Freedom in One Lesson

21.

How Socialism Harms All Individuals

As the modern redistributive, or leveling, state has grown and grown, a generally accepted view has evolved that redistribution benefits the recipients, ennobles the legislators, and doesn’t really harm those taken from because they are only paying their fair share to society. Ludwig von Mises recognized that this view is wrong. “In the short run an individual or a group may profit from violating the interests of other groups or individuals. But in the long run, in indulging in such actions, they damage their own selfish interests no less than those of the people they have injured. The sacrifice that a man or a group makes in renouncing some short-run gains, lest they endanger the peaceful operation of the apparatus of social cooperation, is merely temporary. It amounts to an abandonment of a small immediate profit for the sake of incomparably greater advantages in the long run” (Mises 1978).

Leonard Read develops Mises’s theme in “How Socialism Harms the Individual,” from his 1964 book Anything That’s Peaceful (Read 1964a).

The emergence of the individual . . . [is] our objective. . . .

. . . All persons . . . are harmed by social leveling. . . . The whole caboodle of what are called “social gains” not only fail to benefit anyone but, rather, have a deteriorating effect on everyone. . . .

. . . We must not assume . . . that harm is visited only on the person from whom is taken. . . .

. . . There are several aspects of life we cannot turn over to others without harm to our individual expansion. . . . We are well advised not to leave our liberty in someone else’s hands. Further . . . charity is a distinctly personal, not a collective, matter. . . .

Can any person relieve himself of charitable concerns without losing a priceless ingredient of individual emergence? Does not a growth of the spirit and soul of man require that a concern for others be retained for strictly personal attention? . . .

. . . Millions . . . wish to make their own decisions as to how the fruits of their own labor should be expended. They have judgments concerning people in their own orbits, based on intimate experiences and relationships, a knowledge which no agency—governmental or private— can possibly possess. Are these persons to be deprived of their own funds and the practice of personal charity denied to them because some others wish the government to preempt the welfare activity?

. . . This voluntary act [charity]—one of the highest expressions of a common brotherhood—is thwarted when your honestly acquired income is taken by government. What was yours has been arbitrarily declared not yours; a “social” claim on your labor has been decreed. Indeed, government now operates on the theory that it has a first lien on your income and capital; your freedom of choice is severely restricted. . . . The state will practice charity for you. A common brotherhood, by some quirk of reasoning, is to become a collective act of compulsion!

. . . Do strangers who didn’t earn it have any right, in logic and justice, to what you have earned? . . .

It isn’t possible to see other than harm done to the person . . . by the compulsory taking of his income.

. . . Does any able adult person “in need” really benefit by living on the confiscated income of others? Does this ever improve his character or his mental and physical faculties? His growth? Does anyone ever benefit by the removal of self-responsibility? . . .

Life’s problems—obstacles—are not without purpose. They aid the processes of self-development. . . . They demand of the individual that he gather new strength to hurdle each new obstacle. The art of becoming is composed of acts of overcoming.

. . . Rewards not associated with one’s own effort tend to weaken the sinews which make for growth. Such rewards—handouts—remove the necessity for production and invite potential producers to remain non-producers. In short, there is an ever-present danger that they may encourage a person to become a parasite, living off what others produce. Parasitism is not associated with man’s upgrading.

. . . Responsibility and authority . . . are meant to go hand-in-hand. When the responsibility for one’s own welfare is surrendered to government, it follows that the authority to conduct one’s life goes where the responsibility is reposed. . . .

The idea set forth in the Declaration of Independence that each person has an inherent and inalienable right to life becomes meaningless when a person loses the authority for his own decisions and must act according to someone else’s dictates. Unless an individual is self-controlling, his life is not truly his own. Before a life can be valued for its own sake—not simply a means to someone else’s goal— that life must retain its own power to choose, along with its own quality, its own dignity. Without self-power, there is no basis for love, respect, and friendship; . . . The powerless person becomes either a puppet or an unwanted burden. . . .

. . . The evil means of confiscating income must lead to an evil end to those who live on it.

Actually, we are dealing here with . . . a double standard of morality. Comparatively few persons will take private property without the owner’s consent. We think of that as stealing. . . . Yet we will form a collective—politically group ourselves—and take billions in income without consent; we thoughtlessly call it “doing good.”

