The Many Disguises of Socialism
In his book, Socialism, Ludwig von Mises warns about the threat posed by socialism to peaceful co-existence and to Western civilization. He highlights the “disastrous wars and revolutions, heinous mass murders and frightful catastrophes” that have been caused by socialist policies, a warning that was also sounded by Friedrich von Hayek in The Road to Serfdom.
Mises goes beyond warning about the destructive nature of socialism, going further to draw attention to what he considers “the main issue,” which he describes as “the desperate struggle of lovers of freedom, prosperity and civilization against the rising tide of totalitarian barbarism.” Socialism is destructive in itself, but more than that it fuels the “rising tide of totalitarian barbarism” through its many disguises. There is a persistent belief that socialism is an ideal worth pursuing if we could only work out just the right form that it should take. Part of Mises’s goal in Socialism is to explain the dangers of socialism and help readers to recognize socialism when they see it.
Among its many disguises, socialism cloaks itself in the mantle of ideals that many people value such as the ideals of justice and equality before the law. Speaking of the anthropomorphism that ascribes “justice” to the distribution of wealth that results from market interactions, Hayek in his essay “‘Social’ or Distributive Justice,” warns:
I believe that “social justice” will ultimately be recognized as a will-o’-the-wisp which has lured men to abandon many of the values which in the past have inspired the development of civilization.
Thus, the problem is not simply that many people are beguiled by socialism, but that this causes them to abandon the ideals which civilized societies once held. As Hayek writes in “The Origins and Effects of Our Morals”:
[I]t is no exaggeration to say that the central aim of socialism is to discredit those traditional morals which keep us alive.
The traditional principles of morality to which he refers, such as the concept of honesty, are associated with the cultural values of classical liberalism which are now under threat: freedom of contract, freedom of association, free speech, and the right to private property. By undermining these ideals, socialism undermines the very foundations of civilization.
In the contemporary context, the primary disguise of socialism is the ideal of equality. Thomas Sowell describes the tenets of socialism as “make believe equality”—the idea that we should create laws and policies that ensure we are, in fact, all equal—even though, as Murray Rothbard explains in Egalitarianism as a Revolt against Nature, seeking to make all people, in fact, equal would be a sinister Procrustean goal. As Sowell famously said, “No one is equal to anything. Even the same man is not equal to himself on different days.” Yet the concept of “equality
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