What's Wrong With Socialism

Socialism is a pretty big deal to conservatives.  It is treated as the devil.  Socialism is treated like tyranny.  It takes away freedom and destroys fairness.  It eliminates the will to work.  Really though, what is actually wrong with socialism? Why do most conservatives fear it?  Why do people think that it is a threat to freedom?

The answer is sadly simple: Taken to its logical end, socialism results in communism, where all wealth is equally distributed, everyone owns everything, thus no one owns anything, and there is no ownership, thus there is no motivation.  Socialism as seen in the USSR is frightening, because, aside from the corruption aspect, it resulted in all of the things that most conservatives fear about it.  It nearly eliminated personal freedom entirely, and it reduced motivation to work so far that it caused serious economic problems.  This extreme socialism realized the darkest fears of conservatives.

There is a major problem with this fear though.  During the earliest times of this nation, after it had declared independence, but before it became the US, a similar problem was observed with democratic republics.  Contrary to popular belief, our founding fathers did not base the design of the Federal government entirely on the democratic republic of Athens (or similar governments of that era).  Much of that design was based on existing colonial governments of the time.  Different colonies were trying out different versions of democratic government, though nearly all used some form of republic.  One problem that came up a lot was too much democracy.  I believe the colony was Virgina (I might be wrong; it's been a while; there may also have been others).  One colony created a legislature that had absolute power.  The governor did not have veto power.  The result was a very high level of democratic representation, which resulted in a very high level of democracy.  The end result of this was that at one point, many farmers were having a difficult time paying their debts, so the legislature of this colony (mostly farmers, elected by farmers) passed a law suspending all debt payment for farmers.  The result was catastrophic.  With no legal guarantee for debt payments, lenders stopped lending.  Those owning existing debts found relief, but those lending were quickly in serious financial trouble, and without anyone willing to grant more loans, the economy of the colony suffered very seriously.  This was not the only problem.  Different colonies experimented with different balances, all with different results.  When the founding fathers drafted the Constitution, they based the Federal government on what they had learned from all of these experiments.  The President was given veto power, to help avoid problems like the Virginia situation.  Congress was divided into two houses, partially because many states with a single legislature still had problems with too much democracy causing unwise laws to be passed, and partially because the state governments wanted more direct representation in Federal government (this last part was demolished when Senators became elected by public vote, instead of appointed by state governments).  In short, too much democracy is no better than too much socialism.  In fact, there are other historical cases where democratic governments have quickly destroyed themselves, because there was nothing to prevent the majority from ignorantly passing self destructive laws.  Historically, democracy was such an epic failure that many of the founders of this nation even questioned the wisdom of a democratic government, because they feared this would happen with the US as well.

Any form of government taken to an extreme will result in problems.  Isolating all governmental power in a single person has proven problematic almost constantly throughout history.  Democratic forms of government have historically never lasted very long, because they tend to become very unstable as size increases.  On paper, extreme communist socialism sounds like an excellent idea, but in practice, we have seen only disaster.  In the US, we are seeing fairly extreme capitalism (extreme compared to most of history) recreating the feudal systems we thought we had thrown off long ago.

The problem is not socialism.  The problem is extreme.  The type of government matters less than how far it is pushed.  In the US, we have gotten by for far longer than most governments throughout history have managed to stay stable, with a system combining democracy, republic, capitalism, and various amounts of socialism.  The US is not purely democratic.  It is not purely a republic (the Supreme Court is not elected by popular vote, among other things).  It is not purely capitalistic (we regulate fairness and safety to some degree).  It is not purely socialist.  It does have elements of all of these though.  None of these need to be feared, so long as they are not taken to extremes.  Extreme democracy will result in voters making decisions that they are not informed enough to make.  Extreme republic will result in so much politics that no one will have time for anything else, not to mention still having voters making decisions that they are not qualified to make.  Extreme capitalism will result in a caste system including slavery, though perhaps less overt than the chattel slavery we are all familiar with.  Extreme socialism will result in exactly the same things that happened with the USSR.

The fact is that the only extreme we are really close to is capitalism.  We don't need to fear socialism, because we are so far away from it that we are suffering problems from the opposite extreme.  The fears about socialism are well founded, but they should be fears about extreme socialism, not about socialism in general.  Fearing socialism is about as logical as fearing democracy.  In either case, there can be too much of a good thing, but too little is just as destructive.  What we should really fear is imbalance.  Right now, the imbalance is against socialism, not toward it.

What's wrong with socialism?  The same thing that is wrong with capitalism and democracy: too much is a bad thing!