A right is a human capacity to act freely in a non-aggressive way. A decision right is a specific instance of a right, one that involves a decision.
For example, a person may have a right to decide whether to visit or not visit a given doctor, a right to ingest or not ingest a medicine, and a right to buy or not buy health insurance. A doctor may have a right to create or not create a fee schedule, to join or not join a group practice, and to charge different fees or the same fees to different patients for the same service. An insurer may have a right to turn down or accept applicants with various ailments or medical histories.
The large number of decision rights is matched by the large number of decisions that individual persons may be in a position freely and non-aggressively to make.
Socialism can be thought of in a number of ways. From the viewpoint of decision rights, socialism is a system that replaces decision rights in the hands of individuals with decisions in the hands of people with power. Power supplants rights as the source of decisions.
Medicare, Medicare for All, and Single-Payer systems are all socialist. They all take away decision rights. Freely-made and non-aggressive decisions disappear, which mean the decision rights disappear. Decisions are still made but without a basis in rights, freedom and non-aggression. The decisions over numerous medical and health matters are lodged in the hands of people with power, such as administrators, bodies that use majority voting, regulators, politicians, councils, advisory boards, associations, etc.
From the standpoint of decision rights, the essence of socialism is that politics is applauded for replacing free markets and decision rights more or less completely. This applause is generated under various mistaken theories that free markets (or capitalism) have inherent defects that can only be gotten rid of by such institutions of socialism as central planning and worker control of companies and capital. Decision rights are to destroyed under socialism, to be replaced by decisions made by other means than rights.
But socialism’s decisions fail in all respects (see, for example, Salerno): “Simply and starkly put, Mises’s position is that ‘Human cooperation under the system of the social division of labor is possible only in the market economy. Socialism is not a realizable system of society’s economic organization because it lacks any method of economic calculation. … The choice is between capitalism and chaos.'”
Democratic socialism is as adamantly critical of free market decision rights as is Marxian socialism. Both call for extensive central planning and both are bound to fail as Mises showed.
Democracy itself cannot be equated to free markets and decision rights. Democracy determines who is in a government. But it does more and worse. It determines government policies and tips them into larger government, and government that is thereby necessarily more socialist. Democracy expands limited government into unlimited or socialist government, thereby producing failure of the economic system.
According to advocates of limited government, there may be a very, very few areas of decisions in which government, for one reason or another, should have control over the decisions and not private individuals. Put another way, if there is to be limited government, it can only be held within limits if the citizens maintain an ideology that reveres decision rights in all but a tiny minority of cases. Citizens may agree to abrogate rights in these few cases only when broad and identifiable benefits accrue to nearly all of them by doing so. To bring about restraint in the scope of government, there has to be an understanding in the population of LAW to which everyone including the government is held.
For example, a society may decide to abolish private wars, removing them from the arena of decision rights. It may institute public war, in which government decides matters of war. Such a policy would not at all be incompatible with decision rights maintained in the area of private arms.
The ravages of socialism occur when decision rights are abrogated as a matter of acceptable policy, in a quest for creating a good or great society, or an equitable society, or a fair society; as opposed to allowing government power only when the arguments for it are one-sided, which means they must be clear from reason, experience, costs and benefits, morality and justice. Even then, there are going to be grave mistakes made.
Political leaders are far too activist, far too demagogic, far too willing to make slanted arguments, far too willing to use propaganda, and far too willing to go by their biases. The voting system allows and propagates this. The education system is far too biased and superficial in educating enlightened citizens. As a people, we are far from an understanding of government’s highly limited proper boundaries.
We are drenched in socialism without knowing it. We automatically and unthinkingly abrogate decision rights. If there is a “debate” about Medicare for All because several candidates place it before us, we take it for granted that this “democratic” debate justifies whatever the outcome will be. In other words, we no longer respect any kind of LAW and rights. We respect only POWER.
Democrats are now the openly socialist party. Yet how many limited government Republicans can you name? How many hold office and articulate the philosophy of limited government effectively?
4:08 pm on April 2, 2019