Doing politically what we reject doing individually in no manner alters the immorality of the act; it merely legalizes the wrong and, thus, gains social absolution for the criminal; giving it the political twist keeps one from being tossed into jail! But to anyone who rejects the authoritarianism of a majority as much as that of a Stalin—to anyone who believes in the right to life and to one’s honestly acquired property—no moral absolution is gained by legislation.

Those who think only materialistically may argue that the stealing of a loaf of bread is . . . a gain to the thief, if the thief “gets away with it.” This is an incorrect view. . . . The one who takes the loaf without the owner’s consent loses not only the respect of all who know him but loses also his integrity! Man can never realize his creative potentialities without integrity. This virtue lies at the root of emergence. To live on loot appears to be no further removed from evil than to take the loot.

Unless one believes in authoritarianism—that men should lord it over men, that some fallible humans should cast the rest of us in their little images—it is not possible to see anything but harm done to the person in “need” who is “aided” by taking the income of others without their consent.

. . . In social leveling by compulsion, the authoritarian. . . [is ] the one who administers the taking and the giving. . . . But what about . . . the well-meaning social reformer at the top of the political heap who uses the police force as his means of persuasion? Is harm done to him? Yes. . . .

The person who attempts by force to direct or rearrange the creative activities of others is in a very real sense a slave-master. And here is the crux of it: A slave-master becomes a slave himself when he enslaves others. If another has me on my back, holding me down, he is as permanently fastened on top of me as I am under him. Both of us are enslaved. True, he can, by force, keep me from being creative; but in so doing, his own energies must be diverted from creative to destructive actions. He cannot upgrade himself while he is employing his energies to downgrade. One who only destroys is himself destroyed. . . . Man’s usefulness to himself, to other men, to Creation’s purpose is to be achieved only by personal upgrading. . . .

All aspects of upgrading are creative in character. Necessarily they first demand . . . self-cultivation. Nothing creative is induced by compulsion. . . . Compulsion has only the power to restrain, repress, suppress, penalize, destroy. By the use of sufficient force, I can keep you from acting creatively; but no amount of force can compel you to think, to invent, to discover. . . . Compulsion is antagonistic to creativeness.

. . . I cannot indulge in my own upgrading at the same time I am inhibiting someone else’s creative action. Therefore, to the extent that one’s life is spent in using force to coerce others, to that extent is one’s life destroyed, its higher purpose frustrated. . . .

Observe the profound change that comes over men when they are given power over others. . . . They begin to think like authoritarians; they talk like authoritarians; they act like authoritarians; for, indeed, they are authoritarians. It is as if a chemical change had taken place in their persons.

Power or authority over the creative activities of others—that is, a responsibility for the creative behavior of others [has] an inevitably destructive consequence. Thus overburdened, a wielder of power eventually becomes intolerant, quick-tempered, irrational, disrespectful, and unrespected. . . .

Further, when in possession of political power over the creative actions of others, a fallible human being is almost certain to mistake this power for infallibility. . . . They cannot abide dissenters. . . .

. . . The authoritarian act is always directed outward at other persons.

The directing of, or the meddling in, the creative activities of others—the dictator role—is so compellingly corrupting that no person, interested in his own upgrading, should ever accept the role. . . . The likelihood of corruption is so great that any person is warranted in confessing, “Even I cannot assume this role without being corrupted.” . . .

. . . All of us are degraded to the extent that social leveling by compulsion is practiced, whether we are primarily the ones with “ability,” the ones with “need,” or the ones who act as the coercive do-gooders or levelers.

The only way, then, that we can avoid personal degradation is to avoid social leveling by compulsion. Not a single person is benefited; all are harmed by socialism.

Leonard Read recognizes clearly what few others have to this day: the pursuit of liberty is the most effective means of benefiting everyone in society. Redistribution, that vast apparatus of social leveling that tries to directly benefit the poor by coercing charity, undermines the liberty that offers the poor the only real, morally defensible path to economic improvement.

But, for Read, the damage to the recipients’ integrity, without which “man can never realize his creative potentialities,” is even more important than the lost economic possibilities because “this virtue lies at the root of emergence.” And liberty is also the only way to develop ourselves to our utmost potential, to grow into more responsible, creative, and productive individuals.

Let government confine itself to defending the life, liberty, and property of each of us equally; in short, let government keep the peace! Leave all creative action to men acting freely, all creative energy flowing unrestrained and uninhibited. Only the release of creative energy can produce abundance, be it material, intellectual, or spiritual. Given these kinds of abundance, along with the unrestrained freedom to act creatively, and there will be as much good done by each for others as there is good within us to give.