Socialism—let's not even go there

This Politically Dissident column originally appeared in The Exponent (University of Alabama in Huntsville), Vol. 34, No. 26 (April 9, 2003). Digitized issue: UAH LOUIS archive. Reproduced here courtesy of that archive.

The level of Soviet socialism in our former commercial republic is frightening.

Republican cheerleaders like to sing jingles of praise to the Gipper for his alleged toppling of the Soviet Union. It would be a real shame to let economic reality spoil a good propaganda opportunity—the economic reality being that the USSR’s collapse was inevitable. Without productive hosts, a guarantee of socialism, hordes of parasites can only survive until they deplete the present stock, but at least in the end they get to wither away in bread lines. Propaganda is bad enough, but outright obliviousness is even worse: progressives criticize Reagan for not adopting measures from the broken-by-design Soviet economy!

In recent local news, CEO Richard Scrushy of Birmingham corporation HealthSouth has, like the unfortunate women in Salem, been burned at the stake for imaginary crimes. Activities such as owning a few cats or selling private property are “consorting with evil” and “insider trading” in the language of witch hunters. Scrushy’s persecution by the government is unjust: in America, we have a little something called the Constitution (“the supreme Law of the Land” in the United States), and it insists that no one shall “be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” Stock is private property, but, aspiring to be good Soviets or maybe just filled with malice and envy, we’ve eroded the evil capitalist notion of the right of private property to pursue the information-egalitarianism fantasy.

Soviet-style regulation is the cause, not the cure, of many of the problems we’ve been seeing in our economy over the past few years. Outrageous executive stock options, for instance, are the product of a tax code that treats options more favorably than cash compensation. Rather than letting markets discipline bad actors, we pass more laws that create more unintended consequences—and then we act shocked when the next scandal arrives on cue.