Even as GM was deciding to shut down its plants and lay off its workers, its CEO Mary Barra wrote an op-ed glorifying this “collaboration by the private and public sectors, supported by comprehensive federal policies.” She evidently saw her role as advancing public policy goals as much as making her company profitable for its shareholders. Sounding like one of Obama’s utopian speechwriters, she underscored GM’s “commitment to an all-electric future” and called for “a National Zero Emission Vehicle (NZEV) program to create a comprehensive approach to help move our country faster to an all-electric, zero emissions future.”31
At the very time Barra was proposing an “all-electric future,” GM was planning cutbacks on its hybrid plug-in Chevy Volt, which didn’t seem to faze Barra. Why should it when her partner is Uncle Sam? As Investor’s Business Daily editors quipped, “After all, who needs to please actual customers when government can compel people, either by huge subsidies or outright regulation, to buy your product?”32 In her piece, Barra unapologetically called for certain “complementary initiatives” to “encourage widespread acceptance of electrical vehicles in this country.” These initiatives included infrastructure investments to accelerate convenient electric car charging, expanding government incentives (refundable tax credits) for consumers to buy electric cars, and regulatory incentives to support U.S. battery suppliers.33 Her vision would require 7 percent of new cars sold in 2021 to be electric and 25 percent by 2030.34
If this interdependent relationship between government and business doesn’t illustrate the left’s enchantment with socialism, what does? Barra essentially admitted her plan wouldn’t work without government subsidies. It’s obvious that unlike the run-of-the-mill evil capitalist CEO, Barra didn’t see herself as primarily honor-bound to satisfy shareholders but to effectuate policy goals that she and her government collaborators, in their superior wisdom, deemed desirable, even if it wasn’t in the best interests of her company, American consumers, or taxpayers.
“YOU NEVER WANT A SERIOUS CRISIS TO GO TO WASTE”
America has been gravitating toward socialism for years. Nobel Prize–winning economist Milton Friedman observed that late in the nineteenth century, partly due to British influence, the intellectual climate of public opinion in the U.S. began to shift from a belief in individual responsibility and trust in the markets to a belief in social responsibility and reliance on the government. Even as early as the 1920s, socialist views were held by a substantial minority of university professors who were concerned with public affairs.35
Friedman argued that while it was not electorally competitive, the Socialist Party was the most influential political party in the first decades of the twentieth century. With no chance of victory, it could afford to be open about its extremist goals whereas Democrats and Republicans could not. Over time both parties essentially adopted the Socialist Party agenda. “Almost every economic plank in its 1928 presidential platform has by now been enacted into law,” writes Friedman.36 Those positions included nationalization of national resources, a publicly owned giant power system, national ownership and democratic management of railroads and other means of transportation and communication, immediate government relief of the unemployed, interest-free loans to states and municipalities for public works, unemployment insurance, the nationwide extension of public employment agencies, a system of health and accident insurance and of old age pensions as well as unemployment insurance, shortening the workday and workweek, enacting a federal anti–child labor amendment, higher taxes on the wealthy, higher corporate and inheritance taxes (the proceeds to be used for old-age pensions and other forms of social insurance), and a national program for flood control, flood relief, reforestation, irrigation, and reclamation.37
Friedman describes the 1932 presidential election as a “political watershed for the United States.”38 The voters held President Herbert Hoover responsible for the crushing Depression and bought into Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s optimistic promises to cut government waste, reduce spending, and balance the budget. But once in office, capitalizing on the public’s loss of faith in our economic system, FDR launched a massive overhaul, forever transforming the role of government to levels never before contemplated. In the words of Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”39
Before 1929, combined federal, state, and local spending never exceeded 12 percent of the national income except during major wars, and federal spending only constituted about one-third of total government spending. Federal spending, notes Friedman, was generally about 3 percent of the national income. But since 1933, government spending has never been less than 20 percent of national income and was more than 40 percent in 1980, when Friedman wrote those words. Since 1946, domestic spending has never been less than 16 percent of the national income, and in 1980 it was some one-third the national income, with federal domestic spending constituting 25 percent of the national income. “By this measure,” says Friedman, “the role of the federal government in the economy has multiplied roughly tenfold in the past half-century.”40 While the government and economists use gross domestic product (GDP) as a measure today rather than national income, total government spending as a percentage of GDP has significantly increased since 1980, and federal spending has remained at about the same level. President Clinton grossly erred in his opportunistic assurance in 1995 that the era of big government was over.41
Even more troublesome is the historical expansion of the federal debt as a percentage of GDP, which declined drastically after surging during World War II but has now almost returned to those wartime levels.42 Since 2009 alone, the gross federal debt as a percentage of GDP has increased from 82.4 percent to 105 percent.43 Thomas Sowell notes that when the national debt rose above 100 percent of GDP in 2013, Wall Street was no longer yawning. “It is one thing to have a national debt as large as the Gross Domestic Product, or larger, at the end of a major war, for the return of peace means drastic reductions in military spending, which presents an opportunity to begin paying down that national debt over the ensuing years,” Sowell explains. “But to have a comparable national debt in peacetime presents more grim options, because there is no indication of the kind of reduction of government spending which occurs at the end of a war.”44
AN EXPRESSION OF PETULANCE AND OBSTINACY FROM IDEOLOGUES
Leftists seem unconcerned about either the inevitable failures of their programs or the loss of freedoms they entail. As central planning advocates and collectivists, their goals aren’t freedom and prosperity but increasing their control and advancing their redistributionist agenda.
