The Volokh Conspiracy

Many commenters on my post on "Israeli Kibbutzim and the Failure of Socialism" argue that socialism is a dead issue. Why, they ask, should we bother arguing against an ideology that is already so completely discredited? Their point is not without some merit. In most of the world, socialism has far fewer adherents today than at any time in the last 100 years.

Nonetheless, there are still some good reasons to continue the debate over socialism, and to explore the reasons why that ideology proved so disastrous in both theory and practice. First, to state the most obvious, there are still at least two governments that continue to practice full-blown socialism: Cuba and North Korea. It is important to understand the reasons why the people of those two nations live under such horrible oppression.

Second, it is far from impossible for socialism to stage a political recovery in the future. Especially when packaged with nationalism, socialist rhetoric still has tremendous appeal to many people. Hugo Chavez's political success in Venezuela is an example of how some of the most disastrous socialist policies can be successfully sold to the people if combined with nationalism - a lesson first taught by Hitler and Mussolini. Political entrepreneurs in other Third World nations may well try to emulate Chavez's successes; the same could even occur in parts of the developed world if economic conditions deteriorate sufficiently. And, as Bryan Caplan shows in this excellent paper (scroll down to the link marked "The Totalitarian Threat"), several likely future technological and political developments may increase the viability of socialist totalitarianism and render its reemergence more likely.

Third, full-blown socialism continues to have some important and respected advocates in the intellectual world. Yale economist John Roemer and Oxford political theorist G.A. Cohen are two of the most sophisticated, and both are leading scholars in their fields. There are other academic advocates of socialism who enjoy considerable followings despite the fact that their work is far less impressive than Cohen's and Roemer's, or is even downright dishonest (as in the case of Noam Chomsky's political writings). By contrast, there are virtually no intellectually respectable advocates of fascism (in the true, rather than the purely pejorative, sense of the word) or racism left in the Western world.

Fourth, even among those who agree that socialism has been an abject failure to date, there is disagreement about the reasons for that failure. Some defenders of socialism claim that it failed in the USSR and elsewhere only because of insufficient ideological fervor, negative attributes of Russian culture, the hostility of capitalist states, or other causes that do not discredit the ideology's core ideas. As I explained in my previous post, the failure of the Israeli kibbutz model is important precisely because it helps rule out some of these arguments.

Finally, some, though by no means all, of the shortcomings of full-blown socialism are shared by more moderate interventionist policies. The problems of knowledge, incentives, and political ignorance that undermines democratic control of big government are particularly important here.

For all these reasons, the debate over socialism is far from over. The spectre that once haunted Europe and the world may have been defeated and discredited. But we have not yet completed the task of driving a stake through its heart.

UPDATE: To avoid confusion, I should emphasize that in this post, as in the previous one, I use the term "socialism" to refer to government control of all or most of the means of production, not to more moderate departures from the free market, such as welfare statism or government regulation of industries that remain privately owned.

Some of Glenn Reynolds/Instapundit's readers claim that there is a contradiction between his claim that Jack Goldsmith's new book on the War On Terror criticizes excessive legal constraints on presidential wartime authority, and Jonathan Adler and Orin Kerr's characterization of Goldsmith as criticizing the Bush Administration's assertions of virtually unlimited presidential power in time of war.

In reality, there is no contradiction here. Glenn is right to point out that Goldsmith believes that pre-9/11 law constrained presidential wartime authority too much, and that some of the Bush Administration's efforts were undercut by those constraints. But Orin and Jonathan are also correct in pointing out that Goldsmith disapproved of the Bush Administration's response to the problem. Instead of working with Congress and the courts to change overly restrictive laws (Goldsmith's preferred strategy), the Administration chose to claim that they already had the power to do almost anything the president might want to, so long as it has even a remote connection to waging the war. As Goldsmith argues, this approach is bad law because the Constitution does in fact allow congressional and judicial restriction of the president's warmaking powers, and in some cases even requires it (for my take on these issues in a debate with John Yoo and others, see here).

Goldsmith also argues that the Bush Administration's approach was politically counterproductive and led to an actual diminution of the executive authority that the administration sought to enhance. Bush's overreaching generated a backlash in Congress and the courts that eventually led to stronger curbs on executive power than would have existed had the Administration tried to work with Congress early on and made less sweeping (but still broad) claims of inherent presidential power. As Goldsmith himself puts it, “They [the Bush Administration] embraced this vision because they wanted to leave the presidency stronger than when they assumed office, but the approach they took achieved exactly the opposite effect. The central irony is that people whose explicit goal was to expand presidential power have diminished it.”

In sum, Goldsmith believes that the War on Terror has been hobbled by excessive legal constraints, but also argues that the Bush Administration's response to the problem was both legally dubious and politically counterproductive. In my view, he is largely correct on both counts.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary Becker has a fascinating post on Israel's kibbutzim. The kibbutzim are Israeli agricultural communities initially organized on socialist lines, mostly between the 1910s and 1950s. Originally, most kibbutzim followed strict socialist policies forbidding private property; they also required near-total equality of income regardless of differences in productivity, and in some cases even abandoned specialization of labor. In recent years, Becker points out, most of the kibbutzim have had to abandon these policies, due to the perverse incentives they create and their inability to to hold on to their more talented younger residents.

