The Socialist Temptation

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0:00:07.6 Trevor Burrus: Welcome to Free Thoughts. I’m Trevor Burrus. Joining today is Iain Murray, vice president for strategy and senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, where he also directs the Center for Economic Freedom. His most recent book is The Socialist Temptation. Welcome to Free Thoughts Iain.

0:00:22.1 Iain Murray: It’s a delight to be with you today Trevor.

0:00:24.7 Trevor Burrus: How is socialism doing right now in the world? I guess in both public opinion and in actualization?

0:00:33.6 Iain Murray: Yeah, it’s an interesting situation right now. A few years ago, back in the 1990s, we assumed that socialism was dead and buried. Socialist parties around the Western world had moved away from the classic Marxist definition of socialism towards something that could be best described as Blairism, a sort of mild social democracy. And then after the financial crisis, it sort of came back, rose from the dead like a vampire, and it’s been doing pretty well ever since. In fact, it’s those social democratic parties across Europe, for example, have been almost wiped out and there’s been a significant resurgence on the socialist left, whether it be a hardcore socialist communist parties, like Die Linke in Germany, or whether it be a sort of new variant, which is very much focused on the environment, like the Greens in a lot of European countries. So socialism is back, and I think we’ve also seen a sort of resurgence in something that could be described as socialist economic thought on the right around the world as well. So this isn’t your grandfather’s socialism, it isn’t really even your father’s socialism, but it’s back in a new form.

0:02:13.3 Trevor Burrus: Clarify that on the question, the coming from the right, what sort of socialist tendencies do we see coming from the right?

0:02:19.8 Iain Murray: Well, this is a sort of socialist economic paradigm that in some ways is socialist, in other ways it’s returned to even pre-​socialist thought, mercantilist thought. It’s something that generally finds a lot of suspicion in the free market, there’s a suspicion that corporations aren’t beneficial to an economy. That they’re out to try and exploit, which is a very Marxist term, exploit the ordinary working man, and we see that in a lot of conservative parties around the world today. We certainly see it in the Republican Party in America, we see it in the Conservative Party in Britain, we see it even in the Liberal Party in Australia. It’s an interesting phenomenon that the Keynesian, if I may use that expression, Keynesian thought, economic thought is really gaining traction in conservative political parties around the world.

0:03:34.3 Trevor Burrus: Well if we’re talking about Keynesianism as some variant of socialism and socialism coming from the left and the right and the Greens, it seems like we should probably step back and see if we can define this term because it’s one of those terms which can be useful but might be overused by people all across the political spectrum to the point that it might not have much meaning, so clarifying our terms would be helpful.

0:03:57.9 Iain Murray: Yeah, that’s an important previse, really. The trouble is that many self-​declared socialists these days don’t actually agree on what socialism is. The term has morphed considerably. There used to be an accepted definition, it had its roots in Marxism. I could go into voluntarious socialism and pre-​Marxist forms of socialism, but generally for about 150 years, the accepted definition of socialism was based around worker’s control of the economy, the commanding heights of the economy, if you will. The means of production, commodity, distribution and exchange, that was what socialism used to mean. Today, it has changed quite a bit, and I think we can trace a lot of this to the influence of the New Left in America, especially in the 1960s and ’70s, and they introduced some new concept into what socialism means. It became a means of addressing power disparities, so socialism became all about identifying those power disparities and trying to rectify them, which is how these days, you have a socialism which is very much concentrated on things like gender and racial power disparities. And so, the economic form of socialism, even as it starts to rise on the conservative right, isn’t nearly as important as it used to be on the left. So this is all part of a realignment, a political realignment in the world away from economic issues, I think.

0:06:07.5 Trevor Burrus: And if the word is used by say, an American right, it’s used quite often to describe many, many, many things that are different from your classic Soviet style socialism and then interestingly, it’s also used by people on the left, sometimes self-​described socialists, like AOC, for example, to describe a bunch of things too, that if you had a healthcare system like Norway it’s socialism, or if you… Sometimes I hear people say that things like police and fire are a form of socialism, so it seems, again, both sides are trying to expand the definition for their own purposes.