For a while it appeared that the socialists’ blind idealism would die a natural death. In fact, the worldwide failures of socialist policies sparked a general distrust of government, leading Irving Kristol to write a 1976 obituary for the very idea of socialism. “The most important event of the twentieth century is not the crisis of capitalism but the death of socialism,” writes Kristol. He acknowledges that increasing numbers of people and political regimes then identified as socialist but stresses that “the socialist ideal has been voided of all meaning.” Socialism had ceased to be of any interest to anyone because reality had repudiated it.
Despite true believers clinging to the fiction that socialism couldn’t be judged as a failed system, history had shown otherwise. “Socialism is what socialism does,” writes Kristol. “The plaintive lament of the purist that socialism… has ‘never really been tried’ is simply the expression of petulance and obstinacy on the part of ideologues who, convinced that they have a more profound understanding than anyone else of the world and its history, now find that they have been living a huge self-deception.” It was ridiculous for self-styled socialists to decry the three-quarters of the world that actually was socialist. Kristol observes that “the most extraordinary fact of twentieth-century intellectual history is that all thinking about socialism takes place in non-socialist countries.… Not a single interesting work on Ma
rxism—not even an authoritative biography of Karl Marx!—has issued from the Soviet Union in its sixty years of existence.”45
Just four years later, Milton Friedman celebrated socialism’s decline, noting that Britain had swept conservative Margaret Thatcher into power on a platform of reversing socialist policies. Moreover, other Western European nations were following suit, while Ronald Reagan was about to win the American presidency in a landslide. But Friedman didn’t share Kristol’s sanguinity about socialism’s ultimate demise. He notes that this movement “may prove short-lived and be followed, after a brief interval, by a resumption of the trend toward ever bigger government.”46 While there was widespread enthusiasm for cutting taxes, it was not accompanied by support for eliminating government programs. Friedman laments that the pervasive failure of government programs did not lead to their abandonment but a demand for even bigger government. Socialism is an important tenet of the leftist, secular religion, and the adherents’ faith in it does not waver in the face of empirical evidence discrediting it. They always object that true socialism has never been tried, or tried by the right people, and any failures can be remedied by a purer version or better planners.47
The writings of these two brilliant men and the intervening history between their writings and today demonstrate that the devoted left never accepts defeat. It still operates this way today—blaming the failures of socialism on capitalism and demanding more government intrusion. It’s an ingenious strategy to introduce socialism incrementally—just enough to disrupt or financially distress a system—then demand more drastic, remedial government intervention. As noted above, in 2003, Barack Obama advocated this strategy to achieve a single-payer healthcare system.48 And indeed, Democrats have reacted to the failure of Obamacare by calling for “Medicare for all,” the abolition of private insurance, and other drastic increases in government control of the industry.
NOT SO FAST: SOCIALISM IS REBORN
Referring to Kristol’s pronouncement of socialism’s demise, Matthew Continetti, Kristol’s grandson-in-law, laments, “If the death of the socialist idea was the most important political event of the last century, then the rebirth of this ideal must rank high in significance in the current one.”49 This is partly because utopian socialism offered what Kristol describes as “elements that were wanting in capitalist society—elements indispensable for the preservation, not to say perfection, of our humanity.”50 Elaborating, Continetti says that “socialism supplied the values, aspirations, goals, mechanisms of meaning that democratic capitalism could not;”51 or, as Kristol puts it, “The essential point of this indictment was that liberty was not enough. A society founded solely on ‘individual rights’ was a society that ultimately deprived men of those virtues which could only exist in a political community which is something other than a society. Among these virtues are a sense of distributive justice, a fund of shared moral values, and a common vision of the good life sufficiently attractive and powerful to transcend the knowledge that each individual’s life ends only in death.”52
Capitalist society, notes Kristol, as imagined in the writings of John Locke and Adam Smith, is bereft of these virtues—not rejecting or scorning them but leaving them to the individual to handle privately. These “founders of capitalism” assumed the virtues would persist, because they were confident that the moral and spiritual heritage of Judaism and Christianity was unassailable and the individualism that accompanied capitalism would not liberate people from these traditions. Kristol concludes that while these virtues remained for many generations thanks to their accumulated strength, they eventually depleted over time, being replaced by a spirit of nihilism in which a “good life” had come to mean a “satisfactory life style.”53
I would emphasize that capitalism doesn’t purport to be more than an economic system; it doesn’t claim to have an underlying spiritual or religious component. It is not a moral system, though it is perfectly moral and has produced immeasurable benefits for mankind. Socialism, despite being touted as virtuous, is immoral for reasons we’ll explore further. We must challenge the claim that capitalism is flawed because it lacks a set of moral precepts. We must resist the urge to impute to capitalism the function of religion. That would be “like criticizing the U.S. Postal Service for delivering too much hate mail, but then acknowledging that ‘for all its repugnant and deplorable aspects,’ our postal system is better than systems that censor the mail and deliver late,” writes Rev. Peter A. Speckhard.54 “Capitalism, like the postal service, is not a religion, and so it neither can nor should measure up to the moral demands placed upon it by disillusioned Marxists seeking a new way.” This is not to say that capitalism is inconsistent with biblical values. Indeed, as we shall see, it is fully compatible with Christian morality.
