Are you a Socialist?

What kind of crazy question is that? Next I'll be asking if you're anti-American! I know we've all been taught to worship the free market, but chances are, despite all the indoctrination, you're still a socialist at heart! A wonderful article at In These Times recounts a recent study performed at UC San Diego:

Behavioral economists at UC San Diego recently conducted a study in which tokens were distributed among experimental subjects, with a few getting a concentrated chunk of the wealth and a majority getting little. They offered the “poor” subjects the opportunity to pay a price to take money away from the rich. The catch was that rather than being redistributed, the money would simply disappear. Economic orthodoxy predicts that few would snap at the chance, since they’d be paying for something that would confer no direct benefit. But they did. In spades.

Though only one data point, it suggests that people have a profound sense of economic fairness, that we are all, more or less, intuitive socialists. As far back as Edmund Burke, conservatives have suspected as much and feared democracy for that very reason. Read James Madison in the Federalist Papers and it’s clear that many of the Constitution’s undemocratic elements were designed to prevent the expropriation of wealth from an outnumbered elite.

In my experience people are generally fair, but there is often an irrational fear of the unscrupulous welfare mother or societal leach. There is this pervasive idea that the poor are really living it up in this country. They just live high on the hog off the rest of us who work. In reality, of course, it is the wealthy who live off the rest of us. It is the wealthy who get the free ride in our society, not the poor.

The title of the article is Who's Afraid of Democracy? Very good reading. Check it out.

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