0:06:48.3 Iain Murray: I think that’s very much the case. These days, trying to define socialism is a bit like nailing jelly to the wall. But the… Yeah, it’s very interesting that, for instance, on the left, at the same time as somebody like AOC will say. “Well, oh, we just want to be like Norway, we just want to be like Sweden, we just want to have an expanded welfare state and so on.” They are at the same time attacking a capitalism, which countries like Norway and Sweden have accepted as a vital part of their economy. In fact, having a vibrant, in many ways, much less regulated than America’s capitalist sector is what allows the Scandinavian countries to pay for their welfare state. So there’s quite a bit of speaking out of both sides of the mouth when it comes to this sort of definition of socialism.

0:07:47.4 Trevor Burrus: How has America flirted with socialism in the past? You have an interesting discussions of… We have a history, of course, coming out of the Soviet Union, but the concept seems to really take foot with accusations too of socialism during the New Deal initially.

0:08:03.9 Iain Murray: Yeah, you can look at the Progressive Era and think, perhaps that was actually an American variant of socialism, but perhaps a bit more social democratic in the form that we’ve just described. One that accepted capitalism as part of the economy, but looked to use government to make people’s lives better, and the Progressive Era seems to be that sort of variant of socialism. But then when it comes to the New Deal, you see a much more active government. A government that really wants to suppress certain aspects of capitalism, especially when it comes to employment and labor issues, they very much want to… The New Dealers very much want to get capitalism under control in that sense, and it’s no surprise that the opponents of the New Deal would use the socialism word all the time about the New Deal. The New Dealers rejected it, of course, but I think there are arguments on both sides. But again, I think this is part of this American variant of socialism that didn’t follow the way the socialism developed in Europe, whether be on the east side or the west side of the Iron Curtain.

0:09:47.7 Trevor Burrus: And then getting to the British socialism, which are probably my favorite chapters in the book because of your own personal experiences with this, but it is somewhat surprising that it is… I wasn’t, of course, in England at the time, nor have I ever lived in England, but the Churchill loses the election after the war so decidedly even though he apparently I heard was quite popular during the war, but we had this entire switch to some pretty extreme forms of socialism, that I think a lot of people don’t realize what the UK, what Britain was like between about 1948 and about 1980.

0:10:26.4 Iain Murray: Yeah, if you look at even after the First World War, there was a turn to centralization after the First World War. David Lloyd George said. “We must make the country a home fit for the heroes to live in.” and moved the liberal party away from being a classically liberal party to being a much more of a social democratic type party. But then during the second World War, basically everything was nationalized, central planning was the order of the day, and people saw that and thought. “Well, it worked, it beat Hitler, why can’t we use it in peace time?” And so there was very much… Especially amongst army voters, the votes that came in from the army, the armed forces in general, were very much in favor of the Labor Party in that immediate post war election. And the Labor Party was standing on a manifesto, that promised nationalisation of all industry and introduction of central planning processes into the use of private property and things like that, and people voted for it overwhelmingly.

0:11:47.1 Iain Murray: And so the conservative opposition just sort of accepted this and put up a sort of half hearted defense of things like private industry and private property, but going along with the nationalization of most of heavy industry in Britain, transportation industry, ship building, coal mining, extractive industries, all that sort of thing. The Conservative Party accepted that for almost 40 years, and that was the accepted political settlement whereas Britain was a social democratic country and was going to remain so.

0:12:31.3 Trevor Burrus: How far did it go? ‘Cause we don’t think… It’s not like the UK went to Soviet style socialism in that period of time. The NHS, which I want to get to, was of course created at that time, but you talk about the unions and how bad that got. But are unions themselves are form of socialism that we should be concerned with, or maybe the kind of unionization that was practiced at that time when we were growing up.

0:13:00.2 Iain Murray: Yeah, what’s interesting is that… Just a side note on unions, is that union law took very different directions in America and Britain. In America, there was the National Regulations Act, but at the same time there was a Fair Labor Employment Standards Act, and so employment was very heavily regulated from the center. In Britain they basically left that up to the unions. They left the negotiating… Sorry, negotiations over employment contracts were very much left in the union’s hands. And were going side by side with the nationalization of heavy industry, this made the unions extremely powerful. So the National Union of Mineworkers, for instance, became one of the most powerful forces in the country because it could basically turn off the supply of fuel to the power stations, and therefore, cut all the electric power just on a whim. The Auto Workers Union, for instance, could basically stop production of automobiles, they became incredibly powerful. And it was this realization that the unions were running the country because of the presence of nationalized industry, just as much as the government was, that eventually led to a major backlash against the Social Democratic settlement that was so union focused.

