Marxism Isn’t Enough

William F. Buckley Jr.’s first book, God and Man at Yale, examined the anti-Christian and anti-capitalist mindset which, even in 1951, was pervasive among the Yale University faculty. The book caused quite a bit of controversy—not because it wasn’t true, but because the radical liberals/socialists/communists in American academia and other institutions (the press, government, etc.) were not prepared to be exposed in a country that was so traditionally-minded.

Today, we’ve come to a place where the radicals no longer mind being exposed. In fact, they live out in the open!

Now, there is nothing wrong with folks living as they please and expressing their opinions. The problem, of course, is that society is so accepting of some of these radical opinions today that we are paying to support them with our tax dollars just about everywhere we turn in academia, government, etc.

One such person espousing a radical economic/political philosophy today is John E. Roemer, Professor of Political Science/Economics, Yale University. The essence of his argument is that pure Marxism, i.e., communism, is not enough to bring equality to the masses. Under Marxism, Roemer says, equality is achieved through the “distribution of output in proportion to the value of labor performed.” Traditionally, the way to achieve this is to eliminate private property and to make all property public so that the government can then distribute profits according to the “value of labor performed.”

However, Roemer says that if we did this today, it would still result in an undesirable distribution of income, because of the unequal distribution of skills caused by our present capitalist system. But after a while, he says, the distribution of skills would start to become more equitable under socialism, as long as under socialism there was included “some kind of equal-opportunity educational system.”

However, even then, Roemer writes, “equality of opportunity may not be enough. Imagine that the distribution of innate talents is such that an equal-opportunity educational system would still engender a great deal of income inequality. Many would still advocate redistributive taxation, justifiable under the Rawlsian construal that the distribution of talents is morally arbitrary.”

So here we come to the bottom line. Marxism just isn’t good enough, because innate differences among individuals (of course, this begs the question of how the distribution of talents came to be in the first place—a discussion for another time) results in unequal distribution of wealth. So even in the most socialist of countries, the government will still have to actively redistribute property/income on a real time basis to bring about true equality.

This post was first published by the Texas Public Policy Foundation