Communism, socialism ills
MALCOLM Dyani’s letter “Christ and socialism sit well” (DD, December 15) refers. For brevity’s sake I will comment only on the economic aspects. The economic problem is scarcity. In a nutshell, human wants are unlimited. Resources are not.
One system designed to solve this is capitalism (free market economy). The essential principle is competition. The market decides how resources are allocated. To avoid a long discourse, when everybody is free to choose, people will make the choices that each person thinks best. This includes labour. In pure capitalism you choose what you wish to do and where you wish to do it.
The good side of this is that intelligent endeavour is rewarded. There is nothing wrong with being rich if you have honestly earned it.
The bad side is that there is no safety net, so if you lose you lose badly.
To avoid the problems inherent in a capitalist economy, Karl Marx proposed that all resources should be owned by the state and that the allocation of resources should be decided by a wise and benevolent government. It is difficult to think of any government that has been wise or benevolent, but that’s another story.
The good side of this is that everybody will have sufficient (from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs). The bad side is that it stifles innovation and nobody is incentivised to do more than what is absolutely necessary. The end result is that more and more people share less and less until everybody has an equal share of nothing. That, ultimately, is why the USSR collapsed. Even China has had to create capitalist enclaves in order to subsidise its communism.
Socialism, a mixed economy, is an attempt to obtain the best of the aforementioned economic systems while avoiding the bad. Private enterprise is allowed, but the government owns and regulates “strategic sectors” – Eskom, SAA, SABC, the Post Office etc. South Africa has a socialist economy. Enough said?
The more capitalist an economy, the less opportunity for corruption and for exploitation. Where people have freedom of choice, why would they choose bad? This spills over into the political field. Democracy is a capitalist creation, brought about because capitalists do not like being dictated to. Transparency, freedom of discussion etc. are also capitalist. Knowledge is essential to intelligent choice.
When a government knows it can be unseated at any time by intelligent and well-informed voters, the temptation to be corrupt is reduced. When business people tempted by corruption know they will lose their customers to the competition, they tend to stay honest.
Wherever you see corruption, greed and exploitation, you also see this is made possible by government regulations that restrict free market (capitalist) activity. Ironically, those regulations have usually been enacted to “protect” the people from capitalism. — Dave Rankin, Cambridge