0:14:56.6 Trevor Burrus: So we have the idea of kind of different variants of what socialism looks like in different ways. And again, it’s a broad definition but now we get into this question of The Temptation of Socialism, which is the title of your book. It seems to me, I understand why people are tempted by socialism. It’s not strange that people are tempted by it but I don’t know if you have a personal theory. I mean, there’s obviously the, “I like free stuff,” but there’s also the, “I like guarantees of various things, that I may not be guaranteed by other systems.”

0:15:30.3 Iain Murray: Well, one of the thesis of my books is that socialism actually speaks… Plays a very good game, when it comes to appealing to basic American values. When you get down to it there are various theories about this. But one theory that we have Competitive Enterprise Institute, subscribe to, is that there are three basic American values, the value of fairness, the value of freedom, and the value of community. There are technical names for this, but that’s essentially what those values are. And socialism speaks to all three of those, it speaks to fairness, that you won’t be exploited under a socialist system, there will be equity, not just in opportunity, but in outcome. So you are going to be treated fairly. It speaks to freedom, as I say, you’re not going to be exploited, you will be free from the constrictions of a boss, you will be free from the issue of needing health insurance, you will be free to live your life the way you want to live it because the state will guarantee certain basic standards for you.

0:17:06.6 Iain Murray: And then it speaks to community. It says that it will maintain jobs for you in your community, it will ensure that your community continues in the way that it’s set up now, except free from all the bad elements of it. So because it speaks to all three of these values, it can be tempting for basically any American, whichever one of those values the American thinks of as being primary, it can tempt any American as a result of that. And that’s why socialism is so insidious, because when you actually look at what socialism does it actually corrupts all three of those values.

0:17:53.6 Trevor Burrus: Maybe the question, but kind of going back to what it is, because take health care, I understand the socialist temptation of healthcare, especially in the following way that many people getting sick in many different ways are not their fault. There are… If you smoke and things like this, absolutely. But if you get struck by lightning, or hit by a car, or you happen to be the unlucky person who gets a very rare disease, that does not seem fair, and so the idea that we should be taking care of those people… And as far as I can tell, if you go to Norway, or talk to Norwegians, or Finns, or even a bunch of Brits with the NHS, those systems do that. They at least say, “You have cancer. Let’s say it’s no fault of your own, you got hit by a car, we’re not going to leave you without medical care.” So they’re not complete failures. I think the American right often sells these things as total failures. But there are some successes, they do provide health care and they do provide it very broadly.

0:18:57.0 Iain Murray: If you look at the National Health Service, for instance, it is extremely good when it comes to the accident and emergency care. If you get hit by a car or something, break your leg, you will be patched up and you will be patched up quickly, reasonably and quickly and well. Where the National Health Service starts to underperform the American system, and it’s not a binary, where the National Health Service under performs a lot of European systems is in chronic conditions, because there the lack of various signals leads to over provision of some care, under provision of others. My mother, for instance, hurt her hip, was replaced in her ’50s. She’s now well into her ’80s probably needs another… Probably needs a hip replacement so that she can actually regain mobility, but she’s too old for the National Health Service. It’s not viewed as a priority to replace the hips of an almost 90 year old woman.

0:20:21.1 Iain Murray: While the National Health Service it definitely does provide some certain, very good, a certain amount of very, very good care, it also under-​performs in a lot of areas. And if you look at a lot of the European systems that out-​perform both the American system and the most centralised British or Canadian systems, they have a lot of private involvement. There are a lot of private hospitals, a lot of private doctors, a lot of private insurance, not as much as in the US but nevertheless there’s very much a role for the private sector there. And when we think of the health service as binary, either single payer, completely government controlled or complete private provision, then that’s not the right way to look at it. There are a whole number of models out there, most of which have a significant role for the private sector.

0:21:25.1 Trevor Burrus: That seems to be the trade-​off too that, whereas the access is broader for certain people in the NHS that in its shortcomings are chronic care and things that are considered unnecessary like your mother’s hip, or at least not necessary at this point, on the other side, for our health care system, we might be good at those things, but bad at other things. So in terms of the kind of values that people wanna promote with their health care system, and they say “Well, I prefer the access, the broader access to the specialization.” And we could say “Well, we prefer the specialization to the broader access.” Is there one of those that is correct, that we should view as correct? Or should we look at them within this socialist lens that you’re talking about and say no, there’s a fundamental problem with the way it’s done in the NHS and other similar systems?

