AUSTRIAN ECONOMICS ADDICT

From each according to his ability, to each according to his need (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Socialism is defined as Government control of the means of production, instead of private ownership, (property rights). Socialism goes against human nature as you can read about in this article, “Does Socialism Work? A Classroom Experiment”, by Dan Mitchell at danielmitchell@wordpress.com. Human beings are self-interested and will work harder for their own benefit than they’ll work for the benefit of others. The human nature of a child born in today’s world hasn’t changed, it is the same as a child born in prehistoric times. A child has to be taught to share, selfishness is natural to him, and even when he becomes a civilized member of society, self-interest is still his default position. In the article mentioned above, the students insisted that Obama’s socialistic plans would work. As an experiment the professor said all grades would be averaged, and everybody would receive the same grade, according to the Marxian saying, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need”. What happened next was predictable.  After the first test the average was a B. After the second test the average was a D. After the third test everyone received the grade of F. The average score came down because, being true to human nature, no one would study for the benefit of the others. The students who were getting the highest grades started to shrug like atlas when they realized their were not getting rewarded for the grades they had produced with their effort and talent.

You would think that it would be easier to allow individuals to pursue their own interests in a system that accommodates their nature, like the free market economic system, than the cost and effort in the attempt to change billions of  individual’s  human nature, in order to accommodate the elites illusion of a perfectible socialist economic system. Placing humans in a socialist economic system is like taking a mountain goat and putting it in the ocean. The goat is not built for that kind of environment, and can’t be genetically changed to accommodate the ecosystem. Since nothing human is perfect, we should want to implement an economic system that allows for an optimal outcome. A free market system allows room for imperfect individuals, who have changing subjective values, to cooperate and compete in a trial and error process that eventually produces the optimal satisfaction for each imperfect and constantly changing individual. Attempting the impossible isn’t free, it has an economic cost, as well as a psychic cost. The political elite think that the impossible, is possible, because it has yet to be tried by them.

Socialism’s only chance of working is in small groups. A  family is a socialist entity, parents produce for the good of the collective, while the children consume without producing anything. Parental love for their children, and each other, is what motivates them to produce for the family. Trying to get a basketball team to sacrifice their individual interest for the good of the team, is the most difficult, and most important, thing a coach tries to accomplish. The bigger the group, the more difficult, and eventually impossible, it becomes to get people to work for the collective. Force will eventually have to be used to implement the political elites illusory socialist utopia.

Watch the video of students trying to get fellow students to sign a petition mandating the redistribution their grades.

Listen to Murray Rothbard talk about “Even if we all become new socialist men, socialism still wouldn’t work. This is from economicpolicyjournal.com.

Related article, “Walter E. Williams Speaks About The Economics Of Liberty“, austrianaddict.com.

This entry was posted on March 28, 2013 at 1:09 pm and is filed under Econ. 101. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: Free market, Human nature, Murray Rothbard, Private Property, Self Interest, Socialism, The Collective