COMMENT ⊗   VALID 00002 PAGES
C REC  PAGE   DESCRIPTION
C00001 00001
C00002 00002	social[s84,jmc]		Socialism in theory and practice
C00014 ENDMK
C⊗;
social[s84,jmc]		Socialism in theory and practice

jmc - Even though the debate has died down, I cannot leave unanswered
the various arguments to the effect that the U.S. is as bad as the
communist countries.  Also I want to make some remarks in reply to
JMM's favorable comments about socialism.  Since I don't know whether
the files still exists on other BBOARDs, I am not forwarding these
remarks, but anyone who wants to is free to copy them.

As JMM says, socialism has several intellectual attractions.
Most come under two headings - rationality and justice.

Rationality: One observes various apparent irrationalities under
capitalism.  These include unemployment, wasteful forms of
competition such as competitive advertising and allocations of
income that don't seem related to contribution to society.

Justice: When the socialism developed its first political programs,
social position was very largely determined by inheritance,
and the rich and powerful were often incompetent, arrogant
and sometimes cruel.  Then as now, socialism got much of its
political strength from a sense of injustice.  It was claimed
that a socialist society would be more just.

There are various theoretical arguments against these claims
were made from the beginning and are made today.  I agree with
many of them.  However, now there is plenty of empirical evidence.

Communist societies are worse than capitalist ones in both efficiency
and justice.  No social group in any capitalist society feels any desire
to emigrate to the communist countries, while the latter all
forbid emigration.

Social democratic ruled countries are not qualitatively different
from more capitalist societies.  Some of their social innovations
are adopted in capitalist societies, but they have been less
innovative technologically, and that's the real source of improvements
in standard of living.  Countries oscillate between social-democratic
and conservative governments without anyone having any sense that
the fundamental character of society has changed.

I didn't miss JMM's point when I compared the U.S. and the Soviet
Union.  My point is that the faults he and others find with the
U.S. are trivial in comparison with the millions who have been
killed by the communists in the Soviet Union, in China, in Indochina.
The most disaffected groups in the West are not putting to sea
in leaky boats knowing that their most probable fate is death
by starvation, shipwreck or piracy.

JMM and others gave many examples of U.S. actions of which they
disapprove and which they cite as evidence that the U.S. is no
better than the Soviet Union - or at least not enough better to
deserve support in its conflicts with the Soviet Union.

These acts may be divided into two categories - those that precede
World War II and those that follow it.  The latter were
primarily part of our rivalry with the Soviet Union and were
justified, correctly or not, by fear of Soviet expansionism.

	The criticized acts that preceded World War II
had a variety of motives.  First come those involved in the
expansion of the United States from the Atlantic to the
Pacific.  Those who got in the way were primarily the Indians
and the Mexicans.  They are unacceptable by present moral
standards and were often criticized at the time.

	Today only the Soviet Union of the major powers still is directly
annexationist.  The most recent examples are the Soviet Union's East
European conquests before and during World War II, the Kurile Islands and
the bit of Afghanistan bordering China which has apparently been directly
incorporated in the Soviet Union.  However, no major people now existing
in the world doesn't owe its national boundaries to such expansionism be
it recent or ancient.

	Another presently unacceptable motivation is economic -
control of markets.  It existed, but its importance is much
exaggerated by Marxists.

	Still another is a sense of cultural superiority including
a sense of religious superiority.  In many cases the cultural superiority
was genuine, but it isn't now considered an acceptable reason
for imposing one country's will on the inhabitants of another.
Worse, the sense of cultural superiority was often accompanied
by a sense of individual or racial biological superiority.
This was one of the factors that contributed to a revival in a new form
of the ancient custom of enslaving conquered peoples.  The ancient
custom wasn't mainly motivated by a sense of superiority but merely
by a dog-eat-dog attitude toward other peoples.  But I digress.

	The postwar actions are motivated by fear of the Soviet Union and
communism.  Many people have asserted that these should be distinguished
and that most Third World communism is not instigated by the Soviet Union
even though the Soviet Union helps it sometimes.  They then argue that
national communism isn't so bad, and the U.S. is wrong to oppose it.  I
agree that they are different, but I think communism has shown itself to
be bad even when it isn't a creation of the Soviet Union.  Thus it wasn't
the Russians who caused the Cambodian communists to kill 2 million
Cambodians after they seized power.  It wasn't the Russians who instigated
Vietnamese anti-Chinese racism.  It wasn't the Russians who caused the
world's worst famine at the time of the Great Leap Forward in China or who
instigated the terror of the Cultural Revolution.

	However, while these manifestations of communism are bad, they
aren't America's main business as a nation.  It can be argued that we have
no reason to try to prevent a new Cambodian genocide - even in El Salvador
- provided our national safety isn't threatened.  The argument has some
force, though I don't entirely buy it.  Anyway the matter is complicated
by the fact that the Russians are involved to some extent in these
conquests of power.  I still am not sure that we are directly threatened
even if Mexico, let alone Nicaragua were to become a subservient to the
Soviet Union as Cuba.  Maybe yes and maybe no.

	A counter-argument that I see as having considerable force is that
assuming we are generous enough to aid foreign countries at all, we should
be generous enough to help them defend themselves.  Clearly this has its
limits when the defense requested is against internal opposition.

	However, while I have my doubts about how directly our security is
affected by third world communist takeovers (no matter how harmful to the
countries involved), the successive administrations of the U.S. have
believed that the takeovers do threaten our security, and this has
motivated their actions.  They have believed that we and other countries
are the subject of Soviet aggression which has often been successful and
need to combine to restrain it.  In their efforts they have taken actions
that have sometimes harmed innocents as always happens in wars.  Many of
their actions have been mistaken.

	Nevertheless, when we add it all up, the number harmed by American
actions is less than one percent of those harmed by communist actions.
Of course, this requires doing the arithmetic differently from the
way the anti-Americans do it.  The New York Times columnist Anthony
Lewis, for example, includes the Cambodians killed by the communists
as victims of American policy.  Reconstructing his argument is left as
an exercise for the reader.