The libertarian critique of socialism, or “social democracy,” has usually gone something like this:
The socialist program demands a planned economy. A planned economy can result only from plans. Plans must be made by a group of experts who are not subject to the vagaries of the electoral process. To form and implement their plans, the planner-kings must know everything crucial to the economy. They must know everything significant to their own plans, and be able to predict everything significant that may result from them.
But that is impossible.
This being true, the people who become planners will be those who are either stupid enough to believe that Plans can succeed or cynical enough to care only about the personal power that can be acquired by Planning.
The libertarian critique has a logic that no socialist program ever possessed.
Now we witness the reductio ad absurdum of the socialist idea: Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the International Monetary Fund, chief honcho of the French Socialist Party, and prospective president of France, who was arrested Saturday on charges of trying to force a maid in his $3,000 a night hotel suite to have sex with him.
Suppose that the charges turn out not to be true. Suppose that Strauss-Kahn’s nickname, “the great seducer,” means nothing. Suppose that consensual sex is nobody’s business but one’s own. Suppose all these things — the last of which is certainly true. The $3,000 a night hotel remains a problem.
As a self-chosen representative of socialism, and an anointed planner of the world's economy, Strauss-Kahn has supposedly devoted his life to the good of the people. How, then, $3,000 a night? On what premise must the people of the world pay for that?
I’ll tell you. The premise is that Strauss-Kahn, a product of those inner-circle French schools whose graduates automatically get high government jobs, deserves his perquisites of office, because he is somehow qualified to plan the world's economy.
Is he?
No. And anyone who thinks that he himself is so qualified, and uses that idea to justify his perquisites of office, is likely to present a strange moral profile.
World economic planning is allegedly justified on humanitarian and charitable grounds. Planners, allegedly, exist to help people, especially the deserving poor. Planners are supposed to be performing an altruistic work, the modern form of a religious mission. Yet among these managers of the world economy there is a strange absence of people who live in modest circumstances, practice some kind of religious or ethical discipline, or have anything to do with normal human beings, except when the maid arrives a few minutes early in their $3,000 a night hotel suite.
There are plenty of smart people in this world. Many modest people, skeptical of their own conclusions because they are actually in touch with their fellow citizens and knowledgeable about their lives, are also smart people. Strangely, many of these smart people are socialists, but their ambition is not to become world socialist leaders.
Why?
Because the idea that a small group of people is smart enough and knowledgeable enough to plan the financial lives — in fact, the lives — of six billion people is an idea that no one with any ethical understanding would apply to himself. An ordinary moralist would ask, “Who am I to do that? I don’t know enough. I could never know enough.”
Strauss-Kahn presents little evidence of any such moral or practical reflection. But what he did with his life was predictable, under the modern socialist system. A beneficiary of unmerited advancement, he did his best to “stabilize” the world’s economy by using political means to get the productive countries to support the spendthrift countries. He who wasn't producing anything himself.
I don’t presume that an alcoholic is incapable of becoming a good author. Faulkner did. Hemingway did. And I don’t presume that a “great seducer” is incapable of becoming a great thinker. Plenty of examples argue otherwise. But I do not presume that a drunk will be good at running an airline. I do not presume that a person who lacks discretion even about consensual sex affairs will have enough discretion to plan the future of six billion humble families.
To put this in another way: how did someone as stupid as Dominique Strauss-Kahn become one of the small group of people appointed to oversee the fiscal life of planet earth?
The answer is: the logical necessities of the socialist idea. If you want socialism, you are voting for fools like Dominique Strauss-Kahn. You may not know it, but you are. Otherwise — I’m sorry, you can’t have socialism on any other terms. The fact that Strauss-Kahn rose to the top is only a sign that the rest of the candidates were actually less competent than he.
To conclude: if you want someone running your life, and the life of the world, you can be assured that it will be someone like Dominique Strauss-Kahn — and if not him, then worse.
