Beyond Arthur Brooks' Social-Justice Agenda

Arthur C. Brooks is a real good guy.  He's the one that wrote Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism and found out that it wasn't liberals that cared.  And now, writing in Commentary, he's found out that people that believe in redistribution don't give much to charity.

According to the 1996 General Social Survey, those who strongly agreed that “the government has a responsibility to reduce income inequality” gave away $140 on average to charity. Among those who strongly disagreed, the average gift was $1,637.

But still, he says, conservatives believe in redistribution to the extent of a basic government safety net, and more.



A proper conservative social-justice agenda should include -- well what exactly?  Somebody decided to ask the poor, and this is what the poor wanted:

The real answer is both simple and profound. They need transformation, relief, and opportunity—in that order. On these three pillars, conservatives and advocates for free enterprise can build the basics of the social-justice agenda that America deserves.

So off goes Brooks into an enumeration of the programs that would be needed to do that.



But I'm not so sure.  Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) gave an education speech recently "Making Higher Education Affordable Again." According to Daniel Doherty Rubio starts with a "Student Right to Know Before You Go Act." Oh Good.  That sounds just like the Affordable Care Act that isn't.  Rubio then proposes that employers step in and start to invest in education for their employees with equity deals, etc.  But surely the problem is bigger than that.



In fact I would imagine that any conservative social-justice agenda for the poor must start with zeroing out the middle class entitlements.  Why?  Because otherwise we get right back to where we are today, where the middle class entitlements completely dwarf the goodies going to the poor.



What do we see today?  The poor get shafted when it comes to education. The schools in the "inner city" -- meaning more generally wherever the poor send their kids to school -- are dreadful.  So what's the point of government education?  The middle class will find a way to educate their children.  In fact the latest fad is for home-schooling that does not plan any specific program.  It assumes that middle-class kids will pick up what they need to know as they grow up just as they teach themselves to speak their mother tongue.  So we have an education system that was  originally intended to make the poor literate, and instead it amounts to a middle-class baby-sitting service.



Then there's welfare, which seems to be intended as a middle class jobs program rather than relief for the poor.



It would be nice, e.g., to have government assistance to the poor for retirement income and health care.  But instead we have the monster Social Security Medicare/Medicaid system that's a feast for the special interests, privileges the middle class, and elbows out the poor.  Well-to-do middle-class grandmas make a hobby out of visiting their cardiologists for their heart problems and their neurologists for their Parkinsons problems whenever the mood takes them: meanwhile the poor have to hope to elbow their way in at some government clinic.



It seems to me that Point Zero is to say that, whatever it is -- education, retirement, health care -- the middle class ought to be able to do it and afford it on their own.  If it takes government for the middle class to afford it, as in health care, then the whole thing is screwed up so bad with government programs that we need to start again.



So that's why I can't get too excited about a conservative social-justice agenda that starts tinkering away with the current subsidies and government programs.  I don't believe that we'll end up helping the poor if we do that.



First of all, we've got to get us, the middle class, off the government teat.  Then we can start to talk about a conservative social-justice agenda for the poor.



There's another thing.  Brooks' three ideas, of "transformation, relief, and opportunity," are great.  But let's think about how we can get government out of it.



In transformation, of course, we are talking "personal moral transformation."  That means government must have nothing to do with it, because of the separation of church (meaning any morally oriented organization) and state.



Then with relief we must deal with the basic problem that the poor climbing out of poverty and dependency face the highest marginal tax rates of any Americans, often over 50%.  Every time a poor person works, they face the removal of some benefit.  So if a poor person is receiving government benefits, then that poor person is facing severe fiscal headwinds.  The less the government is handing out relief and the more that the private sector (that means you and me) is stepping in the more the marginal tax problem goes away.



Then there is opportunity.  Writes Brooks:

An opportunity society has two basic building blocks: Universal education to create a base of human capital and an economic system that rewards hard work, merit, innovation, and personal responsibility.

Really?  I'd say that an opportunity society is one that goes out of its way to make it easy to learn and to work.  I'd say it combines education and work.  Right now we have a government education system that doesn't educate and we have extensive workplace regulation and taxation that makes it very difficult for marginal workers to get ahead.  The current system puts barriers in the way of people that want education, and puts lead weights on the feet of people that want to work.