TURNING THE TABLES ON OUR SOCIALIST ACCUSERS
It is hardly a mark against capitalism that socialism falsely claims to be a morally grounded system that seeks to more fairly allocate economic resources. It is neither reasonable nor fair to condemn capitalism as inadequate because it fails to fulfill a promise it doesn’t make. Capitalism promises greater economic efficiency, productivity, and prosperity—not an equal distribution of resources or income. There is nothing immoral in its refusal to make that promise because there is nothing morally imperative in the promise itself. Capitalism doesn’t need to borrow spiritual ideas from socialism to ward off the creeping nihilism that some think is inevitable in their absence. Socialism doesn’t offer true spiritual or moral ideas that survive from theory to real-world practice, so why concede that point? Socialists don’t deserve credit for their allegedly good intentions and capitalists don’t deserve blame for refusing to masquerade as economic high priests.
It would be healthier to acknowledge that capitalism can’t provide what only biblical religion can and realize this doesn’t devalue capitalism. Its sphere is limited. Likewise, the framers had no illusion that the Constitution would be a panacea for men living together in community. John Adams recognized this when he said that the Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. He meant the Constitution couldn’t supply a society’s religious and moral foundations any more than an economic system could. But society must have those values for the Constitution to be able to work as intended and secure the individual rights it guarantees.
This doesn’t mean free-market conservatives believe government has no role in the moral realm or that we should be indifferent to the moral quality of our culture. The Constitution most emphatically guarantees, by force of government, our religious liberties. Moreover, contrary to conventional wisdom, almost all laws are rooted in someone’s notion of moral principles, and conservative Christians must seek to influence laws compatible with their moral views. In much the same way, capitalism must be undergirded by moral principles and the rule of law.
Quoting Kristol, Continetti asks, “What can a liberal-capitalist society do about the decline of religious beliefs and traditional values—a decline organically rooted in liberal capitalism’s conception of this realm as an essentially ‘private affair’ neither needing nor meriting public sanction?” Continetti answers that at the very least we must defend religious freedom and promote religious and civic education. I agree, though I don’t see the decline in religious beliefs and values as being rooted in capitalism’s notion that they are a private affair. To say that capitalism doesn’t address this deficiency doesn’t mean the deficiency is therefore capitalism’s fault. Capitalism hasn’t led to nihilism, and if we are truly concerned about rampant licentiousness and an overall breakdown of our moral values, we should examine their causes and consider solutions, particularly in the spiritual realm. That is, exonerating capitalism against this unfair charge doesn’t excuse or relieve us of the duty to influence society to re-cultivate our founding morals, values, and traditions.
Conservatives must respond to the socialists’ attack on capitalism instead of assuming their challenge will self-destruct amidst its logical incoher
ence and historical failures. This new breed of socialists didn’t arise in a vacuum, and we must provide answers to the younger generations who have been indoctrinated by progressive university professors on the evils of capitalism and the virtues of socialism. But we needn’t overcomplicate this. The modern socialists’ case is mainly a recycling of their ancestors’ arguments that I encountered in college in the early seventies: that conservatives lack compassion for the poor, that capitalism is immoral because it leads to an inequitable distribution of resources, and that the rich get rich on the backs of the poor.
Conservatives have fallen short in demonstrating the compassion of our ideas. We mustn’t project callousness and appear to glorify greed and selfishness as some hardcore Ayn Rand acolytes do. There’s a difference between self-interest and dark-hearted selfishness. Though capitalism isn’t a moral system, it facilitates man’s inalienable right to liberty and produces greater prosperity for more people than any other economic system, and for those reasons alone it is morally superior.
We must address, head-on, the claim of social justice warriors that the rich don’t pay their fair share and that society’s resources are distributed unfairly. We must emphasize that we do care about those who fall through the cracks and that almost all conservatives believe in some form of safety net, provided it doesn’t exacerbate the problems it seeks to alleviate. Jack Kemp astutely described conservatives’ genuine concern for the less fortunate: “Our definition of compassion is not how many people live on the government welfare plantation, but how many of our people are liberated from government dependence.”55
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