“Of course, the question of whether healthcare should be socialized is only a small piece of my general disagreement with [Walter] Block on political economy. Still, it is a vivid enough example to stand in for all the bigger questions.”
Walter Block has many ideas that seem strange and extreme.
I do not just mean that many of his ideas seem this way to a democratic socialist like me, though they certainly do. I mean that, if one explained some of them to the first 100 people one meets on the street, I would be amazed if at least 95 did not react that way. I am not saying this as an ad hominem sneer or an excuse to dismiss his ideas without argument. Just the opposite, in fact. Bear with me while I give a sense of what I mean.
Many Americans have pro-Israel views on the war in Gaza, for example, but very few of them support the outright mass deportation of the entire Palestinian population—men, women, and children, with no attempt at differentiating between fighters and civilians. Block does. Explicitly. Similarly, many people dislike excessive government regulation and/or think #MeToo went too far, but very few would forthrightly defend a “right” to private-sector sexual harassment. Block does. He has written that harassment “that takes place between a secretary and her boss is not a coercive action like the pinching that takes place in the public sphere.” And most Americans are at least vaguely pro-capitalist (at least in the minimal sense of not advocating the abolition of the private ownership of the means of production), but very few would support “anarcho-capitalism.” That is Block’s position. In Block’s utopia, no one would be educated at a public school because he regards the taxation that funds those schools as a form of theft. There would be no public fire departments, though one would presumably be free to pay to contract the services of a private fire brigade like the one operated by Marcus Licinius Crassus in ancient Rome. There would not even be public sidewalks.
The late philosopher David Lewis, who (in his own, very different way) adopted some deeply strange positions, once said that he knew how to refute every objection to his views except “an incredulous stare.” It would be easy for me to respond to Block’s views with nothing but an incredulous stare. Instead, though, in all of my interactions with him, I have done him the courtesy of taking his arguments seriously and doing my best to refute them point-by-point. I did that four years ago when he came on my podcast for a debate on anarcho-capitalism. And I even did that when he wrote an article here advocating for outright ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.
So, when I wrote an essay for Merion West explaining why I am a socialist, I expected that Block would return the favor. He starts by promising to do exactly that:
“I shall consider, and refute, this author’s claim that socialism is better, more just, leads to greater prosperity, etc. by quoting from his essay and then indicating his errors.”
…but then he just doesn’t!
He quotes a grand total of three and a half sentences written by me. Otherwise, he simply trots out a series of generic anti-socialist talking points that have nothing much to do with anything I wrote (at least in the essay to which he is responding). He says, for example:
“In the hard sciences, controlled experiments are possible. This occurs not at all in any of the social sciences, such as economics. But sometimes, on rare occasions, we approach this possibility. East and West Germany are a case in point. This applies also to North and South Korea.”
But not only did I not advocate the economic model of East Germany or North Korea in my article, but I went out of my way to say exactly the opposite. I said, for example, that:
“[T]he countries that called themselves socialist in the 20th century are not a good model. Those western Marxist intellectuals who made excuses for those regimes were making a grievous moral and political error, much as, for example, the leading lights of libertarianism (like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman) were making a similar mistake when they engaged in apologetics for former President Augusto Pinochet’s reign of terror in Chile.”
I also explored, at length, which features of these systems (even apart from their political authoritarianism) led to their economic failures, and I talked about how future post-capitalist experiments could be designed differently. Block just ignores all of that.
He also makes the generic point that any un-coerced market transaction must be mutually beneficial to all parties in the transaction and from this concludes that, therefore, no one could possibly have any grounds for complaint about such things as domination and exploitation in a market society. There is a narrow sense in which his premise is true. In the particular circumstances in which someone finds himself at a particular moment, no one would buy or sell a product (including selling their working hours to a capitalist) if it were not more advantageous to them to do so than whatever alternative options were available to them in the moment. Of course, how those circumstances arose and how (and why) the options available in the moment were restricted is often a different matter. (Think, for example, of the initial rise of modern industrial capitalism in Great Britain, which was facilitated by the enclosures which mass expelled the British peasantry from their ancestral land and made them desperate enough that accepting factory work suddenly became “mutually advantageous” to them and their new bosses.)
