I have been watching what has been happening for the past 100 years with communism and socialism and think that I have finally discovered why people keep being seduced by them. Anyone with a brain and a little honesty can see that communism socialism both have been failures. The problem is "why" people keep turning toward them as the solution? Here is my theory.
All of us humans start out as part of a "family". This is the smallest common social unit and this is where we get our start at learning about social and economic systems. It seems to work and it is small enough that we can understand it. The bigger social system outside of our family unit is much more complex and thus much more difficult to understand. If you are part of a poor family, all the members are poor and if you are part of a rich family, all the members are rich. Since the focus is on the inside of the family unit, everyone seems "equal". If there is a rich family living next door, the poor family never seems to conclude that the richer family became rich at the expense of the poorer family. Why is that? When these family unit people look outside their immediate family and see the same difference between rich and poor, they jump to the conclusion that something about this picture is "not" fair. The above is to show that we all start from some base point and from that base point, we tend to judge all future situations.
Now when people who got their first taste of social systems from family or extended family units start to see things happening in the larger world that are "different" from their family unit, they conclude that the family unit system is the way to make things right. Socialism appeared to work very well in the family unit, so why not for the whole country? Let me give another example before I tackle the above question. Take a church group or a fraternity as a social support group. These units seem to work just as good as family units. There is a strong mutual bond between the members of these groups, but there is a "black" side too. In the case of the church, you have to have the "same" beliefs as the other members. The same is true of fraternities. People who do not fit the mold of these groups are "rejected" and are not part of these groups. People who favor socialism or communism never seem to be concerned about those on the outside. If you are not part of their group think, then there is something wrong with you. Small groups can get away with an attitude of exclusion, but as systems get larger this is not acceptable. Now, what system tends to work better?
It turns out that distributed systems where, as much as possible, the individual makes their own decisions about their lives works better. The strict rules of big social systems have to keep getting more restrict as the group gets larger. Since people start out with family size units as their test model, they have no experience with what happens as the groups get larger and larger. Most recognize that tighter and tighter rules are required to hold the socialism and communism groups together as they get larger and just accept that as a fact of life. Since distributed systems appear to be "no" system, the people who favor socialism reject distributed systems as being out of control. They site situations where one person is richer than another, but never point out how socialism restricts the personal freedom of all its members. If they are the ones who are making up the rules, it is no wonder that they do not see the rules as restrictive, they are just simple logic.
In the case of Obamacare, notice how Obama is saving us from our own stupidity by making our "sub-standard" insurance policies against the law. When he makes the rules for my conduct, he does not see it as a problem, but what happens when I ask him to follow the constitution? He does not want to follow the rules that have served us so well for the past 250 years. See where I am coming from on this?
Size has a lot to do with what kind of system will work best and provide the best "compromise" between rules and freedom. A system that may work for a family, church or fraternity may not work for a larger group or a more diversified group. The USA is one of the largest human groups and one of the most diversified and it seems clear to me that the best system compromise has to tend toward being "distributed". For socialism or communism to work here would require so may restrictive rules that it would, in the end, choke us all to death.
PS------Take this test. What if you got a directive that you had to double the number of members of your church in the next 12 months? What do you think this would do to the character of your church? It would be a church that I don't think you would want to be a part of. This is what happens when you try to scale a successful small socialism system up to a much bigger system.
PS-----Why is it that we have so many people advocating Communism and Socialism and so few who are advocating distributed control systems? It is because most people started out as a member of a small socialized family system and did not recognize the many successful distributed control systems around them. Bees, ants and wolves are examples of successful social systems that operate on distributed control. Capitalism is an example of an economic system that operates on a distributed control system.
