Know Better Socialism Made Manifest

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Michigan’s Socialist Progressive-Democratic Party candidate for Senator, Abdul el-Sayed, is a poster child for socialism’s Know Better ideology. He’s claiming now that

[m]ost billionaires don’t park their money making more businesses. They park their money in the stock market. That is not meaningfully investing in opportunity. It’s just investing in other billionaires.

Not only is el-Sayed completely ignorant about how rich folks gained their wealth generally, he’s completely ignorant of how they grow their wealth. (I’ll leave aside the shibboleth that they already have “enough” wealth and shouldn’t be looking to earn more.)

He’s also insisting he’s the primary, if not sole, arbiter of what constitutes meaningful investing. The folks who got their wealth by investing in their own way in areas of their choosing don’t know as much about it as he does, and so he must direct their investing for them.

El-Sayed’s position is insulting to us average Americans in two ways.  One is that we’re too stupid to manage our own financial affairs; his Socialist Government must do that for us. The other is that we’re stupid enough that we cannot see his self-absorbed arrogance in representing himself as Knowing Better how the Evil Rich should deploy their assets than do those Evil Rich, or that he won’t be coming after us later.

Bonus third insult: that we’re stupid enough to believe he’s not as economically ignorant as he really is.

Absolutely

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New York City’s Socialist Progressive-Democratic Mayor Zohran Mamdani defines Socialism this way:

Socialism to me means you’ll have whatever you need to live a dignified life and that it is the government’s job to deliver on that[.]

He’s correct as far as that simple statement goes, but Mamdani cynically uses it to disguise his call for outright socialism. The core tenets of socialism, though, are that Government knows best what’s good for us, Government caps opportunity in an effort to enable the least of us to keep up with the most capable, and Government achieves these by taking the wealth of the successful and redistributing it among the least successful. Socialism achieves equality of poverty in every instance.

Free market capitalism, on the other hand, enables all of us to live dignified lives and to do so with only minimal government intervention. In a capitalist society, government’s (note: small-g government) primary roles are two, and they are critical: one is to minimize crime, and the other is to promulgate rules that protect free markets: sanctity of contracts and honesty in the negotiations that produce those contracts.

Capitalism further allows each of us to prosper as well as we might, beginning from equality of opportunity, given our individual endowments of ability, work ethic, and luck. None of us have our abilities or the outcomes of our abilities truncated artificially by Government.

“Dignified,” too, is more than just being personally comfortable. It’s possible to live a dignified life only if it’s a moral and virtuous life, as Ben Franklin and John Adams had it those ~250 years ago. That means we take care of each other as well as ourselves.

Notice two things about that: we take care of each other; we do not depend on—create ourselves dependent on—Government to do for us. Our individual prosperity flows from, and increases via, free market capitalism, an economic system under which each man [is] guaranteed the opportunity to show the best that there is in him. The other thing, then, is that the personal prosperity that comes from this system vastly potentiates our ability to take care of ourselves and, especially, of each other.

Free market capitalism, in fine, combines the opportunity for individual prosperity with individual dignity as the only truly moral economic system: it’s the only system that leaves each participant in a free and voluntarily done economic exchange better off than he was before the exchange.

Socialism has no capability to achieve any of that.

Risky

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In her piece regarding the utility of the AI agents that increasingly can do things, including interact with other AI agents and commit one’s personal resources without human involvement—given an initial set of instructions—Nicole Nguyen recounted her experiences testing these agents. In the course of that reporting, she had this:

Meta will soon give Muse an encrypted mode that will keep the company from being able to see what the user is doing with the agent.

It’s naive and dangerous to trust Meta’s—or any other such provider’s—word on this. We never really know two things about the Metas of the AI Agent world: whether they’ve installed a backdoor into the “encrypted” app, and how strong the app’s encryption really is.

That last, too, is at least partially beyond the control of the Metas of this world: quantum computing is on the verge of blowing up encryption generally, and post-quantum encryption is not yet ready.

A bonus third thing: we don’t know how firmly these companies will resist the government’s warrantless/subpoena-less requests for personal or other private information.

One Additional Aspect

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The Supreme Court is taking up the case of Suncor Energy v Boulder County, which as the WSJ editors put it, asks whether state and local governments may use state tort laws to impose liability on American companies for the effects of global climate change.

The editors pointed out a number of reasons why the Boulder County effort to punish fossil fuel companies nationwide for global outcomes from a global range of putative sources should fail, including this one:

From the beginning, the Constitution was designed to ensure that the US would speak with one voice in its dealings abroad. States may not conduct their own foreign relations or establish competing national policies toward other countries. The Supreme Court has repeatedly enforced that principle, recognizing that federal authority in matters affecting foreign relations must be free from local interference.

There’s an additional aspect to this argument. One of the reasons for the Constitutional Convention was to correct the several ills and weaknesses in our Articles of Confederation, weaknesses that were verging on being fatal to our nascent nation. Under the Articles, the nominally central government could not speak for the nation on matters of international import; each of the 13 States of the Confederation could speak for itself on the global stage. Those 14 voices, usually in as much conflict with each other as with foreign nations, were tearing the Confederation apart if not exposing it to outright conquering by a still hostile Great Britain, a newly (overtly) hostile France, and an antipathetic Dutch Republic.

Our Constitution fixed that failure by seating foreign policy firmly in the hands of the Federal government, to be executed by the government’s chief executive, the President. States no longer had any say on foreign policy, other than via Representatives and Senators in Congress.

Costs and Aggregated Statistics

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A Just the News news writer wrote that [p]ositive US economic indicators have been left out of much of the mainstream media’s reporting on the state of the economy.

He’s right—the mainstream media really is that mendaciously biased. His claim, though, also is wholly irrelevant in the present election season.

All those economically favorable data that the news media studiously ignores are aggregated data; they refer to the nation and not to any particular individual, not even to any small groups of people in local communities.

Folks don’t care that, as a nation, inflation is down sharply from the Biden years or the nation’s median household income has risen to nearly $87,500. Who is this Mr/Ms Median Household person, anyway? Has anyone actually met him or her? Nor do folks care that the nation‘s jobs data are favorable.

What an individual—a voter—cares about is that he’s personally paying gas prices that are up 30-40 percent over the pre-Biden years; he, the trucker, is personally paying diesel prices that are up nearly double; her grocery bills at the local grocery store are up 40-50 percent; his/her income—what he or she gets in an actual take home paycheck—doesn’t stretch to pay those higher costs. It’s not that he notices that his take home pay isn’t growing enough to keep up with inflation—generally he doesn’t. Nor does he need to, what he sees is that his paycheck no longer covers his gas, groceries, utility bills, and on and on. That’s if the individual has a job at all, which personal datum is invisible in those aggregated statistics. He’s just a depersoned number in the collection of labor statistics.

What are politicians, especially Republican politicians, going to do about that? This is what, so far.

Republicans are going to be swept into oblivion next month if they don’t stop hiding under their desks avoiding these simple facts and get out among their constituents—diners, rec centers, town halls, letters to local editors, interviews on local television and radio stations—and say, in so many words, what their particular policies are that will address their constituents’ particular cost of living concerns.

Being specific is the bane of politicians, exposing them as specifics do, to broad criticism and sharp opprobrium. It’s time now, though, for Republicans to find some backbone and be specific, which, as a happy side effect, would let them point out the failure of their opponents to have any sort of plan for these ills other than that they’re not Trump and they’re not Republicans.