned in 1865 the very thing modern socialism is about: people “wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces” rather than working for it themselves.Making government the agent of forcible wealth redistribution — determining how much of your income is actually yours and how much it will give away for you — is fundamentally contrary to the inherited American ethos of working hard to make your own way in life.
But not only is socialism un-American, it is inherently inefficient. A relevant anecdote is the classroom experiment. In it, a teacher faced with a class of young people who firmly support socialist policies, offers to run the class in a way that reflects socialist ideology. He tells students that their grades will be averaged and everyone given the new averaged grade. But as you may be able to guess, the class average decreases on each successive test as the lazier students try to freeload on the hard-working ones, while the industrious students lose motivation because their study is not rewarded and give up as well. The economy is of course a vastly larger and more complex system than a classroom, but the same basic principles apply. When people are punished for succeeding and rewarded for mediocrity, then we have instituted a perverse incentive that negatively effects productivity and innovation.
Socialism also cultivates an attitude of entitlement that is dangerous to our nation’s future. If the government’s primary role becomes not to “provide for the common defense (and) promote the general welfare,” as stated in the preamble to the Constitution, but to provide for you personally and make your life easier, we are on a slippery slope. Just this year we have seen Bernie Sanders promising free college, cheap nationalized healthcare and more welfare benefits despite our country already running an estimated average annual deficit of $912 billion during the Obama administration. A quote often misattributed to Benjamin Franklin warns us: "When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.” Whoever wrote it is right. When one party is offering extensive services to be paid for by someone richer than you and the other is urging fiscal responsibility and sustainability, there can be no denying that our population is discovering that it can vote itself money.
I close with the famous words of John F. Kennedy, who urged us in his 1961 inaugural address to “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.” Let us reclaim the values embodied in those words before it is too late.