You Didn’t Build That. Your Luck Built It for You.

Economy, according to the socialists

If you thought that Obama’s remark to small business owners that they didn’t build their businesses was kind of odd and unusual, or may be even a slip of the tongue, think twice. It is, in fact, a basic doctrine of socialism concerning the emergence of economic classes in the society that successful people owe their success to anything else but themselves. Mainly to luck. Some people are lucky, and they get rich. Others are not so lucky, and they are poor. The economy is not the labor and efforts and ingenuity of millions of people, not at all. It is the good luck and the bad luck of millions of people. The economy is like a lottery: the goods are there – and no one knows how they got there in the first place – but some people get luckier in ending up with the most toys. No matter what you do, it is your lucky star that decides if you will ever make it to the top, and if you end up on the bottom, blame the lucky star for it.

That’s the basic view of socialism concerning economy. Forget about production, innovation, work, organization, discipline, work ethic, education, etc. Luck is what matters, and science has proven it.

No, I am not joking. This is actually the claim of Martha Gill, a columnist at The New Statesman, the flagship of Fabian Socialism in Britain, in an article she wrote earlier this month: “Cameron Needs to Stop Rewarding the Lucky.”

Of course, she starts with the age-old claim used as a pretext for class war since the time of the dinosaurs:

If we’ve learned anything in the past few weeks, it’s that life at the top is even better than we thought and life at the bottom is probably just going to keep getting worse.

Gill’s memory span being only few weeks, we shouldn’t expect her to have learned anything of the last couple of centuries. For example, if she would upgrade from her socialist memory span to a normal intelligent being’s memory span, she could notice that in the last couple of centuries life has become enormously better for the lower strata of the British society. That the poorest in Britain – or anywhere else in the Western world – today enjoy more luxuries and conveniences than even the richest a hundred years ago, let alone two hundred years ago. She may even get to understand that the process is not one of zero-sum game but a win-win process for everyone, for the laborers – whom the Fabian Socialists and the Labour falsely claim to represent – work less but get more than what they used to, a century ago. And that the only places where laborers didn’t get better off were where Gill’s beloved socialist system was introduced in practice: like the Soviet Union, praised and extolled by Fabian Socialists in the past. She may even get to read a few books by historians like Niall Fergusson or Deirdre McCloskey that would teach her a thing or two about the realities of the economic history of the West.

But no, Fabian Socialists have no use for history. But they have good use for luck. Luck is what drives the economy. And to prove it, she appeals to science. And science means an experiment at the Oxford’s Saïd’s Business School which proved that ending at the top or the bottom has “much more to do with luck.”

The experiment was not an experiment, actually. Or, at least, not an experiment in real life. It was based on two computer models of 50 rounds of win-lose games between 5 million players. Forget the fact that economy is not a model of win-lose games but a production-consumption model; such realistic definitions would only hamper the proper understanding of the socialist idea of the world. We can not afford them. Let’s focus on these two computer models which were specifically built on a fallacious view of reality, and let’s see what they say about reality. And they say that in reality, luck is what matters, not any moral or intellectual qualities a person may have. Exactly what a socialist would want to prove from the very beginning. It’s always good to know the results in advance to know what kind of experiment you want to construct. And it is so fortunate we have computers to create irrelevant models and pretend they mean something.

Unfortunately, Gill doesn’t continue her own reasoning to its logical conclusions. For example, she doesn’t tell us what that means for education. If lower skills can achieve exceptional performances as often as higher skills, only based on luck, why go to school to learn skills, then? Seems like the Fabian Socialist obsession with free government education was misguided, after all. Skills or no skills, a person wins or loses based on luck. Why go to school then?

Or, if Gill is so concerned that some people win in the big lottery of life and others don’t, and that winnings must be equalized by government redistribution, one wonders if she would say something about the national lottery of the UK. For example, she could mention the fact that half of the board members of that lottery, including the chairman, and members of the Labour Party, and there is not a single Conservative there. For a party that is so concerned about the negative effects of luck in the economy, the Labour Party seems quite eager to participate in games of luck, at a national level, at that. Ah, but it’s the Conservatives who want to reward the lucky. This is only consistent with what we see here in the US: The Democrats, so concerned about the poor, and so eager to impose taxes and redistribute wealth, are the millionaires and billionaires who don’t pay taxes and donate 0.000002 per cent of their personal wealth to charities.

Neither does she explain what that means for entrepreneurs: If knowledge and skill and honesty and good service don’t matter as much as luck, who would even invest their time and money and effort to build anything?

One thing we know for sure: Gill and her colleagues at The New Statesman did not get to their position of writers by any skill in writing or logic they may have had. It is all luck. This is sufficient to explain the quality of modern socialist journalism, both in the UK and in the US, and in Europe.

Meanwhile, the reality is that economy is driven by ethical choices: it matters whether people wake up early, go to work on time, work hard, acquire skills, innovate, deal honestly with their partners, bosses, employees, and customers, and are focused on the future. (Read the Book of Proverbs, Martha Gill.) And luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. Opportunities are everywhere. Preparation is what matters.

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