I'd say that what the poor need is child labor.  Yeah!  Poor children need to get into work early and start doing something useful.  Then, when they are still young they might start to see that a bit of education could really help them live a productive and well-paid life.  OK.  Let's provide lots of ways for people to get their Three Rs under their belt.  And they might do that before they have gotten socialized into the dead-end inner city school and before getting socialized into the local gang culture.



Actually, I'd say that -- never mind the poor -- most children, excepting only the professional and creative elite, would thrive with a combined work-and-education system.  It is only the hot-house flowers of the elite that benefit from an academic education, kids with Tiger Moms that are destined to live by the written word, because Mom said so.  But most people learn by doing; they are kinesthetic learners rather than auditory or visual.  Check out Learning Styles at Wikipedia.  So why in the world have we forced everyone into a audio-visual system?  I'll tell you why.  It's because system is domination and the point of today's government education is not to educate but to dominate.



Of course all this is way too scary for policy analysts like the excellent Arthur C. Brooks and good presidential candidates like Marco Rubio.  They have to appear sound and sensible to brain-dead liberal media types.  But you and I are not public figures.  We can afford to think big, think beyond the conventional wisdom, and try to think of a world beyond the failed world of the administrative liberal welfare state.



And we should.

Get a Clue, Panama

The Panama government is in a deadlock over money with GPUC, the Spanish/Italian construction consortium that's building the Panama Canal expansion for $3.1 billion.  They want about $1.6 billion to finish the job.



It's a big deal, because the bigger locks in the expansion will allow canal revenue to increase from the current $1 billion a year to a projected $4 billion a year, according to Dan Molinski.



Panama chose a Spanish/Italian consortium to build the canal expansion for $3.1 billion, and you can see why.  To select mega-construction firm Bechtel would mean letting the Yankee imperialist nose back inside the tent.  Nobody in Panama wants that.



But, according to Bechtel Group Inc. whinings to the US State Department unearthed by Wikileaks, the European consortium bought the job.  The "consortium couldn't even 'pour the concrete' for the accepted $3.1 billion bid," according to a Bechtel memo.



OK chums, but compare $1.6 billion against the $3 billion per year in increased revenue from the new locks, which will allow ships 1,400 ft long by 180 ft wide to use the canal, compared with 1,000 ft by 110 feet at present.  Get a clue; get the expansion finished!



Mind you, the ships using the canal even now are BIG.  You may read about the miserable Panamax limititation, that is hog-tying today's shippers and shipowners.  But even Panamax ships look amazing  and enormous as they transit the the Gatun lake and approach the Gaillard Cut, the narrowest part of the canal, just before the canal hits the locks on the Pacific side of the canal.



Visiting Panama, I can see the problem.  The Panamanian government is a small affair, a thing of luxurious SUVs and comfortable sinecures.  Visit the foreign ministry and its cool central courtyard surrounded by bureaucratic offices.  But the courtyard's dominating feature is a ramp down to the SUV garage, and it seems that high-end SUVs are continuously appearing from and disappearing into the garage.



Panama has inherited the canal as a working enterprise, a cash cow, from the US.  What does it know about big construction, and high risk construction projects?  So you'd expect that the rough tough construction guys would overmatch the SUV-and-sinecure softened Panamanians.



And, of course, the government must deal with the Panamanian people, who don't want some greedy capitalists making money off "their" canal.



Well, I'd say that it's time to finish the canal, get the revenue from those Panamax-plus container ships, and start to work on the infrastructure, which is clearly pretty old and second rate.  Then Panama's glittering billion dollar mile of 40-storey high rises can transform into a trillion dollar mile, and more where that came from.

Microagression: Liberals' latest Double-O Prefix

Remember the good old days of 007?  That Double-O prefix was James Bond's "license to kill."  Har, Har.  That Ian Fleming guy had quite a sense of humor.



But it seems pretty clear that there is nothing that liberals like more than their own self-awarded Double-O prefix.  In their case it's not a license to kill, but a license to accuse anyone they want or racism, sexism, homophobia, hate speech.



And now there's "microaggression."  There's even a page on Wikipedia.  It's a beautiful concept, because it depends entirely on the eye of the victim.



