Make of this what you will

Photo by Patrick Perkins on Unsplash

We’ve all been more than a little taken aback by the renewed interest in socialism this century, and not just because we’ve seen the great socialist experiments collapse time and time again.

But still, many of today’s youth think socialism is a swell idea. They see the wealthy and lash out, calling anyone who disagrees with them names like “bootlicker.” Seriously, I got that one last week. I laughed at the stupidity of it.

Socialism, as it’s properly defined, is an economic system where the people control the means of production. They own all of the factories, the farms, and everything else that produces goods.

In theory, that means the issue with billionaires is that they control the means of production and aren’t sharing it with the people in what the socialists think is to the proper degree.

Wages aren’t enough. People like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk need to hand every penny over to everyone else.

But over the last little while, I’ve been thinking about another system, one that failed miserably during the Industrial Revolution, but would have kind of bridged the gap between capitalism and socialism, and that’s distributionism.

Basically, distributionism was a proposed system that focused on local communities producing as many of their own goods as possible, where everyone produced at least something, and the community thrived. Think of the Amish as an example.

It sounds kind of Utopian to me, which automatically means it would never work as described, and no one was interested in stepping backward when it was proposed, but at the core of things, everyone had their own workshops or farms, produced, and traded the fruits of their labor. They owned the means of production, but because it was small enough, it wasn’t a big deal. Rather than the state acting as the people, it would be a society of small business owners.

Now, this is really dumbed down, because I’m really only starting to look into this system, but this seems to be the gist.

And there’s literally nothing to stop a group of people from building this here and now. They just need a patch of land, some like-minded folks, and they, too, could own the means of production.

The problem is that it would require them to actually produce.

Think for a moment about all those memes you see where someone asks their fellow communists/socialists what they’re going to do after their supposed revolution. Almost everyone seems to think they can do whatever they want. I’ve seen answers like “poet” and “conduct group meetings for LGBTQIAWTFBBQ lemurs to discuss their trauma with colonialism” or something equally retarded. They all think they’re going to live a life free from actual labor.

But just like how Star Trek’s post-scarcity economics makes no sense, neither does the idea that no one has to actually make things if they don’t want to.

They all want iPhones and laptops, but they don’t want the soul-crushing job of building them. They want all the food they can eat, but they don’t want to spend hours and hours under the burning sun to grow the crops or tend the animals that produce the food.

In short, they don’t want to make anything. They only want to consume it.

Our current system is such that if they wanted to build a business as a co-op, where everyone who works there owns a part of the company, they could. It’s been tried, too. It’s even been done successfully, such as with the Mondragon Corporation, which is based in Spain but stretches across the globe.

So why don’t today’s socialists put their efforts into showing us that their way works, that workers having the means of production puts out products just as good but in a more equitable way than, say, Amazon?

Because that would require work. It would require them to build something up rather than to tear it down.

They don’t despise Jeff Bezos because employees at Amazon have to work really hard for their average starting pay of around $19 per hour. They despise him because he accurately thinks he’s entitled to being compensated for taking the risk and building a company that can pay warehouse workers a really, really good wage for what would ordinarily pay minimum wage or a smidge more.

They don’t hate Elon Musk because he fired people after buying Twitter. They hate him because he had the funds to build his own space program as a side hustle.

They might tell you they’re socialists because they value fairness or something like that, but what they value is resentment. There’s nothing stopping them from banding together and making something to compete with the richest companies in the world, but they don’t. They can’t.

Creating a thriving business isn’t as easy as some might like to believe. It requires a set of personality traits and knowledge that many of us simply don’t have, and even fewer possess them in sufficient quantities to make the Fortune 500.

Rather than cultivate that, though, many today would rather just tear down what stands, rather than challenge it and beat it.

Again, because they can’t. They don’t actually care about their own success or if their system could actually work. They don’t have any idea what owning the means of production actually translates to in reality.

“But if I work on 1,000 widgets, and the owner gets a million bucks for them, why don’t I get that money?” Because you did one little thing out of everything that went into getting those widgets into customer hands. You don’t deserve that million because even if you worked on each one, you didn’t buy the equipment, buy the building you work in, build the infrastructure to allow them to be built, set up the supply chain to get materials in and finished products out, or any of a thousand other things.

And because socialists can’t comprehend that, they can’t thrive as a cooperative and challenge capitalism on its own terms.

No, it wouldn’t be socialism, but it would be an entity that exists on socialist principles and would do all the things they demand every company do and insist that it wouldn’t hurt in the least. It might actually illustrate that they might have a point.

But they don’t.

Again, they can’t.

So, we build what we can. Many of us start companies and fail because we lack something we need. Maybe it was that the market was wrong for our product. Maybe we just sucked at running a business. It could be any of a thousand things, but most who try don’t succeed. That’s alright, though, because we don’t need everyone to succeed, so long as anyone who wants a chance has one.

Maybe, at the core of things, that’s what socialists are really pissed about. Anyone can try, but not everyone will succeed, and they seem to think that they’re entitled to be just as successful as Musk, even though they’ve done nothing to the degree he has, and know that even if they try, they’ll likely fail.

In other words, socialism isn’t really about the people having the means of production. It’s the people having the means to make sure no one has a chance at success because they suck too much to achieve anything on their own.

---

Tilting at Windmills is 100% reader-supported. If you enjoyed this article, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription for 15% off the first year or making a one-time donation here. Either would be greatly appreciated at a time when I know good and well I’m about to have some serious expenses coming.