Forget Socialism Versus Capitalism. Here’s the Real Debate We Should Be Having.
Introduction by Ray Brimble
I have two college degrees from the 1970's, which required a hell of a lot of study of communism and socialism. For years, I thought this was wasted study and by the time we reached 2019 nobody would even be talking about these obsolete forms of economy and governance. Yet, here we are—there are actual, real politicians in the United States of America who seem to believe socialism is the answer. And there are real live folks on the right who are licking their chops at this "red" meat (yes, pun intended!).
Like many (most) philosophical debates these days, socialism versus capitalism is a circus of false choices. In the article below, William Taylor suggests what we should REALLY be talking about, and I couldn't agree more. I am a Capitalist. I have always been. I think we need to clean up our act, but that doesn't mean throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Read on, my friends.
Forget Socialism Versus Capitalism. Here’s the Real Debate We Should Be Having.
by Bill Taylor
This article was originally published in Barron’s, on February 22, 2019. You can read the full article here.
Photograph by Ryoji Iwata
A specter is haunting business—the specter of millennial socialism.
No I’m not channeling Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and the opening line of their Communist Manifesto, which appeared 170 years ago. I am channeling a cover story in The Economist, which appeared last week!
“Socialism is storming back because it has formed an incisive critique” of business, the article warned. And most newly awakened socialists are young people: More than half of Americans aged 18-29 have a positive view of socialism, according to Gallup, while only 45% have a positive view of capitalism. “Socialism’s renewed vitality is remarkable,” the magazine concludes, with a mix of admiration and trepidation.
It’s one thing for a single magazine to make such a provocative argument. But the socialist specter is haunting longtime pundits and would-be politicians alike. Political analyst Fred Barnes recently warned in the Wall Street Journal that “Socialism may not define the new era, but neither is it likely to fade.” That same angst seems to be at the heart of the nascent presidential campaign of Howard Schultz, the former Starbucks CEO. Asked why, during his days as an executive, he turned down a campaign-contribution request from Senator Elizabeth Warren, he told the Washington Post: “I don’t believe the country should be heading to socialism.”
Executives and investors have so far mostly watched this discussion nervously from the sidelines. But business doesn’t operate in a vacuum, and all this talk of socialism is a sign of the breadth and depth of dissatisfaction with rising economic inequality, declining social mobility, and accelerating climate change. It’s hard to maintain a booming economy and a rising stock market amidst bitter social divisions and angry political discourse.
Which is why all sides would benefit from ending the socialism sideshow sooner rather than later. On the left, with due respect to Eugene Debs, Norman Thomas, and Bernie Sanders, European-style, means-of-production socialism has had no real standing in the American vocabulary. Meanwhile, on the right, “socialist” is just the latest (and most convenient) label to denounce ideas with which conservatives disagree. But words matter: Executives and investors can’t reckon honestly with the defects of the economic system they helped build (and benefit from), and can’t figure out how to make the system more legitimate to more people (especially young people), if they can’t rise above rhetoric that bears no relationship to reality.
So forget capitalism versus socialism. The more revealing debate for business, the issues executives and investors have to struggle with, is why and how, in the language of renowned Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel, we have “drifted from having a market economy to being a market society.” In other words, has the logic of profit and loss, winners and losers, insinuated itself so deeply into all aspects of society that we have eroded the sense of shared experiences and common bonds that once held together people of different means and backgrounds? Have we become a culture that knows the price of everything and the value of nothing? When the unforgiving logic of Wall Street occupies Main Street, when everything has a price, do we create divisions we can’t afford?