SEU vs. VGU

In thinking about the 2016 American presidential election, let's look at a little history. Once upon a time, a young student, your faithful political correspondent, went to a Super Elite University (SEU) to study political science. There he studied rationality with a political philosopher, Professor Irving. Irving had published a book on democracy, which your correspondent thought contained some specious logic and unsupportable conclusions. Specifically, Irving argued that a truly democratic society should vote on all important decisions, and he took this argument to its logical an in my opinion unworkable extreme. So extreme democracy is all well and good, but it presents a number of problems. I structure them as Irving's position being: (1) deceptive, (2) derivative, and (3) deeply flawed. Let's examine each criticism in turn.

First, Irving's argument is deceptive because he isn't really interested in democracy at all. He's really interested in furthering socialism. The left never stops furthering its worldview, and here Irving uses the stalking horse of democracy to further the left's ideological agenda. Let's be clear about what what your correspondent means by socialism:

"From each according to their ability; to each according to their need." 

Note that this dictum is a slight variation on a slogan first used by Louis Blanc in 1851 and then used by Karl Marx in 1875 as your correspondent modernizes the phrase by changing the word 'he' to 'each'. The history of socialism reveals frequent changes to its verbal explanations the same way a flu virus changes its properties to avoid defenses and infect new and healthy hosts. The many "-isms" used to describe socialism — leftism, communism, progressivism, liberalism, Fabianism, etc. — provide empirical evidence of this dynamics. So don't listen to what socialist leftists say because what they say is inherently deceptive. Instead pay attention to what socialists do because what they do is always driven by, "From each according to their ability; to each according to their need."

Second, Irving's argument is derivative because because he follows in that rich tradition of revising and reformulating socialism to come up with a workable form. There is a rich tradition of socialist reformulations with  recent attempts being Hardt and Negri's Empire (2001) and Piketty's Capital In The Twenty-First Century (2014) just to name a couple. University departments are filled with leftists reformulating socialism — especially the elite department's like SEU's — so inevitably, some attempts will be better than other and become popular. So Irving's democracy work, in this correspondent's humble opinion, seemed derivative because he simply took this workable socialist work, replaced the word 'socialism' with 'democracy' on the correct assumption that benighted Americans wouldn't accept socialism but would accept democracy, and then got his PhD from one SEU and took a teaching position another.

Third, Irving's argument is deeply flawed because his socialist reformulation doesn't address the fundamental shortcoming, which was identified by Friedrich von Hayek in The Road to Serfdom (1945). That is, socialism was originally conceived as public ownership of the means of production, which failed because central planning and the committees that operated and controlled the means of production couldn't adequately process the information associated with running a modern economy. So there were always mismatches between what information was required and what was available. Committees just couldn't make those decisions and predictions, so having people vote on key issues also fails because of the limited information available to voters and their limited ability to process that information. 

And there are at least two examples of this. First, the California proposition process is inherently problematic because there are so many important issues on the ballots. The issues are confusing, and the available information may be inaccurate, so voters would end up at the ballot box making important decisions with insufficient information to make those decisions. And television advertising greatly influences voters, which in effect slightly changed the central committee problem. Instead of directly impacting the political-economy, they influence the voters who then  directly impact the political-economy. This slight variation on the socialist theme however does not address Hayek's information processing shortcoming.

I was caught somewhat by surprise by the next example, Great Britain. Irving's ideas on extreme democracy had struck me as so eminently impractical that they were only of theoretical and philosophical interest. However Tony Blair's Labour Party actually implemented such a scheme. They advertised no explicit agenda but sought to respond to the wants and desire of their constituency. The problem is that a constituency can only have so many ideas, which tend to change like the weather. So something like railway bridge maintenance may be ignored for a good long while, which results in Labour not maintain the bridges because the electorate isn't interested in them. Of course the public becomes very concerned after there is a major accident due to deferred maintenance, at which  point it becomes a priority again. A major modern economy like Britain's though has hundreds if not thousands of complex and interrelated systems that need to maintained by knowledgeable professionals, not manipulated for votes by ambitious political entrepreneurs, but that sort of logic is at the core of the leftist, socialist enterprise. 

My rationality term paper for professor Irving concentrated on the final, deeply flawed aspect of this critique. I didn't mean for the paper to be controversial, but I honestly could not as an engineer understand how such a system could possibly work, especially given the well-known critique of Hayek, who had received an Economics Nobel in 1974. I figured Irving must have thought through these issues and that I would learn something through our subsequent discussion about them. Those discussions did reveal something important, but not what I initially thought. Eventually, I had to leave SEU and received my terminal degree at a Very Good University (VGU) instead. More about that process later, but as Donald Trump understands better by the day, elites do not tolerate being challenged. And when you're correct about the issue, that only makes them madder.