Colorado Teachers' Union Condemns Capitalism
CEA goes full socialist; Lindstrom on coercion, socialism, and wealth.
Complete Colorado published my new column, “Colorado teachers’ union goes full socialist.” This triple-length op-ed about a resolution passed by (some) members of the Colorado Education Association offers a lot of background detail along with my commentary. Here is the main resolution as passed:
The CEA believes that capitalism inherently exploits children, public schools, land, labor, and resources. Capitalism is in opposition to fully addressing systemic racism (the school to prison pipeline), climate change, patriarchy (gender and LGBTQ disparities), education inequality, and income inequality.
Here’s part of what the governor had to say about this:
What a bizarre thing. I don’t know what part of the teachers’ union said that. Obviously we all value diversity among our teachers. When I was young, I had a libertarian teacher, a socialist teacher, a Republican, Democrat. It’s great to have that exposure for schools.
But, look, it’s the great economic engine of capitalism that creates the prosperity that funds our schools, right? We would have not only educators, but so many others, living in squalor if we moved toward socialism or Communism in our country. So capitalism keeps teachers’ salaries up, funds our schools, and leads to the great prosperity that we have not just in Colorado, but across the country.
Here’s part of what I say about capitalism:
If we take capitalism to mean roughly the system of mostly private business ownership and free trade that has prevailed through much of the world for the past couple hundred years or so, a quick glance at Our World in Data indicates that capitalism has enabled the human population to expand by roughly eight-fold, life expectancy to roughly double, work hours to fall, poverty to fall, and real wealth to expand dramatically. Mainly, capitalism “exploits” people by enabling a lot more people to live in vastly better conditions.
Read the entire piece.
Bryan Lindstrom on ‘Coercion’
Bryan Lindstrom, a high school social studies teacher, plays a large role in my piece on the CEA because he introduced the anti-capitalism resolution. In my piece I quote a number of his comments on Twitter.
Here I want to discuss some of his other remarks, as they help illustrate how Marx-inspired socialists view coercion.
If we had our life essentials guaranteed (housing, healthcare, food, education, etc.) jobs couldn’t coerce you into a $7.25/hour job under the threat of homelessness and starvation. (March 5, 2022)
The “taxation is theft” crowd also believes that wage labor is a choice. It’s inherently coercive in a society that doesn’t guarantee housing and food. . . . The threat Starvation and homelessness is coercive. (November 2, 2022)
In a society where the alternative to working is homelessness and starvation, all wage labor is coercive in nature and isn’t a “free exchange between employer and employee.” Guaranteeing basic necessities is required to truly make this a non-coercive relationship. (December 13, 2022)
If you think that an economic system that needs the threat of homelessness and starvation in order to work is “the best possible economic system,” you lack imagination. (December 14, 2022)
There’s no voluntary work under capitalism . . . the threat of starvation and homelessness is coercive. (December 20, 2022)
Lindstrom’s basic presumption is that humanity’s natural condition is prosperity, except those damned capitalists suck up the wealth and “coerce” people to work by threatening them with artificial poverty. I will call this the “Garden of Eden Fallacy.”
The reality, as Walter Williams points out, is that “Poverty has been man’s condition throughout his history.” To escape poverty, we need to create the values on which our lives and well-being depend. Capitalism best facilitates such wealth creation.
Another way to state Lindstrom’s position is that someone owes everyone a living, whether or not a person able to work for a living chooses to do so. If someone is able to provide another person with a living, yet chooses not to do so, the first person is “coercing” the other. By implication, if government threatens to lock the first person in a cage as incentive to provide the second person a living, that is not “coercion” but the remedy for it.
Here, then, is Lindstrom’s position clearly stated: When one person agrees to work for another to earn a living, the employer thereby “coerces” the employee. But when some authority threatens violence against someone unless they provide another person with a living for no value in return, that is not coercion. That, in a nutshell, is the meaning of socialism.
Now, I want to clarify a few points.