0:22:13.3 Iain Murray: Well, this… The problem of the NHS gets to a more broader problem of socialist systems, which is that essentially that they empower bureaucrats. And one of the issues with the NHS is the presence of health care bureaucrats. There’ve been many reforms over the years since Margaret Thatcher first attempted to reform the National Health Service. And they’ve all focused on the role of bureaucratization, and some of the most successful reforms de-​power those bureaucrats. But this is a generic’s problem with socialism in this economic socialism, with how it approaches the management of industry, which is that it empowers bureaucrats who are essentially removed from both the production side and the consumption side and have their own incentives to do things the way they find convenient and attractive or ideologically attractive. And as a result, the signals from the production side and the consumption side are muted by the presence of the bureaucrats and that’s the biggest issue with socialism when it comes to the provision of services.

0:23:50.8 Trevor Burrus: One of the things that you have not mentioned or some of the things that you haven’t mentioned yet, so, is… Are actually socialist countries. North Korea being the most prominent, possibly, but we have Venezuela would be another example, just in terms of currently existing we could go back in time, of course, and talk about Mao and Soviet Union and Pol Pot, which you do discuss in the book. But one of the common things that you hear about some place like Venezuela or maybe North Korea is that they’re not really socialism in some sense, totalitarianism, authoritarianism. But from people who are avowed socialist like say, people who write for the the Jacobin thing, they often say “This is not real socialism,” and instead point to Norway, for example. Is it fair to call those systems real socialism?

0:24:38.3 Iain Murray: Oh, actually, well there’s a very interesting phenomenon here that applies in virtually all these cases. And I’m indebted to Christine Nemeth of the Institute of Economic Affairs in London, for identifying this cycle. What happens when a socialist, a new… There’s a revolution or a sweeping election result or whatever, you know, something we’ll probably see in Chile in the very near future, is that the leftist commentators say. “Yes, here, at long last, we have the socialist dawn. There’s going to be a genuine socialist country set up. It’s not gonna make the mistakes of all those other countries in the past. Here it is. Socialism is here at last.”

0:25:23.2 Iain Murray: Then, because of the internal contradictions of socialism, the role of bureaucrats that we’ve just discussed, other things, eventually the wheels start to come off. And at that point, those same commentators say. “It’s not moving to making excuses,” saying. “Yeah, oh, it’s the fault of the CIA, or so internal saboteurs or wreckers,” is a common phrase. And there’ll be a lot of what-​aboutery. Yes, so the country’s going to hell in a hand basket, but have you looked at America recently? That sort of thing. And then finally when the wheels have come off and in the worst cases, there may be millions dead, that’s when those same commentators who said “Socialism is about to arrive,” they turn around and say. “No, that wasn’t real socialism.” And so this is identifiable cycle that happens, which essentially gives socialism a get-​out-​of-​jail free card. Because any socialism that isn’t perfect is written off as not real socialism.

0:26:34.7 Trevor Burrus: Well, in their defense, though, they will usually say something like democratic socialism. I forget his name who wrote the Socialist Manifesto who writes, I think, for Jacobin. That’s a big part of what he’s talking about. So from their standpoint… Creeping authoritarianism puts out totalitarianism. If he pull away from the rule of the people, where they get a voice and in this stuff via labor unions and voting and communitarian type of stuff and you give it all to some dictator, that’s not what they’ve been asking for. They didn’t ask for Pol Pot. Marx didn’t ask for Pol Pot, Marx didn’t ask for Stalin in his writings and socialists who write today, they’re not asking for those people. So, when they say. “That’s not what I was asking for,” that’s true. They weren’t asking for those people.

0:27:22.9 Iain Murray: Yeah, but this is the internal… One of those internal contradictions of socialism that I was talking about. And when you think about democratic control over things, it just takes a moment’s thought to realize that the people can’t control all aspects of the economy. So they have to delegate. They delegate that to the bureaucrats, they delegate that to commissars, they delegate it to apparatchiks. These people have their own agendas. The Economics School of Public Choice, tells us that these are people too, and that they will engage in things like empire building and so on. And as a result, the idea of democratic control of any industry or any service, ceases to be democratic control and becomes bureaucratic control at best. And as a result, socialism inevitably, and socialists are good, really enjoyed the term inevitable. Socialism inevitably reduces to rule by bureaucrat and ceases to be democratic. And so if you’re saying… If you as a socialist are saying. “Well, I don’t know, I believe in democratic control, not bureaucratic control, not… And certainly not dictators,” then you’re not taking into account what the inevitable ramifications are of an attempt to put a democratic control over the industry or service.

