Socialism is for losers

And Capitalism doesn't need a PR team

People call me left wing because I’m not outraged about Bad Bunny doing the SuperBowl. I call myself a libertarian leaning centrist because I believe coercion is generally bad and that central planning implies far too much confidence in individual knowledge and ability. I enjoyed the energy behind the recent post from Stella Tsantekidou calling for a loser-purging on the left but disagree with nearly every substantive claim made in it. Not only do I think she exaggerates the purported level and source of stigma faced by lefties, I also think she fails to address the key arguments for capitalism and overlooks why socialist movements (among others) will reliably end up attracting “losers.”

There’s certainly truth to the idea that the right wing both buys into and perpetuates the “lefties are ugly” stereotype. While Twitter: Class of 2025 might reach for well worn pejoratives such as the “blue haired enby” or “male-feminist cuck” the right wing commentators of our mother’s generation would’ve likely been more at home with terms like the “ugly feminist” (who hates men because she can’t get one) or the metrosexual “man” who doesn’t know how to use a hammer. (In either case, the worst thing a woman can be is ugly and the worst thing a man can be is a woman, some things never change <3).

However, the severity of stigma against lefties that Stella implies in her piece feels so at odds with my *lived experience* that it’s difficult to reconcile.

They use the words “socialist” and “communist” interchangeably. They do it to fear-monger- make left-wingers sound sinister- but also to make anyone identifying with the left feel like a LOSER.

If you dare identify with the left, they want you to feel socially humiliated.

Pardon me? In what real world social scene is it seen as “socially humiliating” to identify with the left? Academia is almost entirely left-wing as are most relevant celebrities. High quality left-wing coded media seems much more common and influential than the reverse (so much so that poor Ben Shapiro had to start his own production company!) There are always culturally relevant right-wing figures, sure, but very few who could be described as remotely ‘cool’. As Ross Douthat recently suggested, the best conservatives can hope for is Sydney Sweeney declining to apologize for having great jeans. While there are plenty of “edgy” comedians who code right in the current climate, that association only adds to the claim that the left is culturally dominant. The impulse is counter-cultural, a rebellion against The Man, and right about now The Man just happens to be a tofu eating male feminist.

Setting aside The Culture in general, my experience is that life in a major city is quite cozy socially for those with left wing views (I’ve been in New York for 9 years, I assume London is not too far afield.) While the lefties I know sashay around Brooklyn in bright yellow Zohran bandanas I’m mentally calculating whether it’s worth pushing back on the claim that “the use of food delivery services by the able bodied is unethical” lest I ruin the vibe at bookclub (and yes I did push back, and yes I did ruin the vibe at bookclub).

And anyways, as with most stereotypes, the stigma that exists is probably not purely the result of some intentional smear campaign. Stereotypes very often have a grain of truth; perhaps that grain here, at least regarding the purported link between the left and misery, is the higher self-reported incidence of mental health issues among lefties. Similarly, the “right wingers are dumb” trope isn’t an artifact of left-wing propaganda. Though popular depictions of right wingers as backward may reinforce it, conservatives really are, on average, less educated. Of course, you could push back on both claims: maybe right-wingers underreport mental health problems due to stigma, or maybe conservatives are just as smart as liberals but don’t waste their time signaling with excessive education. My point is simply that whatever association exists, it can’t be so easily chalked up to “successful anti-Marxist propaganda.” And anyways, it’s really no mystery as to why socialism would attract some losers.

Write it out on the blackboard 100 times: Incentives Matter. Incentives Matter. Incentives Matter…

I infer that ‘Loser’ as applied here refers to someone with “low agency”, someone who blames the world for their problems or who perpetually identifies with their victimization. It’s not hard to see how a movement that emphasizes systemic oppression, and believes “that people should not be blamed for their circumstances” could be attractive to such a person (which, to be clear, says nothing about the empirical question of whether systemic oppression exists or how extensive it is). “The left” is not alone here of course, it attracts losers for the same reason any movement which places the cause of your misery outside of your individual control might. While the libertarian right, admonishing us all to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, makes itself inhospitable to ‘losers’, the populist right welcomes them with open arms and plenty of assurance that it’s not them (it’s the Jews).

Many of the people who lead movements will be impressive, socialism included, but incentives matter, and the composition of a movement’s followers will reflect them. While it’s true, as Stella suggests, that proponents of free markets benefit from associations with freedom and protection from coercion, that isn’t the strongest argument for them. It’s that figuring out how to best allocate resources is only a simple problem in theory, and that in reality free markets are the closest we can get to a solution.

The Use of Knowledge

As Hayek explains in The Use of Knowledge in Society, central planning fails because the information relevant to such planning is not, and cannot be, held and acted upon by a single individual (or group). Instead, this knowledge, including “the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place”, is dispersed among all individuals. Decentralized decision making is therefore beneficial because it enables the use of the “unique information” which each individual possesses and “of which beneficial use might be made, but [...] only if the decisions depending on it are left to him”.

The central idea is that the major economic problem we face is not actually how we would allocate resources under conditions of perfect knowledge, but rather “what is the best way of utilizing knowledge initially dispersed among all the people”. The assumption is that “[w]hich of these systems is likely to be more efficient depends mainly on the question under which of them we can expect that fuller use will be made of the existing knowledge.” Markets work because they do not require anyone to see the whole picture; instead prices efficiently communicate the key information required to act.

We must look at the price system as such a mechanism for communicating information if we want to understand its real function [...]. The most significant fact about this system is the economy of knowledge with which it operates, or how little the individual participants need to know in order to be able to take the right action. In abbreviated form, by a kind of symbol, only the most essential information is passed on and passed on only to those concerned. It is more than a metaphor to describe the price system as a kind of machinery for registering change, or a system of telecommunications which enables individual producers to watch merely the movement of a few pointers, as an engineer might watch the hands of a few dials, in order to adjust their activities to changes of which they may never know more than is reflected in the price movement.

The failure to recognize the gravity of the problem of the use of knowledge, Hayek contends, leads us to judge the efficiency of markets against an unrealistic standard:

I fear that our theoretical habits of approaching the problem with the assumption of more or less perfect knowledge on the part of almost everyone has made us somewhat blind to the true function of the price mechanism and led us to apply rather misleading standards in judging its efficiency. The marvel is that in a case like that of a scarcity of one raw material, without an order being issued, without more than perhaps a handful of people knowing the cause, tens of thousands of people whose identity could not be ascertained by months of investigation, are made to use the material or its products more sparingly; i.e., they move in the right direction. This is enough of a marvel even if, in a constantly changing world, not all will hit it off so perfectly that their profit rates will always be maintained at the same constant or “normal” level.

This isn’t to say that there is never an argument to be made for central planning, but it is to suggest why those arguments should have a high bar to clear (arguments for some amount of redistribution are much easier in my view). Free markets may leave much to be desired relative to imagined utopias but in reality they perform exceedingly well against the other systems we’ve actually tried. The problem with socialism isn’t that it attracts “losers”, or that its adherents fail some aesthetic test. It’s that it assumes away the hardest constraint we face: the limits of our knowledge.