The conservative case for Socialism

We could start off from the idea that it’s important to preserve moral values, and community and good things. 

Which means that when we see things getting corrupted by money, a conservative who wants to preserve good things, would want to fix that, to conserve things and stop society from falling into moral decay and corruption.

Now obviously, a conservative won’t want to just jump right ahead into some kind of anarchy, they’ll want to advance cautiously, and to have some kind of order, so naturally, they’d want to have things planned out. Not just one central plan, but backup plans and failsafes too. Can’t be too careful.

Obviously, as the conservative likes the idea of people having families, they’d want to ensure that everyone is paid a decent living wage, enough to afford a family and kids that are not starving.

They have a strong sense of personal responsibility, so it only makes sense that they’d want to avoid delegating power to some owner, and to instead have workers own the means of production.
If they saw a starving kid, they’d feel personally responsible for feeding the child, just like how they’d feel personally responsible for being a good Samaritan and helping the homeless.

As they often have a free market mentality, they’d probably be horrified by the idea of government granted monopolies over insulin and things like that, or by privately controlled supermarkets, they’d want to have public marketplaces where small stands can compete against each other. But as they can be quite strict, and sometimes get a bit of a “law and order” mindset, they’d want the markets to be regulated to ensure that everything is fair, that there is no fraud, no cheating, no scamming, no tainted product, and that it’s all only ever win-win.

They’d probably talk about the tragedy of the commons, and how bad it is when people are simply allowed to simply drain aquifers or pollute the air, and demand that these type of resources be well managed and conserved, treated as a common good.

As they are in favor of freedom, they’d be totally opposed to any violent repression, threats of eviction, mass incarceration or things like that, they be horrified at the idea of putting masses of people behind bars. They’d want healthcare, rehabilitation, integration, education, humane policies that liberate people from addictions and ignorance.

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Overall, a lot of what socialism is about, is perfectly compatible with the values that conservatives claim to hold, in fact, in most cases, socialism is much better adapted to such conservative values than capitalism.

The War on Drugs

25 years ago, Portugal had an opioid epidemic.

Instead of an ineffective, costly, cruel war on drug users, they treated addiction as an illness.

Selling heroin stayed illegal. Owning a small amount for personal use didn't.

Instead of hunting addicts down and punishing them — prison, forcing them into hiding, criminalizing them — they told people: ok, we see you have a problem, we want to help. Come get medical services.

Clean needles if needed. Safe spaces to inject if needed. Psychological support. Methadone to manage withdrawal.

Addicts weren't threatened into stopping. They were helped. Given options.

It didn't fix everything overnight — not every addict was ready to quit. But every time one was ready, the help was there. And the ones who weren't ready yet got to watch their friends get better.

It worked. Overdoses down. HIV cases down. People locked up for drug possession, down. Money spent on enforcement, down. The dealers who were getting rich off heroin lost their customers.

Portugal sees a few dozen overdose deaths a year. The US sees 70,000–80,000. The US has 30 times Portugal's population — and somewhere around a thousand to two thousand times the overdose deaths.

The US approach — "I'll lock you up with people doing hard time for years, that'll teach you a lesson" — works exceptionally badly. The US has one of the highest incarceration rates on the planet, and among the highest drug death rates too. Also among the highest homicide rates in the wealthy world — some states run 10x what you'd see in Europe.

Not much has changed. The war on drug users is a bad idea. You can't solve a problem by criminalizing the symptom. Reality has disproven that.

Some people genuinely believe the war on drugs can work. But plenty of the people pushing it already know it doesn't reduce drug use. That's not actually what they care about.

Some have said outright that it functioned as a way to go after political opponents — criminalize people, and it disrupts their communities, vilifies them, keeps the cycle going.

Nearly 2 million people are behind bars in the US. The 13th Amendment still allows forced labor for anyone convicted of a crime, and private companies profit from it.

Get a felony — for something like drug possession, or falling behind on court debt — and in a lot of states you can lose your right to vote too. Nobody tracks the full national number. Millions of people, disproportionately Black men.

Cocaine used by someone in finance gets treated leniently. Crack, more common in poor Black neighborhoods, gets you years. Police don't do stop-and-frisk on executives who are high all day. They target poor neighborhoods — drug charges are just a convenient excuse to harass people.

That it destroys communities isn't a side effect. For a lot of people behind this, it's the point.

A lot of people are happy to spend unlimited money on incarceration and enforcement, but not on healthcare — because the people who'd benefit are poor and mostly minorities. It's the same instinct behind ICE detention and migrant camps: money appears fast when the goal is locking people up, not helping them.

One senator has openly said the US has an "under-incarceration problem." He represents a Southern state whose prison system grew directly out of the plantation economy — forced labor included.

Calling it a war on drugs is a bit dishonest. It's closer to a war on Black men.

Meanwhile — a veteran can sleep on the street and there's no money to help. Get charged with something nonviolent, like drug possession or an unpaid debt, and suddenly the state can find $50,000–$100,000 a year to keep you locked up.

