Here’s an excerpt from George Will’s op-ed in the Washington Post titled “It’s common to praise socialism. It’s rarer to define it,” that starts with this summary of Marxist/socialist philosophy from Karl Marx: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!”
After many subsequent dilutions, today’s watery conceptions of socialism amount to this: Almost everyone will be nice to almost everyone, using money taken from a few. This means having government distribute, according to its conception of equity, the wealth produced by capitalism. This conception is shaped by muscular factions: the elderly, government employees unions, the steel industry, the sugar growers, and so on and on and on. Some wealth is distributed to the poor; most goes to the “neglected” middle class. Some neglect: The political class talks of little else.
Two-thirds of the federal budget (and 14% of gross domestic product) goes to transfer payments, mostly to the non-poor. The U.S. economy’s health-care sector (about 18% of the economy) is larger than the economies of all but three nations and is permeated by government money and mandates. Before the Affordable Care Act was enacted, 40 cents of every health-care dollar was the government’s 40 cents. The sturdy yeomanry who till America’s soil? Last year’s 529-page Agriculture Improvement Act will be administered by the Agriculture Department, which has about one employee for every 20 American farms.
Today’s angrier socialists rail, with specificity and some justification, against today’s “rigged” system of government in the service of the strong. But as the Hoover Institution’s John H. Cochrane (a.k.a. the Grumpy Economist) says, “If the central problem is rent-seeking, abuse of the power of the state, to deliver economic goods to the wealthy and politically powerful, how in the world is more government the answer?”
The “boldness” of today’s explicit and implicit socialists — taxing the “rich” — is a perennial temptation of democracy: inciting the majority to attack an unpopular minority. This is socialism now: From each faction according to its vulnerability, to each faction according to its ability to confiscate.