George Rebane
Another one of those delightful, disorganized, and sometimes disjointed discussions has erupted in the comments following ‘The Reverends Beck and Sharpton Hold Meetings’. The topic area has migrated from that of the original post on the Beck/Sharpton rallies in Washington, to the related area of types of governance that were actually the underlying thrusts of both rallies. In this piece I will attempt to address a couple of themes that have emerged from those comments.
One theme is that totalitarian governments can result from overzealous implementation of both collectivist and conservative approaches to governance. I have energetically, if not always elegantly, argued that, yes, such may indeed be the endpoint from both starting points. But by their very nature collectivist intentions (e.g. as represented by, say, progressive socialism) are far more prone to lead to the public’s demand for an authoritarian ‘man on a white horse’. The prime cause for this is that collectivist economies have always depended on setting up altruistic commonses (a la Hardin) that eventually collapse and cause wholesale limiting of liberty and widespread misery. It was ever thus.
While collectivist literature – from Marx to B.F Skinner (Walden Two) – has always extolled a social utopia at the end of the road, conservative/libertarians have never promised anything of the sort. The most these so-called ‘right wingers’ promise the people is a fair run for the money and place in the sun, with no guarantees that any given person will find either. But regardless, the argument continues that a strongly collective society will be the best that imperfect Man can deliver. The Left promises ‘equal achievement’, and the Right strives for equal opportunity. One side understands that freedom and equality are two sides of a see-saw, the other side promises to raise both ends without breaking the damn thing.
But none of this says that in the right-left competition we cannot produce an authoritarian government from an ostensibly conservative, free-market society. History has examples of the failure of the conservatives to ‘properly’ defend their ideals when under collectivist assault. Chile’s Pinochet was the response to communist Allende, and Spain’s Franco was the response to the Moscow sponsored Popular Front. (We will excuse calls to include socialists Hitler and Mussolini in this assemblage by victims of our failed public educational system.) Both revolts resulted in dictatorships and state control, loss of liberties, etc. However, both governments eventually yielded wealth producing economies that allowed the dictators to retire without bloodshed. For Spain it was the first time since it stopped importing gold from the new world, and for Chile it was the first time ever, making it one of the most vibrant of Latin American economies.
The second theme is also a familiar one, and perhaps the more important of the two. It goes something like ‘Look at country X, see how happy they are, everyone has health care, and no one goes hungry, they don’t use much energy, and the people dance and sing themselves to sleep every night. Why can’t America be like X?’ In the referenced comment thread, Denmark has emerged as the placeholder for X.
At 5.5 million people, Denmark is less than 1.7% the size of the US, and has less than 0.5% of our land area. Economically it is in the medium range with $36,336 GDP per capita versus $46,381 for the US. Culturally, it is very homogeneous with over 90% being ethnic Danes, and most of the remainder comprised of people from similar European cultures. Its government is a parliamentary democracy with a constitutional monarch as its titular head of state. Thanks to America, Denmark, like so many other EU countries, spends relatively little on defense.
The overarching question in each of these debates suggesting we’d be better off if only we were like Denmark, or pick another one of your favorites, is ‘can the adopted social policies of such a country yield similar results in America?’ In a more technical sense (say, from the systems sciences), the question becomes one of scaling – do the social policies of country X beneficially scale when applied to country Y? We will call this notion ‘social scaling’.
Social scaling may be viewed from many perspectives, or along the several dimensions of a society. We can examine whether the policies of X will socially scale to Y in the areas of security, economy, welfare, education, healthcare, individual liberties, property ownership, and so on. I maintain that the larger and more complex two systems (aka countries) become, the more difficult (impossible?) it is to take one aspect of the first system/country and appropriately scale its direct application up/down to the other system/country.
The truth of this proposition rests on the further notion of the difference in the transfer functions of the corresponding subsystems making up X and Y. Think of a transfer function as the collection of applicable input-output relationships – e.g. ‘raise income tax by 1% yields an increase of 0.7% of government revenues’. And, of course, we can also see that the collateral effects in X vs Y would differ when the same prescriptions are applied to both countries.
All this says is that social scaling is not as readily achieved as currently argued by voices from the left. We can’t simply adopt Denmark’s healthcare system (or some other policy) and apply it to a much larger and culturally polyglot America, and expect the same results. Such policies do not scale, no matter the wisdom suggesting their in vacuo application. In short, social scaling should be approached with great care and deliberation. Its blind application could very easily ‘crash the system’.
Before concluding this small dissertation, I want to point out some little known realities not reported in the lamestream media. None of the socialist nostrums practiced by EU countries, or anyplace else for that matter, are sustainable. How do we know this? Because the costs of such programs are taking an ever greater fraction of their governments' budgets – since that can’t go on indefinitely, that is the definition of unsustainable. Be it healthcare, welfare, public employee pensions, or energy subsidies, the costs are outpacing the budgets.
The bag of solutions still contains only two – raise taxes and take the hit to the economy, and/or lower costs through rationing or privatizing. That may just explain why countries so encumbered are doing all they can to cut back or get out of such programs, all the while we are making headway in going where they no longer want to be.
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