Stay a struggling, law-abiding citizen: $0 in support. Get convicted of something nonviolent: six figures a year, spent on you — just not to help you.

If that much money can be found every year to "teach people a lesson," why does anyone need to go into debt for college?

It's a rigged system. Not really designed to solve the problems it claims to solve — designed to sustain them, and to keep a specific group of people down while doing it. Prohibition 2.0, aimed at whoever's convenient this time.

Is Post Scarcity Possible ?

 I’m a millionaire. Scarcity is no longer an issue for me.

Look at this factory, where robots are building stuff, with minimal need for human intervention.

And look at this beautiful warmed greenhouse, that enables salad production even in winter.

All this technological improvement will improve our lives!

Surely, we cannot be far away from a world in which scarcity no longer exists, right?

Actually, I’m a millionaire in Zimbabwe dollars.

Which is kind of meaningless.

I cant buy anything with it.

How can I still be poor, even though I’m a millionaire? It makes no sense, right?

But look at this:

Having a million dollars is completely useless if everyone also has a million dollars. It’s even more useless when others have trillions of dollars.

Or when they have even more than that.

In a market economy, scarcity is what makes things valuable. Having a lot of money is meaningless if money is not scarce.

Even something that is inherently useful, like air, which every human requires to survive, is not considered valuable, because it is not scarce.

But if there is a lot of pollution? And fresh air becomes scarce?

Then it becomes valuable!

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To live a good life, you need things that are actually useful.

You need air to breath, water to drink, you need food, shelter, healthcare, education, etc.

Ideally, it means that those things should not be scarce.

But to get rich in a market economy, you need to have things that others dont have. You need scarcity. Capitalism, and the market economy rely on scarcity.

If you want to use something directly, it doesn’t matter at all how much others have.

If I have a pizza, and I’m going to eat it, well you can have a pizza too. Or twenty. Or a hundred. What do I care. My pizza is not going to be any less tasty because of it.

I’m still going to enjoy it, it’s going to be delicious, and it will feed me all the same.

I have 0 reason to try and prevent you from making your own pizza. I can actually teach you how to make pizza if you want, it’s really easy.

But in a market economy? When things are intended not for use, but for trade?

Then scarcity is important. Then preventing others from having the same stuff you have is what makes it valuable.

Why do you think counterfeiting money is illegal?

Why do you think inflation happens?

Because when there is more money, then money becomes less valuable.

We could all be billionaires, and we would not have taken a single step towards resolving scarcity.

Scarcity is a social issue.

This is how we end up with the current dystopian society.

Where automation is not actually improving our lives, but is seen as taking away people’s jobs. Making the remaining jobs more valuable.

Where automation does not lead to everyone working less, but instead leads to some people being unemployed, and desperate to have a chance to work.

Where it does not lead to everyone having more, but instead drives wages down.

Where people having more money just makes prices go up.

We end up in a situation where there are warm houses to grow salads, but where human beings freeze to death on the streets without being able to access housing.

Not because we dont have the technical capacity to provide everyone with housing, but because making sure that some dont have access to housing is how rents are kept so damn high.

If everyone had a home of their own, or access to government provided housing, then the property owners would not be able to force everyone to pay insane rents.

Housing would still be very valuable. Because it protects us from harsh weather, because we need it for survival.

But it would not have such a high price, it would not have a high exchange value, billionaires would not be able to force people to work so much just for a roof over their head.

In a market system, based on supply and demand, having more demand than supply is what keeps prices high.

A post scarcity society is attainable. It just means a post capitalist society.

Did you ever notice that there are tons of ads trying to make people want useless stuff?

That’s another way to create scarcity. Instead of restricting supply, increase demand.

Advertising would have you believe that there is no limit to how much material stuff people can desire. And puts a lot of effort into making that happen.

Trillions of dollars go towards advertising, towards convincing people that they want or even that they NEED whatever product it is that they are trying to make a profit on.

But in fact, there are a lot of studies showing that past a certain level where you no longer need to worry about survival, extra money does not actually make people happier.

Contrary to what ads pretend, being stressed your whole life running after money and trying to buy ever more stuff is not going to make you happy.

There are however a lot of things, like friendships, which are completely free, and will bring a lot of happiness to your life.

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A post scarcity society is not a society where everyone has infinite stuff.

A post scarcity society is one where everyone has enough to cover their needs for survival, and has the ability to have free time, to have friends, to engage in arts, in sports, games, etc.

Where people can focus on being happy and healthy.

This stressful, depression inducing rat-race focused on just increasing GDP, creating more stuff, making people work more, pay more, increasing profits, destroying the environment, etc, this is leading us nowhere.

We have the technical capacity for a post scarcity society.

What we need is social change.

A different type of economy. One which focuses on maximizing health and happiness. Not one that focuses on creating more junk.

Current GDP and Economy

The first thing to understand is that economic activity is just activity, and that just looking busy, doing more stuff, isn’t a useful goal in and of itself.

More people doing more stuff, moving things around, moving money around, stressing out, sending emails back and forth, hurrying from one place to another, having meetings, … Well yes, ok, it’s economic growth, sure. But… Is it achieving anything useful?

