In Part 1 I of the health care discussion I wrote: “Churchill considered socialism—a far milder form than we know today—incompatible with human liberty, and sought a way of ameliorating the complaints of the poor (or relatively poor) without confiscating the wealth of those who produce it.” A reader disagrees…

The social­ism that Churchill railed against was a far stronger ver­sion, with very high taxes, and things like state con­trolled indus­try. He would have regarded the Democ­rats as “center-right” com­pared to the social­ist par­ties of the 20th cen­tury, with their com­mit­ments to nation­alised indus­try and very high tax rates.

The British state, like the Amer­i­can, is much larger today in rela­tion to the pri­vate sec­tor than it was when Churchill retired. At the high tide of Labour social­ism, 1951, 20% of Britain’s econ­omy had been nationalized. Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment is spend­ing ever-increasing shares of GDP, the national debt equal to or exceed­ing GDP. Taxes are higher now than they were when Churchill retired. Is there any phase of modern daily life where we are not reminded of the pervasive influences of government?

Socialism redefined

Nei­ther Britain nor America practices pure social­ism, in the sense of gov­ern­ment own­ing all means of pro­duc­tion, which is com­mon to com­mu­nist coun­tries. Even there it’s not com­plete. China calls its sys­tem “mar­ket social­ism,” what­ever that is. Creep­ing cap­i­tal­ism, per­haps?k

The West’s prob­lem is creep­ing social­ism, which need not involve nationalized industries. It does not mat­ter who holds the title to a prop­erty, like an insur­ance com­pany; it mat­ters who gets to direct it.

Churchill argued that social­ism is like Nazism and com­mu­nism in being mate­ri­al­ist and dehu­man­iz­ing, explains Larry Arnn:

In oper­a­tion, modern socialism is more mod­er­ate, at first. But it builds a bureau­cracy that becomes a weight in soci­ety; it becomes a new form of aris­toc­racy, Churchill says explic­itly, worse than the old form.

A question Churchill had to face in his time was: if you are for the social safety net, includ­ing health care, how do you pre­vent that from build­ing a soci­ety of “drones” (his word), ulti­mately dom­i­nated by a bureau­cratic elite? The safety net is good, nec­es­sary, and can be made to work. but social­ism destroys its work­ing because it sets out, in prin­ci­ple, to destroy and super­sede it.

* * *

Churchill answered that ques­tion in many ways: the social safety net is sim­ple jus­tice; with­out it the “peo­ple will set their faces like flint against the money power.”  A con­sti­tu­tion should pro­tect the peo­ple against this ten­dency. A con­sti­tu­tional arrange­ment begins with the prin­ci­ples of indi­vid­ual rights includ­ing prop­erty rights, self-responsibility, the sov­er­eignty of the cit­i­zen, and the com­pe­tence of the cit­i­zen to man­age his own needs (except in extra­or­di­nary cir­cum­stances) and the gov­er­nance of his country.

One may look at today’s bureau­cratic gov­ern­ment in light of these cri­te­ria. What is its prin­ci­ple? Does it in fact oper­ate to waste resources and to over­come the inde­pen­dence and sov­er­eignty of the peo­ple?

Churchill is not here to weigh these facts and make the judg­ments. We are. And we can learn from his criteria.

Statistics

I thank Kyle Murnen of Hillsdale College for the following information:

According to the UK Economic and Social Research Center the total managed expenditure (aggregate public spending derived from public accounts) was about 37% of GDP in 1955.

According to the 2012 Treasury Report, total managed expenditure in the UK was 45.5% of GDP in 2011-2012.  Another source reports that  pubic spending was 34.95% of GDP in 1955 and 42.7% of GDP in 2013.  The numbers are a bit different, but both show an 8% growth of government spending in relation to GDP since Churchill retired.