Socialism Sounds Great...Unless You Ask These Questions

Socialism is great, right? Everyone should have equal access to goods and services and there should be equality around the board.  Sounds wonderful...except we need to answer one foundational question:

Why do people work?

You see, there really is not a thing that comes for free, except maybe air.  Someone has to sacrifice their time and efforts to make everything, be it a cookie to the smart phone that a person at a "democratic socialist" rally uses to take a selfie.  Yet what is my point, an anxious student might ask before running off to sociology 101?  Well here it is:

Work is defined as "activity involving mental or physical effort done in order to achieve a purpose or result." according to Dictionary.com.  And what gets people to work?  Simple, love, force or money.

It really is that simple, and something most people espousing socialism have not considered. Marxism assumes that love is enough to get people to work, and love can relate to the devotion to ideology. Yet that is a very abstract notion, even if we package it as benefiting your "fellow man." And it is not an effective incentive to "give it your all."  This can be illustrated better if we look at real love, that being, for instance, a child to a parent.  How effective is it for a parent to ask their child to clean their room on a regular basis?  In most cases it isn't.  Love is great, we might sacrifice our lives for a relative but love and duty doesn't carry much persuasive power, be it getting the room cleaned or pulling carrots on a collective farm.

Then there is force.  If one pulls a weapon on a person and asks them to mow their lawn they probably will comply.  However, they will do it grudgingly and once the threat of force is removed they will cease to comply.

Finally, there is money.  People like money because it allows them to trade it for things they want or need.  Of course work may not be fun but people will trade their time and efforts for money. And yes, the desire for money can get someone to accomplish a desired task, be it to work in a meat-packing plant, teach in a school, operate on a patient, serve you hamburger and fries or put on a scuba suit and dive into raw sewage if something goes wrong with a treatment plant's submerged piping systems...if the pay is sufficient.

Ironically, people who believe that love or duty should motivate people, if they come into any sort of power, get frustrated really fast when it doesn't work to their expectations. That is why these people very quickly turn to force and violence to get results.  Sure, Stalin industrialized the Soviet Union but he had to do so by creating an infrastructure based on slave labor and death.  Sometimes a parent gets angry over their child not showing a sense of duty and resorts to threats or even violence to get compliance.  Yet in old Russia (before Stalin and the "dictatorship of the proletariat") nobody had to threaten young men to go to Siberia to trap animals for fur - it was the desire for money. In regards to families, allowances based on chores is usually way more effective than any other method.

Again, you think that a farmer enjoys growing cattle and then taking them to a slaughter house?  Nothing in the process is fun, be it managing the farm, getting up early to take care of the livestock, and especially having to see the cattle head off to be killed. Yet the farmer does not do this as a duty to make sure you have a hamburger, he does it so he can earn money for his family.  And this is true for all people who struggle to get out of bed and head to work.

It may not sound glorious to say that greed motivates our economy but it is true. When a person can trade labor for money they will do so - even if they don't feel like it every day. However selfish this sounds it is the truth. 

On another point, many people who like the sound of socialism like the concept of equality of outcome v. equality of opportunity.  Yet ask them how they would feel if, after they spent a great deal of time studying for tests, or creating a project, they would get the same grade as someone who did not even show up for class. They would resent such a re-distribution but there is no difference in that and creating a socialistic society on a macro-economic scale for a nation.  Of course they might rightly point out that equality of opportunity does not really exist in a free-enterprise society (i.e. some people are born into rich families and have money to go to ivy-league schools). Yet in left-wing nations you have children of high party officials getting special treatment. Seems as if human nature cannot be changed and hierarchical structures will form in any society. Ironically, it can be argued that free-enterprise societies have more possibilities for people to climb the socio-economic ladder than other systems.

Overall, if you want to get a person who thinks socialism is cool to question the assumption then you need to basically give them questions to get them actually thinking. The person most susceptible to socialistic thinking is either highly empathetic and wants to help people, or feels there must be some way to restructure society after a higher concept to create a utopian dream (you know, a form religion without all the "God stuff"). Thing is, in the case of the former, socialism does more harm in the long-run and does not bring about a kinder and more prosperous nation.  As for the latter, when ideology and human nature clashes, and the socialist system fails to function properly, you either get psychopaths rise to the top at the expense of the masses, or production levels decrease and faith is shattered when the bread lines stretch far into the horizon.

Yes, socialism sounds fantastic, as does a fairy tale, but as you would not want to structure a society around a fairy tale nor would you want to adopt a socialistic model for society since neither are based on reality.

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