 My topic today is how to convince a socialist bill-evers. I read that outside and we're lucky that that's not the topic because I'm sure if I were a socialist it would be tough to convince. But anyway, we have to look at this, it seems to me in a common sense way, and that is to consider it's just like the problem a socialist would face in trying to convince a thoughtful knowledgeable libertarian. It's useful to have facts about existing socialist societies, but if you think in your own life a lot of people have pulled a factor to on you and expected you to roll over in your political views and you didn't. And really if somebody were trying to convince a libertarian to change his or her political views the way to do it would be to go after the core values, the core notions, the core concepts that a libertarian holds, namely ones about property and about liberty. Well similarly in going about convincing a socialist it's very valuable to have facts, it's very valuable to know about existing socialist societies, existing socialist movements, even ancient socialistic societies such as maybe the Peruvian Empire of the Incas or something like that if you consider that socialistic which I do. But I think it's most important to go after the core concepts that motivate socialists that give them the passion and the emotional and intellectual sustenance for their beliefs. So I would say that we have to go after such things as equality, planning, those are core concepts and ancillary to that I would think and how they regard justice and morality and the possibility of civil liberties under socialism. Now so that's what I'm going to really talk about. Now it's valuable to have facts and to know facts and to know history it always is, it helps situate you, you know something about the intellectual origins, if you're dealing with a Maoist it's good to know ironical things about Mao, you know, I don't know his collaboration with Chiang Kai-shek at various points or his love for the Shah of Iran that upsets a Maoist or with the same with the Trotskyists, you know, Trotsky's involvement in the unprovoked invasion of Poland in the 1920s or what you know things like this that might set the person on edge. But really we have to go after the concepts. Okay so I think what we should do and even in handling the concepts facts are important and valuable because if you can then say not only is your view of inequality wrong and impossible but by talking about it this way what socialist movements do is really this and we can see this in practice in these socialist societies. So facts are valuable but let's talk about the concepts. Okay, let me first talk about equality a bit here. Is the ideal of equality possible? Now this is very important because really you should always tell somebody if they have an ideal, if they have an inspiring value that they would like to see enacted that ought implies can that is to say that saying that something ought to be the case a change ought to be enacted implies that it it could be done that it's within the realm of possibility. So if we can say that the notion of equality of of a pure equality is nonsensical self-contradictory impossible in human nature impossible given the nature of reality these sorts of things we can say that it cannot be done and that then can say something about whether it ought to be done and most people will understand it when you say something like that and it will detach them from this belief that they have. Okay, so we know obviously that in a purest sense equality is not possible. As Murray Rothbard points out in Power and Market which has some powerful anti egalitarian passages in it each person cannot be born in the same time and place each person cannot be raised under the same conditions it's just impossible even in the most level the most antiseptically imaginable egalitarian society you could not do that. Okay similarly there are aspects of human nature that that would be commonly accepted even by somebody that had a lot of profound political differences with you that you could talk to them about and and raise serious questions in their own mind that that even if you didn't seem to be making progress in that argument would constantly recur to them and in a subsequent conversation because you don't very often convert somebody in the day and if you do they may not stay chained very long. So there's a recent book by a British political philosopher named John Dunn on the politics of socialism which is kind of a disillusion left liberals look at socialism and then he says the the sort of another formulation of egalitarianism which is that really each person is entitled entitled to equal respect okay from everybody else and this is a way that some socialists will argue about things because partly because respect is kind of a fuzzy word and and our automatic reaction is yeah everybody is entitled to equal respect but that's not that's really not true we couldn't imagine a society in which each person's claims to have their desires taken equally with everybody else each person was awarded the you know equal patience by all of us for what they they wanted to talk about each person's accomplishments there is not a society imaginable even given as done specifically points out the kinds of depredations on society that a Hitler or a Pol Pot or a Stalin can make that will still not in its hearts of hearts respect a great singer a great athlete you know a person that does things beyond ordinary capacity will not award that person a differential kind of respect so really inherent in human psychology just it's not possible to somehow end up with an egalitarian thinking society either okay so we've suggested here that you cannot really have equality another thing that i think you have to raise with a person who is a socialist is the role of envy in egalitarianism and i think that this is this is a valuable thing because equality strikes people when they're not really reflecting on it a great deal as a very positive thing to try