Socialist

Has Socialism been Forgotten?

“There can be no doubt that most socialists here still believe profoundly in the liberal idea of freedom and that they would recoil if they became convinced that the realization of their program would mean the destruction of freedom.” (The Road to Serfdom , Friedrich Hayek)

In 1944, Professor Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, is said to have been one of the main scholarly works to refute the basic tenets of socialism and put classical liberal economics back on the map of many academics and politicians in the West. Today socialism has widely died down and few experiments with it are still ongoing. As the world globalizes, the predominant form of economics, liberalism, overtakes the globe with fierce rapidity risking to leave most of its people, who do not profit from such abrasive capitalism, in destitute conditions. This blog addresses some of the moral issues at hand and makes a recommendation.

It has been said that as purchasing power parity climbs, so does freedom. In this sense, freedom seems to be elastic. Elastic in the sense that one can work 5 extra hours a day to earn more freedom or take a stock-market gamble hoping to receive a big freedom payoff. It has been said that if a cap is put on one’s earning powers or if one is forbidden to engage in market competition, one is imprisoned by the “despotism of physical want” . From this perspective, the restraint becomes apparent and the whole system of socialism is invalidated on moral grounds – it limits freedom as most of humanity currently sees it.

As we gear up for the 2008 Presidential Elections here in the United States, many of us may be overlooking the French Presidential Election, the first round of which is April 22 of this year. Are there things that we can learn from the French elections that could help us here?