Commentary
Fifty-some years ago, I stood where you stand today. I passionately wanted to help the poor—indeed, to eliminate so far as possible the blight of human poverty. Poverty seemed unnecessarily cruel and morally indefensible in a world where there’s so much affluence. How could the enormous gap between the haves and the have-nots possibly be justified? I was a socialist.
Over the past half-century, my abhorrence of poverty hasn’t waned. However, I quit being a socialist long ago. It wasn’t because my values and goals changed, but because my understanding of how best to achieve the worthy goal of defeating poverty has evolved. Caring about a problem is the easy part. The harder part is to find the best way to solve the problem. With that in mind, I’d like to share with you a few thoughts that every socialist needs to confront. (By “socialist” I mean everyone from a literal, dictionary-definition socialist who wants the government to own all the means of production to people who don’t go that far, but want the government to reorganize production and redistribute wealth to varying extents.)…