I seem to be agreeing with a lot of people today. Now I agree with Roy Cordato’s observation in RealClearPolicy that Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez aren’t socialists; they’re dirigistes:
f the self-proclaimed socialists of the Democratic Party are not socialists, what are they? First and foremost, they are unshackled welfare statists, directed by a morality that values, above all, a form of outcome-based egalitarianism. As a result, they favor all-encompassing government programs thought to minimize income inequality and the outcomes that flow from such inequalities. As we have seen, this includes a steeply progressive income-tax system, government control of payments for health-care services, tuition-free higher education, guaranteed employment, etc. But note that none of their proposed programs seeks to nationalize any industries. What they do seek is to equalize the benefits these industries provide through one or another kind of government payment scheme.
In the area of economic policy, these self-proclaimed socialists embrace, not socialism, but what is called “dirigisme,†which Merriam-Webster defines as a system that embraces “economic planning and control by the state.â€
Dirigisme or dirigism (from French diriger, meaning ‘to direct’) is an economic system where the state exerts a strong directive influence over investment. It designates a capitalist economy in which the state plays a strong directive role, as opposed to a merely regulatory one.
According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, “Dirigiste policies often include centralized economic planning, directing investment, controlling wages and prices, and supervising labour markets.â€
Dirigisme is considered to have been “an inherent aspect†of the fascist economies of post-WWI Italy, Spain, and Germany. These economies, according to Wikipedia, were “based on private individuals being allowed property and private initiative, but these were contingent upon service to the state.â€
Such arrangements lead inevitably—not possibly or even likely but inevitably—lead to the directors of these regimes becoming wealthy while the rest of the society becomes poor. They become wealthy because they can and the society becomes poor because the directors are unable to direct as well as they think they can. The very tools that they use obscure the price signals that a market economy uses to produce efficiencies in the allocation of resources including capital.
We don’t need laissez-faire capitalism to be prosperous and we don’t need dirigism to keep people from being desperately poor but the alternative does require prudence, determination, and forebearance, all of which are in critically short supply.
Cordato simply ignores the plain statements of both Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez. Both are self-proclaimed communists, and both are members of self-proclaimed communist parties. Communists are the ultimate dirigistes.
Cordato is plainly and dishonestly trying to whitewash Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez. Dirigism is the long-standing policy of the French government going back to Louis XIV, at least.
You might want to find out why Cordato is doing this. He is plainly trying to manipulate the narrate and make communists mainstream.
They’re simply social democrats, or pre-1972 liberals who think they can save private capitalism with an increased state component. It was a group of self-proclaimed Marxists championing just this route for socialism that provoked Marx to proclaim he wasn’t a Marxist.
You can’t find out if someone is a socialist by asking them directly. To my knowledge no one has put the right question to either of them to find out.
Where Cordato goes wrong is in claiming state economic involvement in and of itself leads to fascism. Hayek made this claim over seventy years ago and in that time not a single social democracy has become a totalitarian system. The history of the country and design and intent of its political system’s designers matters.
To be more clear, when you have a fascist or communist state, it’s directed by thugs from the top. Social democracies usually emerge from a genuine social movement. So fascist Italy, Spain and Germany had no democratic tradition, while the social democracies had either an official democracy or a history of egalitarianism.
As I hope I’ve made clear, I don’t think that the conditions in the U.S. are suitable for the sort of social democracy you’re talking about. We don’t have enough social cohesion. We are too individualistic and too diverse. We have too much history of social opposition. Too many old scores.
Would the UK have its present system with its present population? Or Germany? I think their present systems are the outcomes of concerted programs to cultivate solidarity that arose from specific historical conditions, conditions which we don’t have. More solidarity of the sort we have now and we’ll have an actual fighting civil war.
On the other hand we do have plenty of thugs more than willing to direct things from the top.