Numbers, Sourced

The motivation for this piece was this meme graphic on Facebook. The graphic sought to illustrate the "cost" of "socialism" in Europe with some current, some historical, and some essentially fabricated numbers. What I want to do in this piece is highlight the difference between systematic, sourced research that is driven by a stated discipline, and the use of "data" in a context that is intended to be purely emotional.

"Socialism," much like "conservatism," is a word so overused as to have lost all its meaning. There is a deep history to the use of this word in American politics. One branch of that history reaches back to the German intellectual trends that most identify with Karl Marx (who remembers Feuerbach these days?). Another branch derives from a purely political context in how Southern politicians described any government expenditure that used tax dollars to benefit people other than the earners of the money taxed. The latter is how the word is currently referenced, but emotionally connected to the Cold War, the Soviet Union as an enemy, and the authoritarian regimes that propagated Soviet-style economies.

What we see in the data is a situation far more complex than a simplistic meme can capture, even with numbers. Using data to support a point is a non-trivial intellectual task, one that far exceeds what is typically meant by "did my own research." It is a skill anyone can develop with the resources that exist online. Researching a topic also does not entail looking only for data that supports your claim or theory, but looking at all related data and reporting the results along with how you arrived there so anyone can replicate it to check your work or validate the results.

There are many "socialisms" in practice world wide with varying degrees of government participation in the economy. The essential point is that government, as the embodiment of the will of the people, is responsible for optimizing the functions of government to benefit the greatest number of people. Not to reward sloth or slackers, but when an entire society or country is free from certain existential struggles, the quality of life and life chances across all sectors of society improve.

Additionally, it is naive to assume that America does not practice socialism. The United States has a well developed socialist system where the management of financial risk is concerned. Deregulation has freed up many actors in the financial and business sectors to the point where periodically, they become overextended and create market conditions that are unstable. A prime example is the 2008 financial crisis that was brought on by the sub-prime lending market collapse. This paralleled or contributed to the destabilization of the automobile industry resulting in the closure of several plants and the discontinuation of several models of vehicles. If those entities were left to weather the storms of a failing economy on their own, the reset could have resulted in financial destitution that surpassed the Great Depression.

Instead of that direction, the Bush Administration sought to support the banks and automobile industries by making sure they did not fail (TARP) and by putting some guardrails around them to protect the people from these events. They, in effect, underwrote the investments in banking and automobile manufacture thus socializing the risks, but they never captured the profits generated afterward because the reward system remained private. Socializing risk and privatizing profit are not new and by no means the innovation of the Bush Administration. But it is a clear example of the idea.

When we consider the comparisons between so-called "socialist" countries in Europe and the United States, nothing reduces to a simple comparison. All the numbers are nuanced by the locations across the world where they were generated. When we compare based on a systematic standard, there can still be an emotional response, but it might drift from what any given argument wants to make.