0:29:05.6 Trevor Burrus: Do we have to accept a similar critique as free market Champions of capitalism? Because we’re often saying, “Well, that’s not real capitalism,” we say, “that’s crony capitalism.” Look at all these industries and how they’re… They depend upon subsidies or some type of protectionism. And we have very few things that we can point to. Hong Kong is one of our favorite. Look at Hong Kong, look at the growth of Hong Kong. Then we say, “Well, this isn’t real capitalism, real capitalism hasn’t been tried or has not been tried,” and then we have to accept the fact that maybe the tendency of capitalist systems is to produce a kind of corruption in the form of crony capitalism, because of the same type of drives that bureaucrats in the socialist system have, which is they’re trying secure their privileges, secure the protection of their industries and the protection of their livelihoods at the expense of others. And that seems to be empirically the tendency of capitalist systems too.

0:30:00.1 Iain Murray: Yeah, I think that’s right to a certain extent too. No system is perfect and humanity is fallible. And those are great insights from free market economists. But if you look at, for instance, the alleged returns to an industry from cronyism or from protectionism, then you… And you look at how much lobbying they do for those protections, you have to wonder why isn’t there more of it? For all the faults of the current American capitalism, it’s not as cronyist or as protectionist as you think it would be, if cronyism and protectionism actually provided the returns that the people say they do. So I think that there is… We often think about the vices of capitalism and those, the ones you’ve described are certainly there. Then I think that there’s also room for a theory of capitalist virtue which is not engaging in these cronyism. And it’s actually going out and listening to market signals and providing value to people. Yeah, there’s a lot more of that goes on there than you think there would be if cronyism was actually a good way of lining your pockets. So I think we should be a bit more appreciative of the virtue of capitalists even though we rightly condemn their vices.

0:31:41.8 Trevor Burrus: One moment, you mentioned briefly but I think it’s important in this story is, greens or environmentalism, now that’s not necessarily in any way socialist, but there seems to be a connection, at least in practice, between many people who are to self-​describe as green or as an environmentalist and believing in socialist type of policies. Why is there that connection, even if it’s not necessary? And then follow-​up to that is… And how dangerous is this sort of environmentalist movement from the socialist temptation standpoint?

0:32:17.8 Iain Murray: Well, I think one of the temptations of socialism that we’ve alluded to but haven’t really discussed yet, is that what Hayek called the Fatal Conceit. The idea that you can actually, centrally plan an economy for the best results. And fatal conceit seems to be fundamental to modern versions of environmentalism. There is a belief that there’s a right level of emissions. There’s a belief that there’s a… That you can control industry so that you can control pollution.

0:33:02.4 Iain Murray: The current version of environmentalism, which is, as you say, isn’t the necessarily the only one, the free market environmentalism has a long and storied pedigree, even if it isn’t particularly prominent amongst self-​described environmentalists these days. But there is this belief that you can actually centrally plan not just a country’s economy, and not just a local economy, but the global economy, to optimize for the planet. And that’s a very seductive temptation, that a lot of countries, and again, we talked about socialism in the right. The Conservative Party in Great Britain has taken on board environmentalism as part of its very fiber, it seems at the moment. It has some of the most ambitious environmental planning goals of any country and that’s the conservative party there. So this idea that you can control the emissions, control the production of industry so that the environment is protected, is a very seductive one. And it’s certainly the dominant mode of environmentalism at the moment.

0:34:36.8 Trevor Burrus: But you’re not against people voting for certain things for environmental values that they hold, that they prefer more green space over less green space, or they prefer to protect endangered species versus to not protect endangered species. I mean, environmental preferences are fine, they don’t have to be destructive in the way that you’ve described.

