© Jeenah Moon for The New York Times
The New York Stock Exchange is reflected on a window in New York.
I was a socialist in college. I read magazines like
The Nation and old issues of
The New Masses. I dreamed of being the next Clifford Odets, a lefty playwright who was always trying to raise proletarian class consciousness. If you go on YouTube and search "
David Brooks Milton Friedman," you can see a 22-year-old socialist me debating the great economist. I'm the one with the bushy hair and the giant 1980s glasses that were apparently on loan from the Palomar lunar observatory.
The best version of socialism is defined by Michael Walzer's phrase, "what touches all should be decided by all." The great economic enterprises should be owned by all of us in common. Decisions should be based on what benefits all, not the maximization of profit.
That's not what "democratic socialists" like Bernie Sanders are talking about, but I get why some of their socialist concerns are popular. Why do we have to live with such poverty and inequality? Why can't we put people over profits? What is the best life in the most just society?
Socialism is the most compelling secular religion of all time. It gives you an egalitarian ideal to sacrifice and live for.
My socialist sympathies didn't survive long once I became a journalist.
I quickly noticed that the government officials I was covering were not capable of planning the society they hoped to create. It wasn't because they were bad or stupid. The world is just too complicated.
I came to realize that
capitalism is really good at doing the one thing socialism is really bad at: creating a learning process to help people figure stuff out. If you want to run a rental car company, capitalism has a whole bevy of market and price signals and feedback loops that tell you what kind of cars people want to rent, where to put your locations, how many cars to order. It has a competitive profit-driven process to motivate you to learn and innovate, every single day.
Socialist planned economies — the common ownership of the means of production — interfere with price and other market signals in a million ways. They suppress or eliminate profit motives that drive people to learn and improve.
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