Suppose you are a white student studying for a calculus test and you ask the nearby Asian student for help, writes Alec Torres.

The Asian student agrees to help, but for some reason feels uncomfortable with the way the question was asked.

Yeah.  I mean.  Such a racial stereotype!  Everyone knows that all Asian students are good at math!  There's your microaggression.



And you can see how it is supposed to work.  If you are a liberal darling -- a women, a minority, an LGBTQ or whatever the liberals come up with next week -- then you have a license to take umbrage at anything your little liberal darling heart desires.  And if you are in any kind of big institution you can go whine to the Diversity Office or HR or whatever the hate speech police are called in your neck of the woods.



That's the liberal game, of course.  Or we should say, the Cathedral's game.  The Cathedral gets to define orthodoxy in the liberal secular state church.  And you'd better get with the program, Jenkins, because otherwise we can make life difficult for you.  Because you wouldn't like to be accused of racism, or hate speech or microaggression or -- whisper this one -- heresy!



If it all weren't so sad, it would be funny.  Here we have liberals, enlightened, evolved, tolerant and all the rest of it.  That's what they say.



But the reality is that they are running their own gigantic Holy Office of the Inquisition, to enforce uniformity of thought, to propagate orthodoxy, or politically correct thought.



And just as in the good old days of the Spanish Inquisition, it is usually enough just to show the heretic the instruments of torture.  No actual torture required.



How modern.  How enlightened.  How tolerant.  How evolved.  How disgusting.

How Did We Get Here from There?

Here's a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger story about the republic of France.  Did you know that foreign investment in France has gone down by 77 percent in 2013?  Writes Tom Rogan:

That figure isn’t just bad, it’s unambiguously catastrophic. But the costs of President François Hollande’s failure aren’t simply economic. They’re also societal. Galvanized by popular disenchantment with the establishment, the French far Right hopes to win major victories in forthcoming local elections.

In short, the Fifth Republic isn’t looking so great.

Oh no, not Fascism!

But the question is: how can France be so stupid?  How can it build such a gigantic state and do nothing about it?  What is preventing it from declaring victory over Big Government and getting on with life?  Well, the answer is simple: chaps like Hollande from the grandes écoles.

The problem can't really be the people.  As Joseph Schumpeter wrote in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy back in the 1940s, Democracy is not the rule of the people, for the people clearly cannot rule.  Democracy is the rule of the politicians.

So why don't the politicians Do Something about the mega-state?

Perhaps democracy isn't the rule of the politicians.  Maybe it's the rule of someone else.

What about Andre Codevilla's Ruling Class?

Today's ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters -- speaking the "in" language -- serves as a badge of identity...  America's ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats. It rules uneasily over the majority of Americans not oriented to government.

Good enough.  But that suggests the "New Class" of Milovan Djilas, once an associate of Yugoslavia's Tito and Vice-president of Yugoslavia.  Djilas's New Class was "the privileged ruling class of bureaucrats and Communist Party functionaries" the "nomenclatura" that possessed not just power over the economy but over a nation's politics as well.

People like me are dissatisfied with this analysis because it does not address the idea that, in the aftermath of the death of God, the New Class or Ruling Class also operates as a kind of established secular church.  In our present society moral leadership and moral creativity comes not from divines but from people in the academy.

The trouble with the academy is that we are not talking about the detached moral leadership of medieval philosophers and scribes.  As Julian Benda claimed in The Treason of the Intellectuals in 1927, today's thinkers are not universalists; they have betrayed their calling.  Roger Kimball:

The “treason” or betrayal [Benda] sought to publish concerned the way that intellectuals had lately allowed political commitment to insinuate itself into their understanding of the intellectual vocation as such. Increasingly, Benda claimed, politics was “mingled with their work as artists, as men of learning, as philosophers.” The ideal of disinterestedness, the universality of truth: such guiding principles were contemptuously deployed as masks when they were not jettisoned altogether.

In other words, today's intellectuals are not just ivory-tower thinkers.  They come down from the mountain and use their ideas for political purposes in the street.  They now count political commitment as a virtue, not a conflict of interest.

The late Andrew Breitbart memorably said the "politics really is downstream from culture."  It's no use trying to change politics if you don't change the culture first.  But what if culture is downstream from religion, whether a transcendental religion such as Christianity or a secular religion such as socialism or progressivism?

