This little gem turned up in my Facebook feed the other day. The meme on the left - fittingly, and the response from the comments. This was a typical response, most other critical responses said roughly similar things.
Neither side really captures the essence of it. Many leftists no doubt think of themselves in the manner described in the meme. And there's nothing wrong with it. Universal health care, education, housing and assistance to the poor are fine things in and of themselves. The problem with standard leftist arguments is that they assume the right wing disagrees in principle. Not necessarily. The ends, as far as the right winger is concerned, do not necessarily justify the means. That's the basis of the right's objection, and the impasse they find themselves at.
Fair enough, but the right winger is not conceptually framing this properly. This kind of vulgar economism underlies a lot of right wing fallacies. The problem with the right wing counterarguments boil down to this: The right winger thinks of socialism as robbing Peter to pay Paul. This isn't what it is. It is both Peter and Paul paying into something that both can use when both have need of it. I bold and italicize this so that its importance can be impressed upon you. It is crucial to understand this.
The left has, in part, itself to blame for the right's successful misframing of social democracy. Their own framing of social welfare is that they're going to make "the rich" and "the corporations" pay for programs that are intended to help the needy because they are "not greedy bastards." They're setting themselves up for the right's "robbing Peter to pay Paul" counter criticisms. A better way to phrase support for social programs than would be "everybody pays into what everybody benefits from."
This kind of socialization of expense and benefit is not necessarily the best way to provide for all goods and services in an economy. There are plenty of things for which people can and should provide themselves, government bureaucracies come with their own pitfalls and private incentives and capital markets matter in economic activities and can't be dispensed with without serious economic chaos. In my experience, the advocates of pure revolutionary socialism do not understand what it is they're plugging for on anything but the most superficial level, and are usually intersectional social justice warriors beneath a thin red and/or black veneer for that reason. So central planning is not what I advocate. Full out worker's control would be fine if the working class actually wanted it, but in my experience they're content to have professional management run things.
But sometimes it makes more sense to socialize, both from an economic and a social point of view. This is generally the case with core infrastructure that is widely if not universally used and makes other kinds of economic activity possible. Sometimes, as with public health insurance, the wisest thing is to realize superior economies of scale and nationalize it in the form of a universal public healthcare scheme.
That in mind, let's have a look at the comment's counter-claims against the original meme.
Your parents never taught you to respect private property ... A straw man and an ad-hominem. There is nothing about belief in social welfare that would imply this, unless its advocates also insist they be exempted from the taxation required to pay for it. A person willing to pay their share into a public insurance scheme or for social infrastructure that all people make use of, and when socialization really is the better way to provide said infrastructure, is not showing a lack of respect for private property, but is giving it a higher valuation than the "annoying kid" who does not recognize his own responsibility to pay into what all make use of.
It means you are an ideologue, who wants things based in wishful thinking rather than rationality. This is no less true of the fiscal libertarian, who thinks unbridled free markets the solution to all ills and an axiomatic moral principle that is beyond question. If you are not such a libertarian, then congratulations! You are a pragmatist who doesn't insist upon either privatization or socialization on principle, but rather on the basis of what is most fitting for the market under consideration.
It means you don't see the difference between education and indoctrination. And that concerns public health care and education how, precisely? Again, this can be said of any ideologue. While there is a lot of dogmatism on the left, especially on the cultural left these days, dogmatism is not an inherently leftist characteristic. Again, free market fundamentalists in their think tanks are no less guilty of this.
It means you care enough about the sick and disabled to give them other people's stuff, but not enough to help out yourself. Go back and reread the bolded and italicized text in my third paragraph above.
It means you are less fortunate and want others to care for you instead of working hard to get out of it. It means being wise enough to know that misfortune can happen to anyone, and collectively insuring ourselves against at least the worst catastrophes might not be a bad idea. It means that in the real world, no one "gets out of it" or even comes at all into fortune and wealth entirely of their own efforts - though this is important - but rather with the assistance of a support network. Perhaps the objecting commentator is fortunate enough to have a private support network that can help him out when things go off the rails in his world, and thereby takes for granted his relative wealth and fortune. Perhaps having safety nets in place can mean the difference between the misfortunate being able to get back on their feet again via hard work, and being completely mired in poverty and hardship due to the lack of leverage in the marketplace that marks those clustered at the bottom of the social hierarchy.
It means you want to use buzzwords to signal your virtue while not doing a thing about the things you say you want to stop. This is sadly true of many on the left, again especially surrounding social and cultural issues. But again, willingness to pay into a social program intended to combat a social evil hardly constitutes "not doing a thing."
Good for you, you understand there is suffering and want to
change it. Problem is, you are going about it all wrong. "Give a man a
fish and you've fed him for a day, teach him how to fish and you have fed him
for life". The left knows only how to give fish, and doesn't bother with
the teaching part, until it runs out of fish and collapses. After all, teaching
people to help themselves would be "blaming the victim" or such other
nonsense. Rubbish, for the most part.
If the left "didn't bother with the teaching part" then why do so many of them advocate for free college (which I don't personally support), universal public education or for full employment. The left can thrive on learned helplessness, and yet again, I think they do this more where cultural issues and identity politics are concerned. This is why I'm alt-left rather than mainstream left and oppose these kinds of politics.
Reasonable people on the left are all for "teach a man to fish and feed him for life." They also know he has to eat in the meantime. They also know that trawlers are too capital intensive for even the most industrious of fishermen to procure for themselves by their own efforts alone, and mere nets and fishing rods cannot compete with them, especially after the stocks have been depleted.
For a relatively small portion of the population to own entire fleets of trawlers to then tout the morality of self reliance to those who do not seems a tad disingenuous and self serving, to put it mildly. Doubly so if it was much more by fortune than by effort that they got to become part of the majority shareholding class to begin with. Perhaps it is they who have been the true beneficiaries of fiscal policy that has robbed Paul to pay Peter.
It is not always for lack of knowledge of how to fish or the willingness to do so himself that it is necessary to give a man a fish and feed him for a day. You can teach a man how to fish and feed him for a lifetime if fishing rods and nets are as far as the need or ability to fish can practically go. In a capitalist economy, however, a share in the fishing fleet might just be what's required.
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