First, I do think a social safety net, whether provided privately or by government, should help the very-poor generally, even those who could work for a living but just choose not to. But this is not a case of redressing coercion.
Second, it’s silly to pretend that, if a person does not take one particular job, the person thereby is resigned to poverty. According to Marxist dogma, employers tend to drive wages to near-starvation levels. In reality, employers bid up wages, almost always beyond the legally minimum floor and often far beyond it.
Third, there are some tricky problems involving the acquisition and transference of property. Lindstrom is right that property often has been handled unjustly. For more on this topic, see my review of The Individualists and my interview with the book’s co-author Matt Zwolinski.
Continuing this last point: If Person A stole all of Person B’s property, then “offered” Person B a job to make back some portion of that stolen wealth, obviously that would be coercive. Lindstrom wants to say that capitalism generally is like that. But it isn’t. Capitalism properly understood bars theft of property. Whatever injustices we continue to live with, for the most part, governments today in the developed world protect people’s property rights. Generally, a person in poverty can get out of it by holding a steady job, maintaining stable family relationships, and investing wealth and otherwise acting sensibly financially.
Government does quite a few things to hamper a person’s ability to climb out of poverty. Government gums up the labor market, artificially restricts the supply of housing, imposes payroll taxes even on the poorest workers, imposes barriers to starting a new business, and so on. If we properly regard capitalism as the system of trade by mutual consent, we need more capitalism, not less.
Lindstrom on ‘Real Socialism’
Lindstrom perfectly follows the socialist stereotype in declaring socialist systems with bad outcomes not real socialism:
I still know of social studies teachers who teach: Capitalism = democracy = freedom. Communism = tyranny = 100,000,000 dead. (October 3, 2022)
Venezuela isn’t socialist. (October 14, 2022)
So . . . apparently the Union of Soviet Socialist Republicans wasn’t “real socialism” either?
What about Cambodia under the Communist Khmer Rouge?
Image of the Killing Fields of Cambodia: Adam Jones
Lindstrom on Wealth
Lindstrom also makes some peculiar comments about wealth: “Millionaires are closer to homelessness than they are to Jeff Bezos.” (March 4, 2022)
That’s just silly. My family household income is close to the average, and we are far from millionaires. (We would already be millionaires had I been smarter with my finances in my younger years.) Yet our standard of living in almost all respects is comparable to that of Jeff Bezos.
Okay, Bezos has a yacht and can fly anywhere in the world on a private aircraft anytime he likes. He has multiple big houses. Also, Bezos flew to space on a rocket his company built. Fine. Those things are far beyond my means. But . . . I don’t much care about those things. If I had them, they would only marginally improve my quality of life. (If Bezos would like to offer me a trip to space, I would jump at the chance.)
Mostly, Bezos gets around the same way I do, by automobile. I can fly anywhere in the world too, it’s just that I fly in cramped quarters, flying strains my budget, and I face irritating airport conditions (thanks mostly to the TSA’s bullshit security theater). Bezos owns a lot more housing than my family does, but Bezos can use one room at a time, just like I can. We both have well-constructed, temperature-controlled homes with electricity and running water.
My quality of life is about as good as Bezos’s. If I had the chance to trade places with Bezos, I would not do it in a million years. I like my life.
The main difference between Bezos and me is that Bezos has done radically more good in the world. Without him, Amazon would not exist, and my life and the lives of millions of other people would be worse than they now are. Bezos has substantially improved my quality of life. He has created extraordinary wealth, and he deserves his fortune.
A very-poor person has a vastly worse quality of life than I do. That’s a problem. That’s why I advocate policies such as free-market housing and mostly-open boarders. Specifically regarding homelessness, the artificial scarcity of housing caused by bad government policies is a major driver. I also favor some sort of safety net, although I’m still thinking through the best ways to provide that.
By the way, Lindstrom and I agree on some issues. Like me, he is worried about some of the government’s restrictions on housing, and he opposes the drug war. Ideologically, I’m probably closer to Lindstrom than I am to religious conservatives. But he’s wrong about capitalism.