So the best way to think about any human community is to think first about the people that are setting the agenda for moral discussion.  And in our society, those people are the professors.  They form, in essence, a established secular church.  They formulate correct opinion; they decide what is beyond the pale.  The media takes its cue from the academy: that is what all those experts are doing on your TV.  And the politicians take their cue from the media.  In other words, the "Cathedral."

The Cathedral has two parts: the accredited universities and the established press. The universities formulate public policy. The press guides public opinion. In other words, the universities make decisions, for which the press manufactures consent. It's as simple as a punch in the mouth.

The Cathedral operates as the brain of a broader power structure, the Polygon or Apparat - the permanent civil service. The Apparat is the civil service proper (all nonmilitary officials whose positions are immune to partisan politics, also known as "democracy"), plus all those formally outside government whose goal is to influence or implement public policy - ie, NGOs. (There's a reason NGOs have to remind themselves that they're "non-governmental.")

And further,

Today's Cathedral is not a personality cult. It is not a political party. It is something far more elegant and evolved. It is not even an organization in the conventional, hierarchical sense of the word - it has no Leader, no Central Committee, no nothing. It is a true peer-to-peer network, which makes it extraordinarily resilient. To even understand why it is so unanimous, why Harvard always agrees with Yale which is always on the same page as Berkeley which never picks any sort of a fight with the New York Times, except of course to argue that it is not progressive enough, takes quite a bit of thinking.

The point about the Cathedral is that it not only has political power, through the fact that it pwns the minds of the politicians.  Not only does it have cultural power in that it defines what it is to be enlightened and fashionable.  Its primary power is that it has moral power.  It decides what is acceptable to think and say, i.e., politically correct or what used to be called orthodoxy, and it decides what is "hate speech," i.e., politically incorrect or what used to be called heresy.

Mencius Moldbug has lots of ideas.  Some of them are good, and some not so good.  But his idea of the "Cathedral" magnificently encodes the nature of the modern ruling class and our current moral, cultural and political predicament.

Anyone that wants to get somewhere from here has to start with the fact of the "Cathedral."  Because the Cathedral is what has got us to our present moment.

And don't forget, if you want to change things:  As far as the Cathedral is concerned, the world is working pretty well right now.

Liberals! Stop Blowing Things Up!

What with Obamacare a full-fledged disaster and all, commentators are just about united in describing President Obama as "blowing up the health care system" for the sake of the 30 or 40 million or so "uninsured."

Only now it turns out that the uninsured aren't signing up for health insurance, not so you'd notice.  So, the commentators are now saying: we blew up the health care system -- for what, exactly?

When you think about it, liberals are always blowing things up.  And for what?

One hundred years ago they blew up the credit system and substituted the Federal Reserve System.  How's that been working out, as the dollar has gone from $20 per ounce of gold to the present $1,300 or so?

What about the wonders of Social Security?  Well, according to some researchers nations, a pay-as-you-go government pension scheme results in people that seem to stop having children.  And that's apart from the fact that Social Security blows a hole in the savings rate.

Then there's welfare.  That's blown up the low-income family, to the tune of $20 trillion over the last 50 years.

Then liberals decided they had to provide "affordable housing" to everyone, regardless of ability to pay.  That ended up blowing up the credit system in 2008.

What else?  Well there is always the student loan system that is in the process of blowing up higher education.  There is always the war on drugs that has blown up the inner city.

Right now I'm reading Doctor Zhivago, about how the Bolsheviks blew up Russia.  Really, Russia has never been the same since.  Go back before that and read about how the Jacobins blew up France.  Ditto France.  It has never been the same.

The fact is that the only thing government knows how to do is to kill people and to blow things up.  But very rarely is that necessary in the course of human events.

Let's take two present issues: marijuana and abortion.

The problem is that both of these are moral questions, not criminal questions.  People may disagree about the morality of abortion, but it is not a criminal matter that should be decided by police.  Same with drug use.  It would be far better to conduct these matters as moral issues, and make abortion and drug use shameful rather than illegal.

President Clinton famously tried to square the circle on abortion by making it "safe, legal, and rare."  I'd say that conservatives should trump him by making abortion "safe, legal, and shameful."

