The myth of a democratic socialist society funded by capitalism is finished

Va Small Dead Animals

 

Janet Daley in the UK Telegraph

Whatever the outcome of the American presidential election, one thing is certain: the fighting of it will be the most significant political event of the decade. Last week’s Republican national convention sharpened what had been until then only a vague, inchoate theme: this campaign is going to consist of the debate that all Western democratic countries should be engaging in, but which only the United States has the nerve to undertake. The question that will demand an answer lies at the heart of the economic crisis from which the West seems unable to recover. It is so profoundly threatening to the governing consensus of Britain and Europe as to be virtually unutterable here, so we shall have to rely on the robustness of the US political class to make the running.

What is being challenged is nothing less than the most basic premise of the politics of the centre ground: that you can have free market economics and a democratic socialist welfare system at the same time. The magic formula in which the wealth produced by the market economy is redistributed by the state – from those who produce it to those whom the government believes deserve it – has gone bust. The crash of 2008 exposed a devastating truth that went much deeper than the discovery of a generation of delinquent bankers, or a transitory property bubble. It has become apparent to anyone with a grip on economic reality that free markets simply cannot produce enough wealth to support the sort of universal entitlement programmes which the populations of democratic countries have been led to expect. The fantasy may be sustained for a while by the relentless production of phoney money to fund benefits and job-creation projects, until the economy is turned into a meaningless internal recycling mechanism in the style of the old Soviet Union.

The Left all around the world never really accepts that governments do not create wealth. Let me correct that: Communists countries in which the State is also the economy – it owns everything and runs everything – can create material goods, inefficiently, shoddily and in small quantities often with slave labor. The Soviet Gulag Archipelago was a dual use system: a way of destroying enemies of the State while simultaneously extracting natural resources via slave labor. The “Democratic Socialists” simply spend their patrimony until it’s gone and then take to the streets demanding more.  Riots follow and the end of the story is yet to be written.  We are watching history in the making.