The Anti-Social Act at the Heart of Socialism

Human societies have allowed for one giant loophole in their prohibition of citizens taking wealth from fellow citizens. We call it ‘government taxation.’

A man carries placards that read “Free Education: Tax the Rich" and “Communism” in this file photo. Justin Tallis/AFP via Getty Images

Commentary

The basic principle of praxeology—the study of human action as set forth by the late, great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises—is that humans act purposefully. More specifically, we choose from the various options open to us in accord with what we value most highly at any given moment. The goal is alternately described as improving our sense of well-being or, as Mises put it rather awkwardly, to reduce “felt uneasiness.”

This does not mean that human beings always choose wisely or that they choose the course of action that is best for their lives in the long run. We are not like penguins, who, as can be seen in the documentary film “March of the Penguins,” are robotically programmed to do certain things at certain times as a matter of sheer survival.

Penguins really have no choice; they follow the instinctual instructions embedded in them. Humans, on the other hand, have abundant latitude to choose actions that, in retrospect, will be seen to be not-so-smart or even self-destructive. Far from being the profit-maximizing homo economicus hypothesized in classical economics, humans are free to make choices that undermine their health, reduce their economic standard of living, or otherwise sabotage their own welfare. There are millions of humans who, for the sake of short-term pleasure or ease, have squandered the opportunity to achieve success in academics, sports, marriage, friendship, career, etc.

The praxeological imperative is demonstrated in how we shop for things. Humans want the best deal—that is, they want what they want at a certain moment of time at the lowest cost. They could have a totally different priority next month, next week, or even in the next hour.

(There are, of course, times when the desire for something is so intense that individuals disregard the lowest cost factor. For example, some people are so rich that cost is of no concern to them. Or one may have such an urgent need for something that he or she is willing to pay far more than would be the case in less pressing circumstances.)

Here is a softball question for you: What is the optimum price for anything you want? It’s zero, of course. We would love to get things for free. But how many people or businesses will give you their property for nothing in exchange? Lots of luck with that! However, there actually exists a way to get something for nothing: Steal it.

Human societies have largely condemned theft. They have recognized that theft is both economically counterproductive and socially destabilizing for the whole. Reason led to the conclusion that social cooperation and its resulting prosperity depend on respect for property rights. The Judeo-Christian ethos coincides with this belief, accepting as divine law the command “Thou shalt not steal” (note the absence of any qualifier, such as “except by majority vote”).

Because one person stealing from another is a fundamentally anti-social act, self-interested, praxeological humans have opted to criminalize theft and to defend private property as an essential prerequisite for a viable, prosperity-producing social division of labor. Praxeology operates at both an individual and social level. Sometimes self-interest requires self-restraint and an agreement to abide by certain ethical norms for the benefit of all.

However, human societies have allowed for one giant loophole in their prohibition of citizens taking wealth from fellow citizens. We call it “government taxation.” Prosperity can continue to grow, both in terms of overall wealth production and an increasing number of individuals partaking of that growing prosperity, when government taxation remains limited (think of the United States for the first 150 years of our history) and is not weaponized by one class of citizens against another.

More often, though, taxation amounts to institutional theft or, to use the term employed by Frédéric Bastiat in his immortal essay “The Law,” “legal plunder.”

Often, that plunder favors the elites at the expense of the masses (e.g., France’s kings and nobles living high on the hog by oppressively taxing the commoners before the French Revolution). Other times, the plunder is more democratically distributed (e.g., in the Roman Empire, in which a vote-dependent senate bestowed ever more freebies—dubbed “bread and circuses” by historians—upon an ever-increasing class of beneficiaries until the number of those who were bearing the ever-increasing burden of taxation—the citizens who actually worked to produce wealth—shrank to the point at which the system imploded).

Fast-forward to the present. The enlightened, praxeological social compact that acknowledged that the individual pursuit of happiness necessarily includes the need to curb one’s own actions has largely atrophied.

Decades of progressive and socialistic ideology have whittled away the traditional American moral restraint against taking the property of some to give to others via the more antiseptic, supposedly “civilized” way of using government to do the actual taking. (For the so-called “Christian socialists”—an oxymoron, if there ever was one—you need to revisit the parable of the Good Samaritan.) This misuse of government would have offended our Founding Fathers. As Thomas Jefferson put it, “It is strangely absurd to suppose that a million ... human beings collected together are not under the same moral laws which bind each of them separately.”

Today, millions of Americans have reverted to primitive praxeological impulses free of moral restraints: I want that, and the easiest way to get it is to vote for a politician motivated by the similar amoral/immoral self-interest of winning elections by buying votes through the device of handing out freebies paid for by other people’s money. This is fraudulently and cynically labeled “social justice” by its practitioners.

That we are far advanced on the progressive road to serfdom is supported by abundant evidence. That includes $38 trillion of national debt, millions of Americans perennially on the government dole, and millions more wanting free bus rides and day care to be paid for by “the rich” paying higher taxes to Santa Claus politicians. The evidence includes one political party so obsessed with government running the whole economy that it chose to shut down the government for a month and a half in an attempt to throw good money after bad in subsidies to partially offset the failures of the Affordable Care Act rather than repeal it. Meanwhile, the other party, despite having talked loudly about cutting government spending, continues to go along with ever-larger federal spending.

Will we learn the appropriate lessons of history, have a moral revival that puts rational limits on praxeological impulses, and stop the gradual social suicide of using government to transfer wealth from some citizens to others? Or will we end up like Rome? Which do you think is more likely?

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.