Meanings of the Word Socialism

Lamartine, before the Hotel de Ville, Paris rejects the red flag of revolution and socialism on Feb. 25, 1848.
By Henri Félix Emmanuel Philippoteaux , Public Domain

Late yesterday, while driving to my favorite bar and listening to Fox News on the radio, I heard something very curious and upsetting. A university student supporting the Bernie Sanders candidacy was asked what the word ‘socialism‘ meant. Did it mean that the government controlled the means for producing wealth? “Absolutely not!”, he replied. “It means people have a right to health care. They have a right to a job.” The student carried on in this vein for several sentences longer, none of which contained anything remotely like the classical definition of socialism.   

Why should this be upsetting? Why should anyone be so pedantic as to argue over the meaning of a word? One answer to these questions is specific to the word ‘socialism’ itself. By defining the word downwards, the student was assigning a meaning that could be applied to many if not most economies in existence. As ‘socialism’ begins to be applied to an increasing number of the economies in the set of all economies, it increasingly loses its power to make distinctions between them. As soon as a word that once labeled a particular type of element in a set can be applied to every set member, it loses all usefulness.

A second answer is that words have a specific role in society: They allow us to communicate with each other. If I hold one meaning of the word in my mind as I am conversing with the student and he has another, then we will both be very confused as to the meaning of the other’s rhetoric, resulting in little if any actual communication. Now, you might well object that semantic drift, the gradual change in the meaning of words over time, can only be accepted and not fought. The word ‘socialism’ is far too useful and specific in its use through history to be allowed to drift into uselessness. Therefore, I will now help man the barricades and defend its classical meaning!

This meaning is captured in the first entry for ‘socialism’ in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary: “any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods”. Accepting this meaning Friedrich Hayek noted in his classic book The Road to Serfdom (reference [E2]) that fascism was just as good an example of socialism as communism was. It should be noted that the original fascist, Benito Mussolini, was one of Italy’s most prominent socialists. (He was eventually expelled from the Italian Socialist Party for not supporting the party’s position to reject entry into World War I. Other socialist parties in Europe supported the war.) ‘Fascism’ unfortunately is another word that has been subject to semantic drift, with the statist control of the economy under fascism de-emphasized to make it seem somehow different from the Soviet Union. That however is a story for a different day.

In her Wall Street Journal post Socialism Gets a Second Life, Peggy Noonan writes of how Millennials in their formative years were subjected to primarily leftist influences. She writes

What in your formative years would have taught you about the excellence of free markets, low taxes, “a friendly business climate”? A teacher in public high school? Maybe one—the faculty-lounge eccentric who boycotted the union meetings. And who in our colleges teaches the virtues of capitalism?

Then came the financial crisis of 2007-2008 with the subsequent Great Recession. The reaction of the American Left was that the recession was caused by greedy capitalists seducing poor people into sub-prime mortgages on which they eventually defaulted. Absolutely no mention was made by Democratic politicians or their media servants about government mandating sub-prime mortgages or the Federal Reserve inflating the real estate bubble with easy money. See the posts Causes of the 2007-2008 U.S. Financial Crisis and Current Economic Effects of the Federal Reserve for more discussion on that. Ironically, the policies Democrats enacted in response to the Great Recession, the Dodd-Frank Act, along with other economic programs of the Obama administration such as Obamacare, have greatly contributed to growing income inequality by destroying economic opportunities. Peggy Noonan continues on Millennials’ reactions to all this:

If you are 20 or 30 you probably see capitalism in terms of two dramatic themes. The first was the crash of ’08, in which heedless, irresponsible operators in business and government kited the system and scrammed. The second is income inequality. Why are some people richer than the richest kings and so many poor as serfs? Is that what capitalism gives you? Then maybe we should rethink this!

Noonan’s point is that Millennials’ experience with what they think is capitalism – what their teachers, the main-stream media, and Democratic politicians have been telling them is capitalism – has suggested they should reject it, and instead replace it with – what? Bernie Sanders tells them the replacement should be democratic socialism. And how does Sanders describe socialism? He gives a list of new government welfare state programs such as government provided healthcare and tuition-free college. Not being able to see the costs of these programs causing material hardships on everyone, why should Millennials not see the Sanders described socialism as very attractive?

Herein lies the problem with the mutable meanings of ‘socialism’. Within the mutation lies a risk of misunderstanding that yields a possibility, perhaps a probability, of a bait-and-switch. Let us suppose with the help of the Millennials Bernie Sanders is elected President of the United States and he is able to get his vast array of new programs through Congress. The Wall Street Journal has estimated their cost as $18 trillion over a decade’s time, or $1.8 trillion per year if evenly spread over the entire decade. That is roughly one-tenth of the entire GDP per year! If enacted, such a program could not help but cause great economic upheaval and distress. The Sanders administration would then claim it is the malfeasance of capitalism causing the hardships, which could be eliminated by nationalizing all companies to harmonize their efforts with the new government programs. Not knowing any better about the effects of real socialism, the electorate could acquiesce.

I suspect if Millennials ever had to live under real socialism, they very quickly would develop buyer’s remorse. Disregard for a moment that socialism is a system reality just can not allow to succeed. (See the posts Why Socialism Does Not Work, Central Planning for Chaotic Social Systems, and How to Solve Problems in Chaotic Social Systems for reasons why this is so, and for why capitalism is superior.) By all accounts Millennials have a substantial number of libertarians. Yet, we have ample historical experience from the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and the People’s Republic of China that once all economic power is centralized in the state, it quickly develops into a “dictatorship of the proletariat”. How long after adopting true socialism could the United States remain a democracy? How long after adopting socialism could Millennial libertarians survive?

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