As Becker puts it, "nowhere is the failure of socialism clearer than in the radical transformation of the Israeli kibbutz." If a socialist experiment could ever succeed, it should have done so in this case. Most kibbutzim were founded by highly motivated volunteers strongly committed to socialist ideology. For many years, kibbutzim had great prestige in Israeli society, and many of the nation's early leaders were kibbutz members. After Israel became an independent state in 1948, the kibbutzim also benefited from extensive government subsidies. Unlike other socialist experiments, the failure of the kibbutzim cannot be ascribed to lack of ideological fervor, inadequate resources, or hostility from the surrounding "capitalist" society. Despite these advantages, kibbutzim failed to achieve a high level of economic productivity, and even failed to retain the loyalty of many of their own members. Over time, many kibbutz residents became frustrated with the perverse incentives created by socialism, and many also yearned for the individual freedom and privacy created by private property rights.

Only by watering down or abandoning their comitment to socialism have kibbutzim been able to survive. If socialism cannot work under the highly favorable circumstances of the Israeli kibbutz, it almost certainly cannot work anywhere.

Of course there is one advantage that socialist governments enjoy that the kibbutzim did not. Unlike a kibbutz, a totalitarian socialist state can use its secret police to suppress dissent and force the people to work for the state whether they want to or not. This explains why Israel's kibbutzim have mostly abandoned socialism, while North Korea and Cuba have not. When given a choice (as in Eastern Europe after 1989), the people of socialist states have rejected socialism even more decisively than most Israeli kibbutzim eventually did.

The failure of socialist kibbutzim does not prove that small, voluntary communities should abjure all communal property. To the contrary, scholars such as Elinor Ostrom have shown that voluntary social groups can often manage common property resources effectively if they also have private property as well. In Israel itself, the less famous moshavim have enjoyed much greater success than the kibbutz model. Unlike the original kibbutz, moshav members hold their land as private property and are paid at least in part on the basis of performance; at the same time, moshavim also often have considerably communal property as well, managed by rules that try to curtail free-riding and the "tragedy of the commons." Small-scale experiments in limited communal property can sometimes work. Indeed, they are perfectly consistent with free-market libertarianism, so long as they remain purely voluntary in nature. By contrast, the kibbutz experience shows that experiments in full-blown socialism are likely to fail even under very favorable conditions. A free society should not ban the formation of voluntary collectivist communities. However, their debilitating shortcomings provide a valuable lesson in the virtues of private property.

Libertarianism is generally seen as requiring free trade. Certainly, libertarian thinkers from Adam Smith to the present have strongly condemned protectionism. How then can a libertarian endorse trade restrictions such as the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, which denied free trade to totalitarian states that refused to allow their citizens to emigrate freely?

Perhaps I am blinded by my parochial interest in the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, but I think there is a compelling answer to this question. Libertarianism does indeed imply free trade between private individuals and firms. But trade with socialist governments is very different. When two private individuals trade with each other, it is reasonable to assume that both legitimately own the goods they exchange. Thus, at least as far as libertarians are concerned, the law should not restrict their transactions unless there is specific proof that one or both are trading in stolen or otherwise illicitly acquired goods. By contrast, a socialist state engaging in international trade is usually exchanging goods that it forcibly acquired from its citizens. The socialist state's goods are either confiscated from former private owners or produced by compelling workers to work for the state (which they generally must do whether they want to or not, because there is no competitive employment market). Socialist states also make extensive use of out and out forced labor. In a true socialist state - one where the government owns all the means of production and the state has a monopoly of foreign trade - trade in forcibly acquired goods is the only kind of international exchange that is possible at all. Just as in the domestic context libertarianism is perfectly consistent with forbidding trade in stolen goods, in the international context it is consistent with forbidding trade with socialist governments that, by definition (as libertarians see it), have acquired their wealth by plundering their citizens.

True socialist states must be distinguished from nominally socialist societies (such as China today) that nonetheless permit a large private sector to exist and engage in international trade. However, the USSR at the time of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment (like Cuba and North Korea today) was a fully socialist society with almost no private enterprise and a complete government monopoly of foreign trade.

Restrictions on trade with socialist states may or may not be good policy. Sometimes trade with such states can serve important strategic interests (as with US trade with the Soviet Union when the two nations were allied during World War II). Critics of trade sanctions claim that they fail to achieve their goals and may even be counterproductive. Be that as it may, restricting trade with socialist states does not violate any libertarian principles.

Former Democratic Representative Charles Vanik passed away recently. Although Rep. Vanik and I disagreed on most major political issues, I nonetheless owe him a debt that can never be repaid.

In 1974, Vanik and Democratic Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson co-sponsored the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, which denied the Soviet Union and some other totalitarian states "most favored nation" trade status unless they permitted free emigration of their citizens. The Amendment was passed by Congress despite the opposition of the Nixon Administration.

In part as a result of the pressure brought to bear by the Amendment, the USSR began to allow the emigration of Soviet Jews and members of several other ethnic and religious minority groups, such as Germans, Armenians, and Pentecostals. Were it not for the efforts of Jackson, Vanik, and their supporters, hundreds of thousands of people - including our senior Conspirator and myself - might have been trapped in a totalitarian state for many years longer. The Russian immigrant community in this country owes Representative Vanik a great debt. My respectful condolences to his family and friends.

UPDATE: Here is a more extensive obituary in the New York Times. It includes a great quote by Rep. Vanik:

In 1988, five years after Mr. Jackson died, the Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev urged the amendment to be scrapped, saying: “Why should the dead hold onto the coattails of the living? I mean the Jackson-Vanik amendment. One of them is already physically dead. The other is politically dead.”

. . . Mr. Vanik countered: “Lenin has been dead for a long time, and they still live under his guidance.”

UPDATE #2: The Jackson-Vanik Amendment and other similar legislation raise an interesting issue in libertarian theory - whether libertarianism is consistent with restrictions on trade with socialist states. I do not think it is appropriate to address that issue in an obituary post. So I will instead consider it in a follow-up. Comments on that issue should also be attached to the follow-up post rather than this one.