Posted by
Andrews on Wednesday, April 08, 2009 2:44:55 PM
I read an article a while ago asking why vegetarians make fake meat out of vegetables. The author jokingly said "I don't see meat eaters forming steaks into corn cobs" or something similar. However, the answer is easy. Recipes are written by people who eat meat, so, if a vegetarian is going to use any existing recipes, there is a need for a meat analogue.
A similar situation exists with many electric cars. A number of such cars are designed with a single motor, a drive shaft, and various mechanical means for ensuring the proper amount of force reaches each wheel. In reality, as electricity can be provided to each wheel easily, it would make sense to provide a single motor for each wheel, providing an adjustable amount of force to prevent slip and skid. But as car design was dominated for so long by internal combustion engines, where a centralized source of motive force made sense, a lot of electric cars are designed as if electricity was as hard to deliver to multiple points as fossil fuels.
So, what does any of this have to do with politics?
A lot, actually.
You see, whenever someone accuses Obama of being a socialist, or of having socialist designs on the economy, the left often runs to his defense by pointing out that he is not eliminating private ownership, that he is not taking direct control of companies, and so on. Basically arguing that, as he is not following the soviet model of socialism/communism, he is simply "regulating" the free market.
However, such an argument is simply absurd. It forgets that the communists in Russia were not the only socialists on earth, and, just as with vegetarian cooking and electric cars, the starting point has a strong influence on the form of the final result. In Russia, for example, the long history of authoritarian czarism allowed for an easy transition to an authoritarian central government. On the other hand, in Nazi Germany, and int he US today, a long history of at least nominal respect for free enterprise leads instead to what von Mises calls "socialism of the German style", that is the command economy developed in Nazi Germany.
I am not saying we are there yet, or even close, but we can can see that, were the US to develop a socialist system, that would be the form it would take. Unlike Russia or many other communist nations, where industries were nationalized outright, it is far more likely our economy would be left nominally in the hands of private owners, but with government "partners" who would be the de facto rulers of those companies.
In the end it makes little difference. Whether companies are nationalized outright or are simply controlled by the state it is still a socialist system. However the German style socialism has two advantages. First, it leaves the businessmen as scapegoats should the central planning go wrong. The state can always resort to class envy and scapegoating and pass the buck blaming greedy businessmen for its own failings.
Second, it allows those on the left to claim they are not socialists. After all, the companies are all still in private hands, right?