The rhetoric of wealth redistribution is filled with metaphors, vignettes, and parables.
The socialist movement needs such picturesque language, because the public will not happily digest abstract statements like this one from Michael Harrington: “The politics of international economic and social solidarity must be presented as a practical solution to immediate problems as well as a recognition of that oneness of humankind celebrated in the Biblical account of the common parents of all human beings.”
The socialists also need these folksy similes and stories because these engaging little tales hide the unpleasant realities lurking in socialist schemes like those promoted by Harrington.
Garrett Hardin produced one of these distracting and seducing narratives, as historian Amity Shlaes recounts:
One of the thinkers of the era, a microbiologist at the University of California in Santa Barbara named Garrett Hardin, sketched a picture to try to convey the need for great public-sector interventions. Shepherds live by a rich common pasture. All want to graze their own sheep there, and all do, each driving as many of his own sheep as he can into the common area without regard to the needs of others or the grass of the commons. Soon, the grass is gone. The sheep starve. This dynamic Hardin labeled the “Tragedy of the Commons.” Hardin recommended a collective solution of the sort Harrington would have praised: let governments play the shepherd, managing or rationing resources of the common.
Hardin’s myth has several factors typical of propaganda. He presents a binary scenario: evil shepherds, good governmental regulators. He also places the vast majority of the citizens into the category of sheep who are the mercy of either shepherds or regulators, but who apparently can’t act or think for themselves.
In his metaphor, Hardin also reduces the amazing complex world of technology, politics, and economics into the overly simplistic symbol of pasture land where sheep graze. He first published his allegory in 1968.
Then, as now, the world of interest rates and taxes, of microeconomic and macroeconomics, of data storage and transmission, of spacecraft and pharmaceuticals, of election cycles and intragovernmental negotiations was exceedingly complicated. To reduce that world to the undemanding analogy of grassland is to engage in massive oversimplification.
Redistributionist and socialist campaigns habitually rely on such oversimplification, from Huey Long to Bernie Sanders.
A more accurate assessment of modern civilization regards the majority of people not as sheep, but as decision-makers. Citizens are constantly making economic, political, and technological choices. The millions of choices made daily shape the nation, the marketplace, and development of new software and hardware.
An accurate picture of socio-political economics includes people who are more farsighted than the shepherds who quickly destroy the land’s grazing material, regulators who are not omniscient angels who know all and always act altruistically, and scenarios with a nearly infinite number of options instead of the two presented in Hardin’s parable.
Socialist schemes for redistribution are almost always presented in such oversimplified rhetoric, and intentionally so: only by means of oversimplification can the socialists gloss over the universe of flaws and problems which come to light whenever someone attempts to implement such programs in the real world.
