National Proletariat Radio had one of its usual economically-ignorant* interviews yesterday. This time it was an interview with a genuine socialist named Richard Wolff on the new face of socialism (or what I’m calling “neo-socialism,” which has no relation to the old neosocialism). Unlike the old failed socialism of Stalin, Mao, Castro, et al., ne0-socialists don’t want the government to own everything. (Hey, gang, they really are making some progress.) Neo-socialists too have “learned” from the boo-boos of their Marxist predecessors. Here are some excerpts from the interviewer’s summation of Wolff’s current assessment of capitalism and his vision for his workers’ paradise future under neo-socialism. My comments are in brackets.

“You can own your house, your car, even your own business. Take how companies work. In capitalism, large companies [emphasis mine] are typically owned by shareholders, directed by a board, and run by a small number of managers.” [What’s Wolff’s numeric criterion for “large companies”? At what “magic” capitalization number is a company considered “large”? Or, like his economically-ignorant Keynesian counterparts do with the destructive minimum wage, are he and some Stalinesque committee going to come up with some “magic” capitalization number to determine when a company has gone from being “medium” to “large”? The economically-ignorant Wolff is one of many people who never bothers to open his self-righteous eyes to observe that the vast majority of companies in the world are not large companies. We only hear a lot in the mainstream media about large companies because their size tends to have a relatively bigger impact in the marketplace than smaller companies and because of their usual lobbying tactics to get their puppet politicians to push through some regulatory legislation or license to benefit them and/or cut out new competition.] “Most workers simply work in exchange for a paycheck. Under socialism, many companies would be owned by the workers and would function as a cooperative.” [Really, Dick? The last time I looked—and was actually an “exploited” worker at the largest brokerage company in the world, Merrill Lynch—workers at a large company generally are encouraged to own shares in the company and have 401K investment plans which the company itself contributes money into from the company’s profits. When I left Merrill Lynch, this “exploited” worker wasn’t feeling too “exploited” by the Merrill Lynch shares I walked away with in my 401K. Aside of that, many workers now invest in individual stocks and mutual funds, i.e., they own a share in large companies regardless of whether or not they actually work for one of those large companies.]

Wolff himself:

“Groups of workers make the decisions: what to produce, how to produce, where to produce, and what to do with the profits that are generated.” [Uh, Dick, groups of workers already make decisions on what to produce, etc. They’re called managers. Or are the new workers-owners with zero managing skills going to start collectively making business decisions without any knowledge or experience because this would be a “fairer, more democratic” way to run a business (into the ground, I might add)?]

Interviewer again:

“A truly socialist government would instantly provide free [emphasis mine] health care to everyone.” [I guess the doctors’ and nurses’ labor, hospital facilities, medicines, etc. will be donated voluntarily since that’s the only way they can be provided for free. Otherwise, Dick, someone’s paying for them. Is Dick et al. going to fall back on the old Stalinist socialist system where there is no market with prices to determine the relative costs of competing market services and products to discover which are the most cost-efficient and subjectively desirable by the individual consumer? (We all know how “well” that system worked out.) Again, Dick’s neo-socialism sounds to me like it’s going to inevitably turn into a dictatorship of the proletariat vis-à-vis health care if there is no market for a given medical service or product. Dick et al. still ignorantly believe that health care is “special,” i.e., an economic phenomenon that doesn’t need to function under the timeless universal laws of economics.]

Here’s some great news for Prof. Wolff: As David Ramsay Steele pointed out in his excellent book, From Marx to Mises, there are no laws in the United States from preventing workers from starting their own cooperative companies. (My guess is that there are no laws in any countries stopping workers from starting their own cooperative companies. In fact, there is a workers’ cooperative company called Mondragon which has been around for decades.)

So what’s stopping workers from starting their own companies in the United States and elsewhere? NOTHING. You see, the vast majority of businesses from the beginning of time are started by workers. Workers, that is, who save money from their wages (and/or in modern economies found some investors) and take the risk of not having the security of working for an “exploitative” boss in order to go out on their own to start a company (unlike the vast majority of his fellow workers). As a result of these former workers’ saving and daring, new companies are formed that successfully compete in the marketplace to provide goods and services to willing customers—and provide new job opportunities for unemployed workers and already-employed workers who are looking for better job opportunities.

In reality, what Wolff and his greedy socialist pig comrades really want are to be able to forcefully expropriate the current property (i.e., hard-earned successful businesses of these former workers) under the guise of “economic justice” and re-distribute it to the masses of undeserving workers.
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*Notice how the economically-ignorant NPR interviewer introduces the topic by saying that socialism is no big deal because in Europe many countries—such as Spain, Portugal, and Greece—are headed by socialists. You mean the countries that are currently on the verge of economic collapse??? Sure sounds like “no big deal” to me.