I’ve been thinking about the persistent attraction of socialism in the face of so many examples of it not working. It reminds me of the sort of ‘magical’ thinking in Peter Pan where Peter turns to the children in the audience and says something to the effect of “if you believe in her, clap your hands and Tinker Bell will live.”
Socialism's supporters asks us to believe in human selflessness so it will work. It is fine in a happy fantasy like Peter Pan. It is absolute crap as an organizing principle for economic life.
Most of us aren’t selfless saints. If ‘sainthood’ were common, we wouldn’t prize it so highly but would take it as a given, as socialism implicitly does.
We are the descendants of thousands of generations of humans who selfishly took their personal and family survival seriously. Expect that, not sainthood, to be our default setting.
We harness that selfishness with societal constraints - laws, rules, systems - to keep it from turning into banditry, and the result is capitalism, based on markets where people exchange value for value in swaps that make sense to both parties.
Taking us as we are, instead of as some would have us be, is why capitalism works and produces rising standards of living.