and achieve in the society and yet envy brings with it different emotional connotations now i personally think and i think if we think about it envy is a part of human nature that we're realistically never going to be able to do away with okay it has to do with rivalry and different attitudes and so forth but there are different ways of looking at envy in society there are ways that elevate envy to a kind of a passion that then consumes the society okay and and really socialism in my view is trying to do that it's an immensely envy conscious although it doesn't tend to admit this an envy conscious envy mobilizing uh movement okay and i think if you can draw this to the attention of the person that you're trying to convince that you're trying to argue with it will take some of the sense of that person that he or she is on a high ground in arguing for equality away from them because it's not somehow as self you know it's not as you can't congratulate yourself quite as much in arguing for envy in my view so if you're really interested in this uh i would recommend a book i'm not sure how available it is i i don't really think it's in print anymore but if you really search bookstores you can find it old ones old use bookstores by helmet shuck s c h o e c k it's a german political sociologist called envy uh and and he has written the definitive work on it he's kind of a libertarian with conservative tendencies and it's certainly in any university or college library and it was a hardcore brace book and he talks about this sort of thing is also very interesting uh sort of science fiction dystopian novel by lp heartley published in the early fifties at a time of sort of labor austerity in england called facial justice that gives you a lot of ideas about envy and how to think about it and talk about it with people anyway so when we talk about equality to a socialist what can we also tell that socialist is that is that work in reality in socialist movements in social in existing socialist societies i think we can say that what we're seeing to a large extent is the rhetoric of envy being used as a route to and erode the power but as a mechanism erode the power by a new ruling class okay now that i think puts a realistic coloration on it and i think if you can get the socialist trying to counter that say that's not so i think that you have that person on the defensive and perhaps through time and conversation you can bring the person around okay now let's talk about a sort of an adjunct to equality which is notions about justice and morality okay now this is sort of going back into what libertarians believe but what a lot of socialists particularly ones who call themselves democratic socialists claim to hold high namely that they believe that socialism will incorporate in it the the virtues the gains that have come with capitalistic civilization while discarding certain outmoded things now i think there are definitely kinds of socialism that are what you might call non marxist ethical socialists of some sort there's no special pet name for them but it's it's a minor thing most socialists you're going to meet are deeply influenced by marx okay they are marxists of one sort or another and i think you can honestly tell them and in a way that hopefully will disturb them unless they are in the most deep sense totalitarians and you will certainly find people you can never convince that's we all know that from our own lines but i think you can prove to them realistically that marxism rightly understood as understood by marx as understood by angles as understood by lennon and trotsky and all the great classic marxist thinker thinkers is a political view that is devoid of ethics it is truly anti ethical okay by nature it's not just that it doesn't you know it's not compatible with christian morality or judaeo christian tradition or libertarian ethics it is anti ethics all ethics okay now this is not just a whim on my part that i have sort of dreamed this up marx himself angles all these people say this okay and there are good things that have been written explaining this the the two best things that i would point to one is an article by steven luke's luk yes in praxis international which is a socialist publication called canna marxist believe in human rights and the other is an article by uh allen Buchanan uh several years ago in the uh journal of philosophy and political affairs philosophy and public affairs uh also to a lesser extent in uh robert c tuckers the marxian revolutionary idea the chapter on distributive justice in that but let me just read you some of the comments of some of these people and you'll see what i'm talking about okay what is what is marx saying he's saying that morality like religion metaphysics all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness had no history no development but men altering their material production and their material intercourse alter along with these their real existence and their thinking and products that are thinking okay have here a little bit of hegelian germanic double talk but what is he saying he's saying that morality reflects the history of morality is the history of technological development and the property law that relates to technological development that he believes relates to technological development it's a completely dependent artificial construction that stems from that okay what is engels saying he's saying morality has always been class morality is either justify the domination and interest of the ruling class or ever since the oppressed class became powerful it has represented the indignation against this domination in the future interests of the oppressed okay there is no intrinsic morality it's simply a tactical strategic thing in class struggle okay here's trotsky morality more than any other form of ideology has a class character okay here's lennon permissible and obligatory are those and only those means we answer which unite the revolutionary proletariat fill their hearts with irreconcilable