But even if capitalism had been as immaculately conceived in real history as in the most pleasant daydreams of philosophers such as Robert Nozick or Murray Rothbard, the inference from the micro-level individual transactions (A agrees to work in B’s factory, C buys B’s products) being mutually advantageous to all participants in the moment to the conclusion that the macro-level social arrangements that emerge from all this must be in the interests of the majority of the population blatantly commits the Composition Fallacy. It is like moving from the premise that all the individual molecules in the Brooklyn Bridge are invisible to the naked eye to the conclusion that the bridge itself is invisible. A secretary who takes a job where she has to put up with the groping of her boss to keep her position is making a decision more to her advantage than being thrown into unemployment (especially if she lives in an anarcho-capitalist society with no unemployment benefits). Nevertheless, laws against private-sector sexual harassment are in the interests of secretaries.
The One Argument to Which Block Responds
I say that Block quotes three and a half sentences “written by me” rather than “from my article” because a full three of those sentences are not exactly from the article to which he is allegedly responding. I started my contribution by quoting something I had written elsewhere:
“I’m a democratic socialist. That means the core of my politics is about seeking to overcome the domination of society by wealthy interests. I want to empower the working class.”
After quoting this, I said:
“That is about as much depth as I felt like I could go into for a short article on an unrelated topic. But the editors of Merion West have been kind enough to ask me to expand on that here.”
In what followed, I spent thousands of words doing exactly that. I explained how what I meant by “socialism” was similar to (or different from) other things various people have meant by it, and I made the case for my kind of socialism on the basis of three values (freedom, equality, and social solidarity), in each case going into some depth about what I had in mind, anticipating and responding to possible objections, and so on. I was looking forward to reading Block’s response to these points. Instead, he ignored every single bit of it. He does not even pause to incredulously stare at the arguments that make up the bulk of the essay.
The only (part of a) sentence from my article itself he quotes is this one:
“…cash-strapped diabetics sometimes die in the United States when they try to ration their insulin, while, as far as I know, this is not something that happens in, for example, Canada, the United Kingdom, Norway, or Sweden.”
Significantly, the part of the sentence he does not quote is, “As I mentioned in my last article here…” The article in question was my contribution to a previous exchange with Block. The observation about diabetics was the one point I made about economics, in passing, in an exchange that otherwise centered on geopolitics.
I will not go as far as to claim that Block did not read my article, but I will point out that, if he had simply read the first four sentences (which included the three he quotes) and then done a quick control-F search to find out if I had referred back to the point about diabetics from our previous exchange, the results could have been indistinguishable from the “response” to me that he produced.
In any case, since the half-sentence about diabetics is the only argument in my essay to which he chose to respond, one could be forgiven for assuming that he had some particularly devastating refutation to offer. Perhaps he has found evidence that this does happen in the countries with nationalized healthcare or health insurance systems I list off! Or even that it happens more in these countries than it does in the United States. Or perhaps even that it has never once happened in the United States, and all the news stories about instances of it happening are elaborate frauds.
He does none of this. Instead, he says:
“One problem with the foregoing is that, at least in the first mentioned of these four countries, the waiting lists for medical service are horrendous. In Canada, horses wait less time for a veterinarian than do human patients for a doctor. A more serious problem is the very comparison. Burgis writes as if the United States is a purely capitalist society, whereas the other four are examples of socialism. Neither claim is true.”
The first thing to notice about this paragraph is that, despite the phrase “one problem with this” (my emphasis), he simply lets the actual point about diabetics stand. This is indeed a barbarity that happens in the United States, where we have the most laissez-faire healthcare system in the developed world, but it does not happen in the other countries I mention. That much is just a fact.
The second is that he simply brings up a problem with universal healthcare (or at least the version of it in one of the four countries I list) as if the existence of that problem obviously outweighed this moral blot on American society. But does it?
I would make two points here.
First, if we are pulling back the camera for a wider shot than the initial point and generally comparing the advantages and disadvantages of the two systems, while length of waiting times is certainly one item that belongs in that comparison, it is very far from being the only one. To my mind, the best test of a healthcare system is how many human beings’ lives it saves. The cross-country comparisons on “Mortality Amenable to Healthcare” (that is statistician-speak for people who die before age 75 even though they would have lived if they had seen a doctor) are brutal for the United States. See here. The numbers are dramatically lower in every one of the countries I mentioned. Nor should this surprise anyone. If a reader cannot think of at least a few people in his own life who have at one time or another declined to get a possibly worrying symptom checked out because they did not want to swallow the copay, then he has either a very small social circle or one that is unusually prosperous.
Second, the point about waiting lines itself strikes me as very much not showing what Block intends it to show. I agree that shorter waiting times are better than longer ones. I am all in favor of combining socialized healthcare with other measures, like making medical school free (preferably, as part of a general program of making all higher education free at the point of service, like K-12 education), which could increase the supply of doctors and hence alleviate this problem. Making it easier for immigrant doctors trained elsewhere to come and practice in the United States would also help. But even in the absence of all of that, there is something truly obscene about defending privatized health insurance on the grounds that the waiting times are shorter. Healthcare is a basic good, like police and fire protection. Like those other two, the lack of it can kill you. It is certainly true that one gets shorter waiting times, all else being equal, if we kick a bunch of poor people out of the waiting line! But our having done so should be a deep source of national shame.
And Block’s claim that I write “as if the United States is a purely capitalist society, whereas the other four are examples of socialism” is flatly false. This is not a matter of interpretation. Anyone can check for themselves that I was crystal clear on this point, in the paragraph from which he pulled the half-sentence about insulin. I spend that paragraph explaining the distinction between “democratic socialism” when used as a synonym for social democracy (or “socialism within capitalism,” i.e., implementing some “socialist policies” like Medicare for All within a basically capitalist framework) and the more radical sense of “democratic socialism” as a democratic version of “socialism after capitalism.” Before explaining that I am not just a socialist in the first sense but also in the second, I brought up the point about diabetics to explain why I find short-term socialist goals like ending for-profit health insurance so necessary and urgent. Block’s misreading of this point is so extreme that “he didn’t read the rest of the paragraph” may be the most charitable interpretation.
The only other thing he says that even looks like a response to the point about insulin (or any other point I make in my article) is:
“[A]s long as Burgis raises the issue of international comparisons in this regard, he might want to consult some empirical evidence that finds a strong positive relationship not only between economic freedom and per capita income but also between economic freedom and the growth in per capita income. According to that tried and true statement, ‘wealthier is healthier.’ Free enterprise leads to greater wealth and, thus, to greater health and longevity, ceteris paribus.”
His hyperlink leads to the Fraser Institute’s data on “economic freedom.” As luck would have it, I already consulted precisely that empirical evidence years ago. I wrote an article for Jacobin in 2021 debunking Fraser’s meaningless junk statistics in detail. Basically, the methodology employed by Fraser stacks the deck in a hopelessly intellectually dishonest way, including all sorts of things that have absolutely nothing to do with issues typically in dispute between libertarians and social democrats or socialists. This methodology pops out self-evidently ludicrous results like Sweden and Norway coming out as more “economically free” (and hence, if the numbers can be used in the way Block thinks they can, more capitalist and less socialist) than Haiti. My suspicion is that most people who use Fraser’s topline numbers to bolster pro-capitalist talking points have not spent enough time with Fraser’s website to notice such whoppers, never mind enough time examining their methodology to have any idea how the sausage is made.
My favorite absurd consequence of Fraser’s sausage-making methodology is one I did not even include in that 2021 article because, at the time, I was sure I must have misread it. According to the Fraser numbers, Ukraine became “less economically free” between 1980 and 2005. Read that again. The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, when plugged into Fraser’s methodology, was more “economically free” in 1980 (five years before Gorbachev!) than 21st-century capitalist Ukraine in 2005. That should tell us exactly how much meaningful information the Fraser numbers convey about capitalism, socialism, libertarianism, social democracy, or much of anything else.
Egalitarianism, Evolution, and Wilt Chamberlain
In the remainder of his response, Block leaves aside the specifics of political economy (and thus the vast majority of what I wrote) to riff about egalitarianism as a general moral impulse. Much of this is devoted to speculation about the evolutionary psychology behind egalitarian moral intuitions.
This speculation is silly on two levels. First, while I would never deny that our brains evolved and that what is in them must thus be explained by some complex combination of social factors and the psychological starting point bequeathed to us by this evolutionary history, ten seconds of thought should tell us that this point cuts both ways. It is not as if the most basic human moral impulses to which egalitarianism appeals (“that’s unfair”) are a result of evolution, while the most basic moral impulses to which libertarianism appeals (“that’s mine!”) were put in our brains by God or space aliens.
One can, if one would like, use Darwinism as an equal-opportunity meta-ethical jackhammer and embrace generalized moral nihilism. Or, one can resist this argument in all cases and defend some form of moral realism (or one can split the difference with some sort of subtle quasi-realism, as many scientifically informed contemporary philosophers in fact do). There is, however, no remotely coherent way of having it both ways and using the jackhammer only against egalitarianism.
The second and more basic problem is that sitting around and speculating about the deep hardwired reasons why one’s ideological enemies are so irrational as to hold onto such silly beliefs is a privilege best reserved for people who have actually delivered some sort of impressive refutation of the beliefs in question. Block largely skips this step.
The closest he comes is trotting out philosopher Nozick’s Wilt Chamberlain argument from his 1974 book Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Now, as frustrating as I will admit to finding it that Block does this rather than address anything I myself said, I am not at all averse to talking about this argument.
The basic idea is that we start by assuming that some egalitarian conception of distributive justice is true. We call whatever kind of distribution of wealth a particular egalitarian principle gets us D1. Then everyone spends their money (the money, remember, the egalitarian thought they should have!) as they please. The basketball player Wilt Chamberlain asks everyone who goes to see one of his games to drop a quarter in a special box with his name on it. Enough people do so that we have now moved from D1 to a less egalitarian D2 where Chamberlain is unusually wealthy. But who has grounds for complaint, given that no rights were violated in the process? As Nozick says, the citizens of this (initially) egalitarian future could have “spent it on going to the movies, or on candy bars, or on copies of Dissent magazine…” (If he had been writing in 2024 rather than 1974, he surely would have directed this jab at Jacobin.) Chamberlain is wealthy because so many people freely chose to spend their money on him. So, surely, he should be allowed to keep all of that wealth.
After summarizing Nozick’s argument, Block jeers:
“What is the egalitarian of the ilk of Burgis to do if he were in charge (Socialists have a tendency to be more than willing to run other people’s lives)? He has only so many choices. One, forbid this superb athlete from making this offer in the first place. Two, compel him to return all the money he has collected from his customers. Three, give up on egalitarianism. I know not how Burgis will answer this query…”
The classic refutation of Nozick’s argument was provided by the socialist analytic philosopher G.A. Cohen just three years after the publication of Anarchy, State & Utopia, in his 1977 paper “Robert Nozick and Wilt Chamberlain: How Patterns Preserve Liberty.” I do not know if Block has ever read that paper, but, as luck would have it, I just wrote about it for Jacobin, as part of my ongoing series there of popularizations of Cohen’s work. So, if Block wants to know what I think of the Chamberlain argument, he can check that out.
I will not repeat what I say there, but I will add to it by answering the series of specific queries Block directs to me.
In the first place, with regard to the “more than willing to run other people’s lives” jab, I would point out that democratic socialism is precisely not a system where particular individuals are in charge of running the lives of vast numbers of other human beings. That is called capitalism. Jeff Bezos, for example, can upend the lives of thousands of workers and send politicians scrambling on a moment’s notice if he decides to shut down or relocate one of his packaging warehouses. Socialism, in the sense I advocate, means taking away the means of production from these individual mini-tyrants and letting everyone decide in a collective and democratic fashion how to run them. Similarly, in such a society, everyone could decide how things like taxes on basketball players could work. Such questions could be hashed out in a far more politically democratic environment than the one we have now since we would no longer have a class of wealthy capitalists exercising disproportionate power over the political process.
Second, if the question is what I, as only one citizen of a hypothetical socialist democracy, who would thus have exactly as much say in what happened to Chamberlain’s wealth as Block himself (or any other citizen) would want that society to do in this situation, here is my answer:
The choices with which Block presents me, to “forbid” setting up the Chamberlain payment boxes, “compel” Chamberlain “to return all the money” (my emphasis) or “give up” on my egalitarianism, obviously add up to a false dilemma. I would use my single voice and vote to push for fairly high taxes on anyone in Chamberlain’s new bracket to pay for healthcare, childcare, education, housing, and the rest of the public goods I care about, all of which would make Chamberlain considerably less wealthy on April 16th than he was on April 14th. I would certainly vote for society to bar him from using what was left to purchase privately means of production and offer would-be employees contracts where they would not have a vote in the operations of the firm. If all this adds up to a (quite mild) violation of the liberty of the Chamberlains of the world, it is a price well worth paying to prevent far more egregious diminutions of the liberty of the working-class majority of the population, who could otherwise find themselves bit by bit subordinated to the domination of the Bezoses of the world. And I would strongly support a ban on inherited wealth beyond some very low limit, since letting people who are unusually successful in one generation pass on their wealth to their heirs is a good way for bigger and more structural inequality to re-emerge over time.
Honestly, though, I would not especially mind if Chamberlain himself was still more prosperous than most of the rest of us on the 16th. As I explained in all those detailed arguments that Block ignores in his response, equality is one of the three main values (along with freedom from domination and social solidarity) that motivates my socialism, but that is what it is—a value, needing to be weighed against competing values. I strongly want a society that is vastly more equal than the one in which I live, but I do not necessarily demand one that is so ultra-egalitarian that the cooperative and democratic arrangements at the heart of the economy are unsullied by the occasional Chamberlain consuming like there is now tomorrow while he is alive. As long as whatever he has managed to accumulate reverts to society when he passes, it does not strike me as a terribly big deal one way or the other.
I strongly suspect that Cohen is correct, though, when he observes, after his point-by-point refutation of Nozick’s argument, that anyone who “think[s] it obvious” that Chamberlain would really take his basketball and go home if he lived in a society where we was not allowed to translate his skill into a vast personal fortune has thereby shown that he misunderstands “human nature, or basketball, or both.”
Block, Bernie, and Me
After speculating that I am only an egalitarian because I have yet to join him in miraculously overcoming the limitations of our hominid brains, Block briefly mentions my favorite part of his own biography: that he went to high school with Senator Bernie Sanders. They were even on the track team together.
He writes:
“I started out my political career as a fan of my high school classmate Bernie Sanders. But I was able to overcome my socialist egalitarian hard wiring…I have hopes for Ben Burgis.”
The last thing I want to do is rob anyone of their hopes. But I have to say that the prospects of these particular hopes being fulfilled are grim if Block does not improve on his last response.
For example, one of the reasons I agree with Senator Sanders about Medicare for All is that I do not want anyone who would otherwise live to die because of their financial circumstances. This is not my only reason. I think it is a problem, for example, that many people stay at jobs they hate for fear of losing their employer-linked health insurance. But the “not dying” point is significant enough that, for the moment, I would be happy to stick with that.
Of course, the question of whether healthcare should be socialized is only a small piece of my general disagreement with Block on political economy. Still, it is a vivid enough example to stand in for all the bigger questions. And the beginning and end of his response on that example was to grumble about waiting times and ignore the core of the issue.
If Block wants to displace Senator Sanders as my favorite graduate of James Madison High School in Brooklyn, he will need to do better than that.
Ben Burgis is a Jacobin columnist, an adjunct philosophy professor at Rutgers University, and the host of the YouTube show and podcast Give Them An Argument. He is the author of several books, most recently Christopher Hitchens: What He Got Right, How He Went Wrong, and Why He Still Matters.