Ee should use the same strategy on drug use.  We shouldn't make it illegal.  We should make it déclassé, darling.  And that means women getting together and whispering about the friend who's doing too much alcohol, pot, pain-killers, anxiety drugs -- like, whatever.

That's how we solve social problems: socially.

And then maybe we could stop blowing things up all the time.

The Rape of the German Women

According to the feminists, we are not to construe statements like "Intercourse is the pure, sterile, formal expression of men's contempt for women" from Andrea Dworkin as "all sex is rape."

But, to echo a famous feminist politician.  "What difference at this point does it make?"

The difference to me is that I just can't trust what feminists say about anything because it is so transparently obvious that it is all about the politics.

But I still think about Briseis, the trophy concubine of Achilles and the cause of the dispute between Achilles and Agamemnon on the plains of Ilium before Troy.  What did Briseis think about her father and mother and brother being killed and then becoming the concubine of the very man that killed them?

I got an approach to an answer in the harrowing book A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City by Anonymous.  It describes what a woman has to go through to survive when living at the mercy of Red Army troops that have just battled their way into the capital of Germany in April 1945.

Here is what she does.  After being forcibly raped a few times this 34-year-old journalist comes to a decision:

Damn this to hell! I say it out loud. Then I make up my mind. No question about it.

I have to find a single wolf to keep away the pack.  An officer, as high-ranking as possible, a commandant, a general, whatever I can manage.  After all, what are my brains for, my little knowledge of the enemy's language.

It's the morning of April 28, 1945 and goes out and finds herself an officer.  He brings food and drink every night and everyone in the apartment has a jolly time, partying the night away until it's time to go to bed and for her to get violated.  And when his unit moves on, another officer takes his place.

It was the adult fecund women that took the brunt of the rape.  The women mostly managed to hide the teenaged virgins in attics and false ceiling, and the older women were mostly spared.

These young, sexually experienced women had the skills to manage their conquerors, to avoid gang rape, and to exchange, as far as possible, sex for survival.

It was the young innocents that suffered most psychological damage.  Not knowing how to manage men sexually, they were the ones that ended up being most brutally violated.

Here's the chronology of a conquered city.  You never know.

• By April 20 water and electricity are out.  
• On April 26 Germans are looting an abandoned barracks for food and drink.  
• On April 27 the Russians arrive and the worst rape occurs.  
• On May 2 the city surrenders.  
• On May 9 the Russian sugar daddies leave.  
• On May 11 they get new ration cards and start to venture out to find friends in other neighborhoods.  
• On May 14 there's "a Russian truck full of flour" on her street.  Food is back.
• On May 15 she registers for work.  
• On May 16 she acts as translator for a Russian lieutenant charged to check out all the banks in her neighborhood.  
• On May 19 the water comes back on.  
• On May 22 she gets to work shoveling debris.  
• On May 24 she works stripping factories of everything movable for transport to Russia.  
• On May 25 she starts work washing soldiers' clothing. 
• On May 26 the electricity and the radio come back on. "They say that millions of people -- mostly Jews -- were cremated in the East and that their ashes were used for fertilizer."  
• On June 3 she starts working (for free) for a Hungarian who wants to start a publishing venture.  
• On June 8 the streetcar starts operations (briefly).  
• On June 16 her German pre-war lover turns up.

Her lover Gerd looks at her diary.  What's this abbreviation "Schgd?"

I had to laugh: "Schändung," of course -- rape. He looked at me as if I were out of my mind but said nothing more.

You get a new understanding of violence and human sexuality from the extreme experience of a woman trying to survive in a conquered city during the key month when order has broken down.

And you get to understand what women want.  They want to make the best of the situation.

The System Isn't the Solution

Why is Obamacare such a mess?  Why is the economy barely growing?  Why are the rich making money hand over fist in the stock market while ordinary Americans are struggling to find jobs?

It's the system.  Or rather the faith in system.  Our liberal friends believe that politicians can and should construct a system of health care.  They believe that government can fine-tune the economic system.  They believe that government can intervene in the labor markets to improve the outcomes for workers.