hostility to oppression teach them contempt for official morality and its democratic echoers imbue them with consciousness of their own historic mission raise their courage and spirit of sacrifice self-sacrifice and struggle okay now i want to make it it clear that the thing goes even deeper than this marxism denies even the most minimal content of morality in other words people like david hume the scottish enlightenment philosopher contemporary of adam smiths and and most philosophers will say look for human beings to just live together in society with the limited resources that we have available to us with the limited powers of sympathy that we can mobilize in our own lives have to have some kinds of generalized rule of conduct in order to live in order to to prosper to get any kind of well-being this is kind of a minimal defense and basis of morality marxists deny that they deny after all that these minimal resources are here that actually we're in a condition of abundance now that is being held in check by capitalistic property law okay to believe according to them that there is a limited power of sympathy is really wrong because what marxists are arguing is essentially and this is a thing that we can also work on our potential socialist convert with with regard to that the notion of a brotherhood of man or the family of man or something like that is something that ought to be the the condition of this future utopia that they're calling for you notice that they're taking a metaphor that's drawn out of the family a very limited number of people that we can certainly have relations of sympathy and empathy and very strong notions of duty and so forth toward and suddenly extending it to a huge you know the population of the entire world now most people if you ask them can they really feel as strong emotional ties toward a person they've never met in Bhutan or basuto land or Tasmania and their brother or their sister or their mother will tell you no I mean if they're honest with themselves okay and they can't really expect the whole world to become like that even if they are so uh you know the the unusual as as William Godwin who once said that he would save a certain benevolent despot and benevolent excuse me benevolent bishop in a fire rather than his mother okay that's rare okay and they can't really believe I don't think what marxists are essentially arguing that that kind of strong emotional intensity in the family can be extended to an entire globe so the marxists are denying these basic conditions of justice as John Rawls calls them or conditions of morality so they are anti-moral they really don't believe they believe that it's an illusion a bad thing to talk about rights morals ethics that it's it's contentless and that if you're talking about anything you're talking about either strategy for revolutionary success or if you're the ruling class talking about morality you're talking about how to keep the public baffled and be mused and not focusing on what is really taking place in society I think if you get a socialist thinking about this you will have them troubled and you can move them in a more libertarian direction if they will accept some kind of moral position you can then work on that most moral theories utilitarian christian contian aristotelian thomas all have some sort of root better or worse depending on your own view toward a defensive libertarianism you can't really take a person who is opposed to ethics per se and make them into a libertarian okay you just can't and so you have to convince the socialist of this if they're already an ethical socialist then the problem doesn't exist you just have to work them along okay let's talk a little bit about another related thing because it has to do with with justice and so forth and that is the prospects for civil liberties in a socialist society i think here we have a very important insight that other critics of marxism don't really have a lot of the points i've been making so far people of various non marxist views can make without too much difficulty but i think that libertarians have a unique insight in understanding how civil liberties work how they're anchored how they're grounded and that is that we believe that real guarantee of civil liberties is their anchor in property rights that that fundamentally you cannot seriously talk about freedom of speech and freedom of the press without the right to own a hall in which one might speak the right to rent out such a hall uh the the right to own a printing press the right to use that printing press to print on the right to engage in sales of the material and prints the right to own a transmission station the right to send out that program to willing recipients and so forth so what you can do in discussing this with the socialist is to ask them how if if they believe and many democratic socialists maintain they do believe that these gains as they would say of of capitalistic civilization over feudal societies and so forth namely uh procedural rights for the for the public as as they would see them how they expect to have freedom of the press in a society in which the government owns all the printing presses all the newsstands all the bookstores pays all the salaries owns all the newsprint that is the paper all the ink sets the prices on everything and just you know keep going use your imagination and i think they will it's i can assure you because my dissertation is on this that you won't find in socialist literature a great deal of discussion of this so they're not going to be very prepared to answer you and no socialist has ever answered it very well even the most sympathetic to having civil liberties in a socialist society and i think you will have them not only on the defensive and your goal is not to kind of defeat them in debate okay unless it is a formal debate but to convince them to to unravel their commitment to this they're to find unexamined things and get them thinking so i think there's a great deal of merit to this approach in talking to a socialist and you will find uh and this will be a kind of a bridge to to my next subject which is planning and the market and price coordination and so forth you will find of course people who talk about themselves as socialists who are really something else that is kind of an intermediate position which you might call a market syndicalist syndicalism is the idea of collective self ownership it's it's uh the producers that is in the people that are working on some project communally own the business enterprise that's putting the thing out and sell it to the public somehow okay so it's workers control or workers self management there are a number of terms that this goes under and the classic term for it all is syndicalism from the the word for a trade union or something a syndic okay now a person who is a market syndicalist and you can see in Yugoslavia today a kind of an imperfect case of this there's a monopoly central bank for investment and some other problems there but you can see some approximations to this a person who is really a syndicalist to the fullest extent is a long way on the way to being a libertarian already okay there are potentially good prospects of course in some ways the final steps are the toughest ones to take them on so don't think it's going to be easy but at least realize that your prospects are good okay now when you when you talk to this market syndicalist you want to keep pushing them in the direction of more and more market and of course with that you have to push the question of investment how is investment going to work because if investment is in the hands of a centralized bank controlled by the government they haven't truly depoliticized the society they haven't truly gained the advantages that are going to strike them they're not going to have true self management if some political bureaucrat some pollute bureau or something is deciding who's going to have investment money similarly there's problems of inequality between between worker enterprises that they're going to have to grapple with in their own minds but but even more so how about people that want to leave this workers control unit they have to think about that ask them about that and ultimately you're going to want to push them into saying well how does this communal group come to have a right to own or control what it has what it's using okay because it's we know as libertarians that it's not simply an easy facile thing to justify the right of original appropriation okay for for most all libertarians this is done through the homesteading notions that Locke and Kant and some other people have but socialists have never really thought about this at all and therefore you're on stronger ground once again than they are and they really have to be able to do this I mean why does some person who's living in Kuwait you know near some oil well or something like that have a right to work on it and reap the rewards from it and so forth why them they have to answer that okay and so you can push them farther and farther into having the answer to answer the questions that we have already thought about seriously and so I think there's a good chance here okay now let's talk about planning in more detail here because this is an additional way you can push them in the direction of market enterprises and private property now there's no question it seems to me that a very attractive thing for a true socialist is the notion of planning Marx is really capturing in his whole notions about alienation and and so forth a sense that a certain amount of people have out there that business activity commercial life is kind of doing things to them in an unplanned random chaotic way and that there's not a sense of controlling it controlling what's happening that is what Marx's notion of alienation is truly appealing to it's not so much the the TDM of the workplace it's really that we are alien to our human nature in our life in the market where we face all these commodities and where we are made into commodities okay and this is why Marx is attacking what he calls the anarchy of the market charming phrase to many of us so socialists in general and and I would sort of exempt these markets and the callists and and you can see China also by the way moving in this direction of Yugoslavia most Marxist most socialists are deeply interested in control of economic matters now one of the first things that you can say to them is look there's kind of this this is on the non-technical level there's kind of a conflict in between your whole idea of calculating rationalistic somehow cost-benefit planning group planning bureau central planner something like that and your expansive humanistic brotherhood of man family of man view how are you going to combine this sort of dictation rational imposition thing with your notion that everyone is going to be in this one is an appeal to expertise one is a technocratic notion the other is a different sort of a notion and I think that they will find some problems with that themselves and you're trying to explore fissures cracks self contradictions within their own doctrine and I think you will make some progress with using the family metaphor back against the planning metaphor and seeing if they can really resolve this in their own minds but there's a deeper more important sense in which we can tackle planning and this takes us into the somewhat technical area of the what is called the socialist calculation debate namely is it really possible to allocate resources efficiently to their highest valued use in a socialist society namely a society in which the state is the owner of the means of production okay now I think it's also useful in all of this including in say talking about the conflict between top-down planning and humanistic brotherhood to press them if they say oh we'll have planning from the bottom up okay because some of them will say that make them say how it's going to work because I don't accept any vagueness here make them spell it out I think you can have some fun and don't be too cruel but you're trying to convince the person this is not just a contest but I think you can if you if you sincerely pursue it I think privately you can notice some confusion on their part and ultimately if it's going to be planning it's going to be central planning and that's what you want to try and show them and you want to show that this has a dictatorial element to it and an impossibility element so let's first talk about the impossibility side of it now back in the early 20th century Ludwig von Mises and subsequently a number of other people especially Friedrich Hayek and lately James Buchanan have written about this problem of calculation under socialism so your problem is that in a non-private property society in a society in which there may not even be realistic money prices there may not be money at all in some sorts of socialist utopias you have a great deal of problems especially with capital goods you have problems in you can't really put prices on capital goods these are primary goods of production or at at some more remote level goods of production machine tools things like that you can't really put a price on them you can't really decide what the best use is for them you can't really decide whether the resources that went into them should have gone into something else you can't really decide when to innovate when to build a new dam when to tear down a dam and let a stream again flow free these are serious problems and believe it or not a lot of Marxists especially if they're sophisticated have heard of this problem and the more you learn about it and the better you can argue about it and it's not something I can explain in the few minutes remaining in detail the the more you'll have a chance at bringing them around to a pro market perspective the basic book that I would recommend is by trig v hoff called economic calculation in socialist society ho ff and it's out in the inexpensive paperback from liberty classics liberty press and uh just just to read you the final concluding paragraph from it the question however is not whether factories can be built and efficiently conducted but whether the factors of production could have been put to a more advantageous use by employing them elsewhere in a society whose aim is the maximum production of needs its resources must not have been used for producing what may be momentarily lacking to have a certain value but for producing goods which according to the end stated are of greater value than other goods each factor of production must be so employed as to give the greatest return according to the ends this and only this is the criterion for rational economic activity for determining this there is a needed valuation apparatus an apparatus with prices and causes varying with the variables to which one has to reckon in the world of reality and it is here that there arise specific and so far unresolved difficulties for the socialist society now that paragraph which as you can see is not too difficult in terms of economic jargon does bring up though the fact that in learning how to talk about this you have to learn how to talk about it to some extent in everyday language okay as I have been trying to do in terms of trying to say should this machine tool have been built should it should have been some other thing should this factory have never been put in should this dam have been put in or not ever put in anyway you do see among socialists some recognition of this problem there are there are socialists that try and answer this but I think the more you get into the debate the more you realize that we have the better of the case this is from an article this month in the Stanford daily at Stanford democratic socialists of America which is the leading group of intelligent socialists in the United States if we can accept that oxymoron okay and a gentleman who is the western regional organizer of dsa made the following comment and you can see that we're already sort of getting the higher ground here by what he says this is a man I've known for many many years almost 20 years I know a lot of these guys an important change in recent socialist policies shock noted is the acceptance in practice if not in theory of the capitalist open market system quote there is no way that computers can plant an economy down to the last nut closed quote he said okay now listen that's quite a bit of progress and you know you can ask these socialists you know why are the Chinese doing this what is the what is going on why do you think you know and they they will have their reasons but keep raising these questions because I think it's it's a worthwhile route in trying to detach them from their beliefs lastly one of those say something about what is this all is talking of planning amounting to in practice and you can go back to some of your previous concerns isn't it really a a dictate by a dictatorial practice by a ruling elite a new ruling class in in the terms of Russian political jargon the nomenclatura a special designated categories class okay isn't there a new class of political rulers of tyrants here that will oppress that don't want to talk about justice and ethics because that they really want to do is rule who don't want to have freedom of the press because when they're making the plans and making the economic planning there's no room for freedom of the press for carrying out if you carry out plans part of central planning is keeping the morale of the public and supporting the central plan now even with the best intentions in the world we wouldn't want to have the morale of those who have to carry out the central plan undermined by learning that things aren't going perfectly therefore we must control the press aside from allocating the newsprint allocating the salaries allocating and so forth that the political dimension in central planning has to be brought forward it's not simply what marx is trying to pretend that it's an administrative function the replacement of government by man by a merely administrative thing it's a political dictatorial thing that's truly at work in reality in central planning so i think if you can bring out these different concerns you can attack and the core notions that socialists have about their beliefs and begin to bring them around and with luck with persuasion with probably some more reading on your part you can take truly dedicated political people and make them into allies libertarians and that's all to the good and it will also stretch your own mind and make your own grasp of libertarian principles and practice that are developed okay well let me ask answer some questions in the remaining moments here sir uh-huh okay well the question in case anybody didn't hear it was this gentleman has had a number of conversations with uh followers of tom hayden and john jane fonda the campaign for socialism campaign for economic democracy and that brings up one point is that this group uh does not like to be called socialist and uh does not like to admit to having socialist beliefs so one way to kind of mildly needle them is to call them social democrats or democratic socialists in their in conversation you know you can say you know and and see what that produces for you now but to get to the specific question which is what about the um what about the claim that that these socialists are making that it's for the good of wool well i guess you have to start out with saying the following you say that you need to convince me how would we know it's for the good of wool what would it be that would be so convincing that would show that this thing is for the good of wool uh is it surely we all want to have our human rights protected that is something that's for the good of wool uh is what you're suggesting not going to violate any human rights is it is it going to leave everybody in control of their own lives to the maximum extent possible you have to kind of yourself you do believe that some things are for that certainly that a system of private property rights is for the good of wool and uh that it's compatible with human nature so you have to try and bring them on to your ground to some extent and to ask them how to demonstrate how to prove it show me take the Missouri approach you know i'm not i can't be convinced i'm not convinced at this point uh get them doing some of the talking remember it's not it's it's it's a dialogue it's it's it's get them talking especially at any point they're unraveling yeah yes yes you know sir okay did you did you hear what he suggested uh i you know that that might work i think that um i think that uh you you have to um you have to raise quite you have to before you want to spend too much time defending your own position it's better to work on unraveling theirs you can if you can interweave the two it's it's really quite effective sir is it this the suggestion is to push them to the reductio out absurdum very useful method in in and how do we but but but okay but but what you want to say is now you of course don't even though Hitler said this you of course don't believe that it was for the good of all how would we know that that's not the case how would we know and why would it you know or that or you can even step them a little closer to their own home ground and surely we know that the the 20 to 60 million people killed in Stalin's uh camps was not a good thing and yet Stalin said that it was for the good of all surely there's something troubling here how can we know yes sir in the vet and i'm one of the all okay i think that's a good point let me just suggest one thing to watch out for though i wouldn't ever i would never myself and except my accident want to appropriate to my position the word equal and as you said i have the equal right i would say the same right or i have full rights or something like that i think once you're accepting but the groundwork of equality even though there is a sense in which libertarians believe in something like equality of rights it's very tricky and i don't think you want to grant that term you want to you want to stick them with it and show it has deep problems sir yeah well i'm not a i'm not a hayekian i think i think i think that hayek is in to some extent a a person who incorporates realistically certain humane modest utilitarian views and and some take some from con also i don't think uh i don't think i think it's too strong to say that he is anti morals in the sense that marx i can't accept mr hayek's view well i'm just saying i'm just i i don't think so but the important thing is to get the marxist socialists to accept some moral principle even if it's not the same one that you accept and then work them down that principle toward libertarian and meanwhile you can nudge them toward the one that you like best i don't think that accepting a pure ethical relevance position is going to be an attractive way to defend libertarianism because once you say everything is up for grabs there's no justice there's no sense of right and wrong that applies to liberty i think you have you've made a mistake in my view and you've you've given away very very important rounds of argument uh let me just get some more questions yes sir well you can you can uh may i address this we're just about out of time here so i'm going to have to make this the last question uh you can do the same kind of thing first how do we know what's to the good of most second is the good of hitler also said it was the good of most he only killed a small group of people the gypsies the homosexuals and the jews uh how do we know hitler was wrong we're certainly troubled by what went on here if to the good of most is what's at stake you seem to have quite a bit of popular support in the society at the time uh again stalin felt it was to the good of most uh not to the good of the capitalist class by any means but to the good of most and again you can press them on this you take take them on the route i thank you all for your patience and understanding and i i think the thought was close to me