0:34:57.5 Iain Murray: Oh, that’s very much the case. In fact, one of the things that I point to regularly in my writings on the environment, is the presence of something called the Environmental Kuznets Curve, which is the idea that as economies develop, they initially get… They go from a state of pristine nature, as it were. But they start to use extractive industries, they start to produce emissions and pollution tends to get dumped wherever it’s produced, and so the environment degrades as an economy starts to grow. But then it reaches a point where environmental protection itself becomes a desired good. And at that point, people start paying for it. They don’t mind paying extra so that the pollution is not dumped in a nearby river. They don’t mind paying extra so that people don’t live in shanty towns that are essentially built on huge piles of trash. People actually value the environment that way. And so, as an economy goes over this sort of tipping point on the curve, the economy both improves and environmental protection improves. And that’s something we see time and again in developed economies, that the richer you are, the cleaner you are. It’s important to bear in mind that this happens all over the… Has happened all over the developed world, and will almost certainly happen in the developing world as well.

0:36:57.0 Trevor Burrus: Is socialism really that big of concern in America? We’ve talked about the places where these parties are large and they’re growing, and you mentioned that even in the conservative party in Britain, they’re very, very pro-​environment, different regulations and, of course, they’re very committed and self-​described socialist parties throughout Europe and in the OECD world. But here, we could always point to the favorite bugaboo of the American rights, someone like AOC, who at different times has described herself as a socialist or a democratic socialist, and some of the others in Congress. But this is a pretty small faction who are themselves pushed aside by their own party. Nancy Pelosi does not want AOC controlling the messaging of the Democrat Party. So is it really that big of a concern?

0:37:43.6 Iain Murray: Well, I think if you look at the popularity of socialism amongst younger people, then you have to think, is this just a manifestation of like the quotation, I think that was, that’s often attributed to Winston Churchill, which is, “If you’re not a communist by the time you’re 20, there’s something wrong with your heart. If you’re still a communist by the time you’re 30, there’s something wrong with your head.” It could be that. Or it may be that socialism is actually viewed as an alternative, a viable alternative to a failed American capitalist system. And if you look at the way the polls worked when it comes to socialism, socialism began to really reappear, especially amongst young people, after the financial crisis. And the idea that there’s something seriously wrong with capitalism started to spread and people started looking for an alternative. Yeah, so I think that if maybe that socialism is viewed as an attractive alternative by enough young people for us… And these days, the people who were 20 at the time of the financial crisis are now in their 30s and seem to be, according to the polls, seem to be still attracted to it just as much. So I think that the sort of ground swell that socialism is something we should look at is still there. It’s certainly not a majority amongst the American people, but I think people like AOC are sort of the vanguard, as it were, of a wing of politics that view socialism as a viable alternative.

0:39:37.1 Trevor Burrus: How should we approach this differently then as champions of free markets and trade-​tested betterment, we need to communicate possibly in some way to people who are flirting with socialism. Sometimes I’ve… It’s always one of the problems is that, the people who actually lived under oppressive socialist regimes are dying off, people who actually experienced the Soviet union or the Eastern block. So now we need to relearn these lessons, but how do we help these lessons get learned?

0:40:11.5 Iain Murray: Well, one of the great things about America traditionally is that we’ve always been a country that’s welcoming to immigrants like myself and a lot of those immigrants come from social countries that have experimented with socialism. And if you look at the opinions of socialism amongst recent immigrants, they tend to be very down on it, much less in favor of socialism than their white or African American peers. So although people like myself who lived under Western socialism are getting a bit long in the tooth, there are lots of people who have actually lived under socialism and know its limitations in America today.

0:41:03.0 Iain Murray: So I think more of those voices should be heard. It should be heard as we try to look at what the actual effects of socialism are. And I think we can also do a much better job of speaking to the underlying values. One of the biggest problems with the free market movement in America, the pro-​capitalist movement in America, is that we talk about economic statistics a lot. We’ll talk about trade balances and GDP and trade balances don’t matter, and things like that. But we’re not actually talking the language of values. And as I said earlier, that socialism does a very good job of talking the language of values, and what we really need is to promote the free market in terms of those values as well, pointing out that socialism actually corrupts those values. That it’s not democratic, it’s bureaucratic, and that ends up being unfair to everyone. It won’t promote your freedom. It will reduce your freedom. And through the use of various central governments planning processes, it will destroy your community. So there are things that we can do to make… To talk that language of values in trying to communicate about socialism that we’re just not doing a particularly good job with it at the moment.

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0:42:53.1 Speaker 3: Thanks for listening. If you enjoy Free Thoughts, make sure to rate and review us in Apple Podcasts or in your favorite podcast app. Free Thoughts is produced by Landry Ayres. If you’d like to learn more about libertarianism, visit us on the web at lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org.