The Students’ Simple Guide to Socialism: Or, How Can You Buy It If No One’s Made It?

I’ll never forget the socialist poster I saw on a billboard when I was a student at Michigan State years ago. The group had three demands for government:

Shorter working hours!
Higher wages!
Lower prices!

And I thought, They want the government to rearrange reality so we can buy stuff that no one’s at work to make. Wonder how they’re supposed to pull that off? 

Higher wages and lower prices mean you can buy more stuff, you see; but shorter working hours means people aren’t making as much stuff. And how do you buy stuff and bring it home if it doesn’t exist?

The Student’s Quick and Easy Answer

There’s actually a well-known way out, a realistic way to get more goods out of fewer working hours, which I’ll come to in a moment. (It doesn’t involve socialism.) First, though, I want to share a quick and easy answer for students returning to school this fall, where profs will be trying to sell them on socialism. It’s simpler than you think.

And here it is: Forget all the complex questions about tax policy, income redistribution, the “1 percent” and all the rest. Yes, all that matters, for ethical and spiritual reasons if nothing else. But in the end, socialism’s failure is absolutely guaranteed by one simple, fatal flaw. It promises you can have goods without someone making them. Which is impossible. Even for socialists.

Think that’s over-simplified? Think it’s a caricature of what socialism is after? Then think in terms of services instead of goods. Think especially of socialists’ grand dual dream of free health care and free college education for all. Give something away free, and everyone’s going to come collecting it. That means we’ll need a lot more qualified physicians, nurses and other highly specialized persons delivering health care, and we’ll need a lot more educators, administrators and the like.

But there are only so many really well-educated (and well-educate-able) people to go around. Not enough, actually. You can’t get great quality medicine or a top education for all, when the people don’t exist who can deliver it in those quantities. You can’t receive services no one is there to deliver.

The Hours/Goods Exception: Increased Productivity

The realistic way out of this, of course, is through increased productivity, which allows people working fewer hours to produce more, so we can in turn buy more. Indeed, purchasing power has exploded over the years. We buy things routinely now that previous generations never dreamed of.

I didn’t have a camera in my pocket back in 1976 to snap a picture of that poster on campus — and certainly not one with video capabilities and all kinds of special effects. Now every student owns one. (If you see one of those posters this year, would you send me a pic, please?) And that camera is attached to a computer vastly more powerful than the computers that guided the Apollo rockets to the moon.

But systems and tools come at a cost. They require investment. They require capital.

So something has obviously happened in the realm of productivity. Let me simplify the complex again, and attribute that to spectacular growth in systems and tools: systems and tools that communicate messages; that organize projects, records, accounting, inventory and more; that transport people and things; that build things, including more tools; and much, much more. We’ve even got systems and tools to deliver an education without professors, though only of a certain limited kind, and to quite a limited degree.

But systems and tools come at a cost. They require investment. They require capital. They require people spending time and money, even putting it at risk, which human nature just doesn’t ordinarily do without hope of gain in return.

Socialism’s Foolishness

Socialism doesn’t see that. It thinks we can get more college-educated people just by deciding college would be a good idea for everyone. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t; debate that all you want. But don’t lose track of the one simple fact that’s beyond debate: No one’s getting an education unless someone or something delivers it. Same with health care. Same with smart phones and hybrid cars and organic vitamin water and Avenger movies and anything else you can think of.

And the key to someone’s deciding to deliver it — or to build something that can deliver it — is that they expect to get some return from their investment of time, money and effort. That’s called capitalism. It’s got its flaws, sure, for no human system is perfect. But none of them come close to the foolishness of a system that expects us to bring stuff home from the store that hasn’t been made, or to enjoy services that no one is there to supply.