We talk about the free-enterprise system and the market system but really it isn't.  Nobody set up an economic system; it just evolved.  And the modern market system evolved out of the limited markets that obtained during the feudal era.  As people got more freedom from the hierarchical demands of their feudal ties they interacted with each other and developed markets and trading and credit and prosperity.  The folk that did international business, like the Champagne fairs of the Middle Ages developed the bill of exchange that allowed them do transact business without having to pay in coin.  Nobody ordered it; it just evolved.

Of course we are trammeling here into the dangerous waters of Social Darwinism.  It is one thing to say that genes evolve by an unconscious process of natural selection, where the offspring that are blindly better adapted to the environment survive and the others don't.  It is another thing to say that the same process applies to social interactions.

But you can see what happens when the unconscious interactions of market players are banned and a state system of interaction is substituted.  You get the flavor of it in Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago.  As the market interactions of ordinary Russians were made illegal and the "system" failed to provide food and basic necessaries in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution people were forced to exchange goods in a criminal manner in the dark of night.  You exchanged household goods for food.  On the train you leaped off at stations to buy food from peasant women that stood around the back of a shed ready for the train passengers with cooked food wrapped in quilted towels.

Here's Michael Totten driving across Cuba in a bus.

Most of Cuba is more or less flat. I could see off in the distance outside the window because the landscape is not forested. It consists mostly of grass, stray palm trees, sad little agricultural plots, and unused fields gone to the weeds. 

Unused fields gone to the weeds?  There's an infestation of weeds from Angola, and "no one seems to have a clue how to get rid of it."  Now why would this be so?

It's because nothing happens in Cuba outside the "system."  If you are an enterprising soul you can't rub a couple nickels together and buy a little weedkiller or experiment with a bit of poly-culture.  No indeed.   Because nothing moves in Cuba unless it's approved by the "system."

It is telling that the best indictment of "system" has been developed by a leftist, Jürgen Habermas.  The system that you get with any large organization, whether capitalist or governmental or military is inherently dominatory, according to Habermas.  That's because the whole point of a system is to force everyone to work for a single goal, and a system always thinks and acts strategically.  His solution is to balance the strategic domination of system with communicative "Handeln."  Handeln means "action" in German but it also means haggling and negotiation.  When applied to Jews and business people it seems to be a pejorative.

I don't know if Habermas knew what he was proposing, but it seems obvious to me that the combination of system and Handeln is in fact modern capitalism with a minimum of interference by lefties.  There is no doubt that the knowledge and the organization of institutions that make and sell goods and services are enormously powerful and dominatory.  But the market is voluntary; actual transactions are subject to negotiation.  You don't have to buy at Walmart, but many people do, and will continue to do so as long as Walmart offers their Everyday Low Prices.

The huge error at the center of Obamacare is to imagine that you can substitute the complex interaction of system and Handeln with a single bureaucratic systems manual.  There is a category error here.  You can create a government system to e.g., invade the continent of Europe.  There's a single, simple goal that, given the biggest economy in the world, you can achieve if you allocate 40 percent of GDP to the task for a few years.

But health care is not so simple.  It cannot end with the defeated enemies of good health care signing an instrument of unconditional surrender.  It is a constantly changing, constantly adapting thing -- an unconscious organism responding every moment to the great tides of secular change and the little ripples of individual need.

When you want something to respond every moment to every change in human need you don't want to give the job to government.

There is in the human breast the constant yearning for an end to all the struggling, to live in peace and tranquility free from the brutal forces of the world: the Kantian dream of Perpetual Peace.

And so, time after time, humans try to create that dream, by fiat, by saying let it be so.  But the only way that people can seem to imagine such a paradise is by forcing their dream on other people.  And so they transform the dream into a nightmare.

Liberals have been dreaming of a universal system for health care for about a century.  If only we had a centralized system, they have insisted, then all the inadequacies and injustices of the current system would be eliminated.

But our liberal friends are in the middle of being proved disastrously wrong on their health care dream.  And instead of a dream they are creating a nightmare.

They have only themselves to blame.  Economics says that a government system is not the answer.  Political theory says that centralized power is not the answer.  Even lefty sociologist-philosophers say that system is not the answer.  And that is to say nothing about the actual facts of history, from the failure of socialist communes in the 19th century to the failure of communist dictatorships in the 20th century and the dead hand of government bureaucracy everywhere you look around.

The system isn't the solution, liberals.  Why is that so hard for you to understand?