Sometimes. 
But often, a lot of that energy is wasted.

Imagine some people who don’t smoke. 
And they want to grow their economy. So they start working more, to plant tobacco, and to harvest and process it, and to transport it, and to advertise it, and to sell it. 
They end up with a growing consumption, growing sales, jobs, etc. 
Then they hire propaganda specialists and think tanks to cast doubt on the link between smoking and cancer, and they hire more advertisers to push it even more aggressively, promoting smoking as something healthy. 
And they also have to hire more doctors and nurses and build more hospitals to treat all the sick people dying of cancer. 
And they can have some random grifter writing ineffective self help books on how to stop smoking. 
And pharmacies selling nicotine patches.

Now it’s very obvious that the tobacco industry grows the overall economy. 
People end up working more, more taxes are paid, more profits are made, more people are sick, more nicotine patches are sold, etc. 
There is a lot of economic activity going on, people are doing stuff, money is changing hands, surgeons get paid to help lung cancer victims.

But… it’s not actually improving society.

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Some economic activity is useful. 
For example, if you want a house, the house needs to be built, so what the workers are doing is useful.

If you want to eat food, farmers need to grow food. 
So you can’t really have no economic activity at all.

But at some point, you hit diminishing returns. 
Working one job, so that you can afford to put food on the table, sure, that makes sense.

But if you already have a second job, so that you can fund some kind of sugar/soda/junk food addiction, where the farmers grow extra corn syrup, more than needed, and there are teams of people working to advertise the junk food to you as dishonestly as possible, and you consume more than needed, and your waist size keeps growing along with your weight and your consumption, and you are struggling to afford the healthcare and the insulin costs linked to your sugar addiction, and people are employed to push misinformation blaming fat for obesity, and coca cola funds misinformation saying it’s actually just about exercise and sugar isn’t to blame, and there are a zillion people selling ineffective diets and so on…

Well, all of that extra economic activity is “doing stuff”, money is changing hands, stuff is happening. 
But again: Is it really improving society, is it improving your life?

You could get a third job and try to struggle to afford some gambling addiction or something like that, so that more stuff is done, and more money is changing hands.

But again, is that really all that helpful?

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Personally, I find that if I consume a moderate amount of food, I’m actually happier than when I’m consuming more and more, and growing more and more obese.

I’ve never hit the point where the growing consumption of food and growing weight caused me to need growing amounts of healthcare services to deal with a growing number of chronic health issues.

But honestly, I’m really not interested at all in that kind of growth just for the sake of growing.

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Growing pollution, growing global temperatures, growing CO2 levels… 
It’s going to lead to more economic activity. 
As more natural disasters happen, people will have to rebuild more, people will have to leave there homes behind, other people will be building fences and concentration camps, there will be growing wars, just more and more panic and frenzy and stuff that is done.

But again: Are we really that desperate for something to do, that we want to create that much more work for ourselves?

What if we had a growing amount of free time instead of growing obesity? Would that really be so bad?

Someone who is just spending time with friends or family is not increasing the GDP or growing the economy. 
Someone who stops smoking, stops drinking, stops gambling, stops compulsively stress eating, and stops having so many chronic health issues, and instead meditates, and does bodyweight exercises at home, and has human relations, is shrinking the economy, hurting the addiction industry.

Is that really so bad?

Do we really need to ramp up the production of bombs and stuff like that, to produce ever more wars? 
I’m not saying we need 0 production of anything, but this whole cult of production and consumption for the sake of doing stuff and being active all the time, seems rather toxic. 
Instead of just trying to look busy doing something, we should think about what the actual goal is, no?

If you are jobless, you don’t really have.....

One of the issues is that financial wealth disappears when inequality is reduced and distribution is improved.

Financial wealth only exists when there is also poverty. 
Wealth inequality and wealth are the same thing in capitalism.

In the US, there are around 150 million houses, and there are 133 million households. So there is more than enough for everyone.

But right now, many people do not have access to housing. 
There are homeless people, there are people living out of their cars, and there are people who do not own housing, who are forced to rent it.

This makes the housing very valuable. A house in the US is worth $400k. 
It’s worth a lot of money, because there are lots of desperate people, who desperately need housing. 
There is some guy who is living out of his car, who would be willing to take on a 30 year mortgage in order to access a house, there are tenants who are poor, who can be forced to pay each month for housing.

This means that the housing is an investment, there can be rental units, there can be speculation, and the houses are worth a lot of money. 
Because so many people don’t have a house, and desperately need some way to shelter themselves from the elements.

But if you were to redistribute the housing? Taking 133 of the 150 million homes, and giving one to each household?

Then the price of the houses is going to drop to almost nothing.

Instead of everyone having a 400k house, now everyone has a $40k house.

What good is it to have an extra house, if there are no desperate people who are wiling to pay through the nose for it? 
It becomes financially worthless if there are no poor people to exploit.

The housing stops being “wealth” worth truckloads of money, and it just becomes… A roof over people’s heads, to shelter them from the elements. A place to live, a home to raise a family.