Funny thing about social democracy

Miscellaneous General
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Social democrats - such as Robert Scheer, Alexander Cockburn, and Paul Krugman - lump something in together.

It’s something that we also lump in together, but for different reasons.

Reading some of their columns, they talk too generally about government and public sector, in a way as to include all of the following:

  1. Nationalised industries

  2. Welfare programs

  3. Government regulation

Obviously, people opposed to government ARE opposed to all those things, but for different reasons in different contexts, albeit from same principles.

Here is what I mean. They want to be pro-poor? Fine, that’s wonderful. That means we are discussing welfare programs.

But how on earth does nationalising industry or having government regulation involve pro-poor matters? How is it even relevant? Just what does it mean that a bureaucracy that calls the shots in the nation’s oil, steel, natural gas, airplanes, and automobiles for strictly government’s own materialistic interests have anything to do with the poor? Isn’t it anti-poor that a government wastes money that could have gone to welfare programs just to focus on strictly selfish interests?

And then, when we are discussing government regulation, how does the same pro-welfare, anti-welfare argument fit into it? Like here in India, ethanol for industrial usage is price controlled. Any attempt to protest the government created shortages by chemical industries is blasted as greedy means of robbing the poor. This is just discussing practical matters of strained production and inefficiency, not robbing the poor.

And in the other sense, a state-operated enterprise is absolutely fine, so long as it charges the customer for the service, does not run on continuous government funding, does not prohibit other private competitors, and is run by managers with the discipline of the bottom line. But regulation is something else, concerning the third-party operation of a private enterprise, without having a stake in it. It has problems of limitations of knowledge, and unintended consequences, which can cause devastation to industry and consumer without even bad intentions. Why lump in privatization and deregulation?

Of course, people like Scheer complain about “radical deregulation”, without specifying what kind of regulation they are talking about. They seem to think it’s just that as long as there is some vague regulation, not knowing which regulation and for what purpose, it’s safe to say things will go well. The concern is only about the government’s input, and not whether it will have an output or results.

Then there is their talk about taxes, without one bit of talk on excessive government wastage of money, be it on TV censor authorities and other groups, when that money could have gone towards building roads and bridges. But somehow, taxpayers are always at fault. Again, all about input, none about output. Why is the discussion always on evil greedy taxpayers, and not poor management of public finances?

Such is the feeble nature of debate, which is to compartmentalize and lump everything together.

(PS: One of my favourite insults used by leftists against everyone else is “neoliberal”. It asserts that a person is a radical modern day return to 19th century classical liberalism. Blair, Clinton, Obama, Bush, Putin, and others have been called neoliberals; as if they are all closet libertarians. I mean, wow.)

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As someone who used to be a social democrat, I think really the issue behind the lumping and vagueness is obviously to provide emotional incentive for the aforementioned’s ideological prescriptions, in the words of Eduard Bernstein, “to train the working class for democracy, and fight for any and all reforms through the State that raise the working class.” A lot of people I know are too involved in their work to read on the level that many Austro-Libertarians do. So social democrats might not be heavy thinkers. They instead subscribe to a program, similar to how the US Libertarian party proposes a minarchist program.. and maligned Republicans and some liberals subscribe to the platform … social democrats being the liberals who are “more humanitarian than thou” authoritarians.

Often times the case, they willfully ignore the fact that the only places where social democracy (or democratic socialism depending on who you talk to) has been a relative success (in terms of competitiveness, GDP & per capita, GNP & per capita, Hapiness index, etc.) have been the small Nordic countries. The process by which the State attempts to remedy social inequality and mal-allocated resources in the free-market is literally too complex of a task to be done efficiently with a large populous. So then the social democrat concludes that social democracy must be a world-wide, or continent-wide institution in order for it to better serve its purpose. You thereby have the creation of the European Monetary Union as a direct result of both social democracy’s problems and its aspirations.

The social democrat concludes that individuality is the problem, and that a one-shoe-fits-all approach is best used in a more homogenized market.

How do you actively change (or attempt to) those two things?

This: