Are
We There Yet, Are We There Yet?
Let's Check Marx and Engels's List
by
Robert Higgs
by Robert Higgs
DIGG THIS
Reading the
news has been exciting lately. Hardly a day passes without the announcement
of some new government initiative to save the world. Bail out the
mortgage lenders; bail out the big insurance company; bail out the
banks; bail out the money-market funds; bail out the commercial-paper
sellers; bail out the depositors in belly-up banks; bail out the
automobile companies; bail out the deadbeats who didn't make their
mortgage payments when they came due. When the Treasury bumps up
against its borrowing limits, and interest rates begin to rise on
its bonds, bail it out, too, by having the Fed flood the world's
credit markets with new reserves created by nothing more than a
snap of its electronic fingers. Who knows what industry, special-interest
group, or noisy whiners bloc will be bailed out next? With the Fed
standing ready to inflate without limit, the festivities need never
end.
Of course,
our rulers assure us that they will defend the taxpayers' interest
like pit bulls. Why, just recently, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid sent a
letter to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson in which they declared,
"We must safeguard the interest of American taxpayers [and also,
they continued] protect the hundreds of thousands of automobile
workers and retirees, stop the erosion of our manufacturing base,
and bolster our economy." Whew! These dedicated public servants
clearly do not intend to rest until they've pretty much cured all
the world's visible ills, including bad breath and flat feet. If
they fail, in any event, it won't be because they were too timid
about throwing the taxpayers' money at the problems.
All of
which raises the eternal question, have we become a communist country
yet? Yes, I know you probably think this question is silly, but
I intend to treat it with the seriousness it deserves in the light
of past, present, and likely future government actions. To ensure
that I do not adopt an irrelevant or tendentious set of criteria
in my inquiry, I will consider the question with reference to the
list of ten measures that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels presented
in the Manifesto
of the Communist Party as "pretty generally applicable"
for the establishment of communism "in the most advanced countries."
In the following text, I reproduce each of Marx and Engels's points
verbatim in bold font (from the 1955 edition of Samuel H. Beer),
followed by my own evaluation or commentary.
1. Abolition
of property in land and application of all rents of land to public
purposes.
Of
course, in this country we pretend to have private property in land,
except for the huge amounts of land owned outright by governments,
especially the enormous federal
holdings in the western states and Alaska. But land taxation,
land-use controls, and other regulations that trench on the rights
of ostensibly private owners have already cut a big slice out of
thoroughgoing private property rights in land. As environmentalism
marches boldly onward, private property rights in land are likely
to be chipped away further and further. Land rents, of course, are
taxed along with other property income.
2. A
heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
In
place. Worse to come.
3. Abolition
of all right of inheritance.
Some
right of inheritance remains, but estate ("death") taxes have demolished
much of its substance. Under the next administration, we might well
see renewed attempts to "tax the rich" more heavily by means of
increases in estate-tax rates or changes in bracket levels.
4. Confiscation
of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
Well,
the rebels here are simply shot dead (see encyclopedia entry for
"American Civil War"), even if their rebellion takes a muted and
inconspicuous form (see entry for "Ruby Ridge"). As for the emigrants,
if the federal government believes that it can squeeze a dime out
of them after their departure, they will be hounded to the ends
of the earth for purposes of legalized robbery (aka taxation). I
am not a lawyer, but I notice that the
law in this regard appears to be extremely complicated. I recommend
that you consult your tax attorney before renouncing your citizenship
or even moving abroad without renouncing it. Remember the government's
motto: you've got money, and we want it.
5. Centralization
of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank
with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.
We
call it the Federal Reserve System. As if it were not enough, the
government is now in the process of taking an ownership position
in hundreds, perhaps ultimately thousands, of "private" commercial
banks by means of preferred corporate shares gained in exchange
for its bailout doles.
6. Centralization
of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the
state.
Despite
PBS, NPR, and other outright socialist media, most of the means
of communication in this country purport to be privately owned and
managed. Don't believe it, though. No radio or television broadcasting
station can do business until it obtains an operating license from
the government. In addition, the Federal Communications Commission
makes rules right and left for these stations, often in insultingly
trivial detail. Newspapers remain somewhat freer for the
moment. It appears that the government has tamed the publishers
and reporters sufficiently, rendering them little more than amplifiers
for its propaganda, so that no further purpose would be served by
nationalizing them. Indeed, permitting them to exist as ostensibly
private entities allows the government to spread its lies more effectively
than it could by operating its own Pravda or Izvestia.
As for
transportation, we have Amtrak, of course, as well as countless
government-owned bus, subway, and surface train systems in various
cities. But we also have licensing, regulations, taxes, and subsidies
galore in the so-called private transportation sector, bearing on
cars, trucks, buses, and aircraft, so that any resemblance to capitalism,
living or dead, in that domain is purely coincidental.
7. Extension
of factories and instruments of production owned by the state; the
bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of
the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
Except
for war-related plants, which the government has built
in abundance and continues to own in many instances, the government
for the most part has not felt the need to take over manufacturing
facilities. If, however, the current proposals to include the Detroit
car companies in the big bailout proceed as the Democrats wish,
then the government may take an ownership interest in them, just
as it is acquiring corporate shares in the banks it is bailing out.
Cars built in government-owned factories: what a deal! Remember
the Trabant?
Holy Smokes, Fräulein! Please, God, do not let them take us
there.
Some industries,
such as those producing ethanol and beet sugar, would scarcely exist,
but for government subsidies or protection from foreign competition,
but in a formal sense, they comprise private, not government-owned,
undertakings.
As for
recovering the waste lands and so forth, we've had the Bureau of
Reclamation for a century, subsidizing foolish dam-building and
unprofitable irrigation of deserts all over the West. The ongoing
conspiracy between members of Congress and the Corps of Engineers
bids fair to destroy all the natural resources that the Bureau of
Reclamation has not polished off. For "the improvement of the soil
generally in accordance with a common plan," we've had the USDA
for a century and a half. If it improves the soil any more than
it has already, the dirt will cry out for mercy. (The taxpayers
won't complain, of course, having been persuaded that the whole
rigmarole aims solely to support the small family farm, an economic
institution whose importance in the modern economy now rivals that
of the small family pizza parlor.)
8. Equal
obligation of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially
for agriculture.
Thanks
to the ingenuity of capitalist inventors, entrepreneurs, and businessmen,
we now find that enormous amounts of goods and services can be produced
with only a small fraction of the resources previously required.
In light of this development, the government has decreed, in effect,
an equal obligation of none to work. If you are an ordinary layabout,
you may collect unemployment insurance benefits, countless forms
of welfare and other public assistance, and generally devote yourself
to a life of unproductive dissoluteness. If you are a lousy business
manager or owner, you may collect your bailout money and the rest
of the lavish subsidies the government uses to keep crummy businessmen
at ease, and generally devote yourself to a life of unproductive
dissoluteness. Marx and Engels must be high-fivin' in Socialist
Valhalla: in this country the workers and the capitalists are finally
completely equal!
9. Combination
of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition
of the distinction between towns and country, by a more equable
distribution of the population over the country.
 Marx
worried excessively about this matter because he lamented "the
idiocy of rural life." Having been born and reared in rural
backwaters, I know what he was talking about. In this country, however,
the problem has been obviated by educational and cultural developments
that have effectively reduced the entire population, urban as much
as rural, to a condition of idiocy. Notice, for example, that not
a single teenage girl in the United States, whether she lives in
a town or in the countryside, can accomplish even the simplest task
in a public place without holding a mobile phone to her ear. Many
teenage boys seem to suffer the same incapacity, but bigheartedness
compels us to admit that they may actually be using the phone for
business. Needless to say, none of these kids can make change, but―hey!―MacDonalds
and other retail outlets have faced this idiocy squarely and defeated
it by putting pictures on the cash registers. If a kid can see,
he can sell burgers. Eat your heart out, Karl and Fritz.
10.
Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of
child factory labor in its present form. Combination of education
with industrial production, etc.
We've long had the "free" education, of course. For the results,
go back and read my comments on the previous point. Not that innumeracy
is the only outcome of this socialized schooling; would that it
were. A kid may not know how to divide two fractions, but he knows
that unless his parents recycle the trash, they are destroying the
planet. Factory employment of children would be a Godsend for the
parents of many of the sixteen-year-old lads and lasses now cluttering
the malls or whiling away their youth playing daft video games.
 So,
here we stand, having come close enough to communism for government
work. It is a mistake, however, to call it communism or socialism,
because a major part of its genius is its preservation of the form
of private property rights, even as the substance of such
rights is progressively gutted. Properly speaking, our system is,
and long has been, economic
fascism. "It's a free country," the Red State voters keep yelping.
But it's not. In truth, it never was. But a hundred years ago, it
came a great deal closer to being free than it does now.
So long
as the rulers left even a semblance of private property rights in
place, however, entrepreneurs kept finding ways to make a buck by
serving consumers. Despite being ever more hogtied, they kept bursting
the bonds, working around the obstructions, undercutting the looters
and world-savers, and benefiting their fellow human beings. There's
a great deal of ruin in a nation, Adam Smith opined, and on that
score he certainly must have been right. But we can continue down
this fascistic economic road only so long. Therefore, in the present
distressing circumstances, we may be warranted in asking: is our
politico-economic system finally going smash in a frenzy of monetary
inflation, bailouts, and government takeovers? We'll know the answer
pretty soon.
November
11, 2008
Robert
Higgs [send him mail] is
senior fellow in political economy at the Independent
Institute and editor of The
Independent Review. He
is also a columnist for LewRockwell.com. His
most recent book is Neither
Liberty Nor Safety: Fear, Ideology, and the Growth of Government.
He is also the author of Depression,
War, and Cold War: Studies in Political Economy, Resurgence
of the Warfare State: The Crisis Since 9/11 and Against
Leviathan: Government Power and a Free Society.
Copyright
© 2008 Robert Higgs
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