A LIBERTARIAN FORM OF SOCIALISM?

Paul Buchheit views a second term for Our President as almost-the-apocalypse, and yet, amidst his hysteria there's an intriguing observation.

Forty years of a winner-take-all mentality has nurtured the greedy belief that 'social' is a dirty word.

But 'social' serves everyone, 'individual' serves only one. And true socialism is far removed from any government control. As activist Gar Alperovitz describes socialism: "It’s about decentralizing power, changing the flow of power to localities rather than to the center." It means firefighters and police and roads and public transportation and parks and libraries. And it means respect for the "social composition" of schools, especially in the early years of our children's lives, when successful patterns for adulthood are found in their kindergarten social skills.

I suspect forty years of winning the Cold War and seeing the emergence of several United States' worth of middle classes in Brazil and India and China and the Warsaw Pact and the continued failures of Cuban and Venezuelan self-styled socialism (thus Mr Alperovitz has to pronounce anathema on Stalinist bureaucracies: like true Christianity, true Socialism has never been tried) that make "social-" a scary prefix, and reliance on "the center" the thing to be avoided.

Dig deeper, though, and Mr Alperovitz's vision is one in which states and localities are not operating units of the national government (if that's really the case, a president or the composition of Congress are less important than the Sunday shows, and implicitly Mr Buchheit make it) and that neighborhoods that foster bourgeois convention might be valuable indeed.  Indeed, there might be echoes of Adam Smith and people led as if by an invisible hand to cooperate.

Yes, we could quibble about whether those firefighters and roads and electric railways and parks are by subscription or by taxing the rich heavily, but we cannot rule out that local cooperation might provide local club goods as a consequence of the localities competing in the bundles they offer at different prices.

That's too logical for Mr Buchheit, who would rather dish the invective.

Why is the word 'social' feared in America? One well-studied explanation is that rampant inequality has reduced the level of TRUST in our society. Coinciding with the expanding wealth gap has been a remarkable downturn in public opinion about the belief that "most people can be trusted." As a result, the two unequal extremes lose contact with each other. People at the wealthy end tend to become antisocial, less willing to support the needs of society, opposed to sharing their wealth, and determined to convince the rest of us that socialism in any form will threaten the cherished American qualities of individual initiative and entrepreneurship.

Perhaps because "socialism," as preached by the usual suspects, is a toxic blend of resentment against achievement and enablement of dysfunction, with the worst sort of ward-heelers owing their continued power to the continued misery of their constituents.

On the other hand, the exemplars of social democracy, at least as Mr Buchheit understands it, are better understood as advanced tribal societies.  "It's revealing, then, that the socialist nations Denmark and Finland and Norway and Sweden have been ranked higher than the U.S. in business freedom by the conservative Heritage Foundation."  Yes, and the political leaders in those countries deny that they are socialist governments.  Social-democratic, perhaps.  Internationalist?  Unlikely, when a candidate for Danish office running on a leftish platform wants a moratorium on immigration.

If you define the needs of "society," dear reader, as equivalent to the needs of Danes or Swedes, you might get a different notion of desirable policies than if you think of yourself as some sort of citizen of the world, or as a seeker of cosmic justice.