Brothers Judd Blog

What we found was striking: not a single country, going all the way back to 1789, has sustained a high level of political freedom under socialism. In fact, only one country — Belarus in 1991 — maintained it for a single year. These results corroborate similar empirical tests by Robert Lawson and J.R. Clark on Milton Friedman’s variant of the hypothesis, specifically the relationship between economic freedom and political freedom, and recent work on the deep relationship between democracy and capitalism by Vincent Geloso and Alex Tabarrok.

But how relevant are the historical disasters of state socialism to modern debates of socialism? As Kristian Niemietz exhaustively demonstrates in his book Socialism: The Failed Idea that Never Dies, many experiments with socialism begin with democratic ideals (Bolsheviks derives from the Russian word for ‘majority,’ after all) and promises of popular liberation. The working poor are initially praised by socialist academics and public intellectuals, only to be abandoned when their political utility and economic liberty decline together. One of the most recent examples was Venezuela, where Hugo Chavez promised a new form of socialism that would learn from history and would be “built on cooperation.” Bernie Sanders offered support of this project as late as 2011, and Joseph Stiglitz praised Chavez’s efforts as “very impressive.” At the very least, socialists’s repeated failure to distinguish “good” from “bad” socialism at its origin should give us reason to be cautious. Even more so when combined with the failed record of any socialist experiment — past or modern — to maintain individual and political liberty.

Socialists, both historic and modern, tend to define socialism not by the means but by the ends. But holding up utopian ends can lend itself to justifying a broad array of even despicable means. Writing about the 1917 Russian Revolution, Dan Edelstein notes, “The choice of dictatorship was rather a temporal shortcut, encouraged by the belief in a perfected future. By opening up the future as a space to be colonized by a just society, the modern doctrinaires of progress encouraged their followers to value the world to come so highly that they were willing to accept the temporary suspension of democratic beliefs.”

There are a handful of truly monumental collective achievements in our history: Machu Picchu, the Great Wall of China, the Pyramids of Giza, and perhaps, if we’re being generous, the Roman aqueducts. Modern global civilization has made one contribution to this eternal pantheon. It is not the moon landing. It is the semiconductor supply chain.

This strikes almost all of us as ridiculous. A microchip is a bauble of metal and refined sand. It doesn’t appear to have epic proportions. Upon close examination, however, the epic proportions are there in miniature. Imagine a perfect replica of a sprawling metropolis, a Tokyo or a São Paulo, engraved at atomic dimensions on a tile the size of a fingernail. The urban details would be faithfully rendered to the last golf ball or egg—each reduced to approximately the bulk of a hemoglobin molecule, or the distance grown by a human fingernail every five seconds. If a chip were merely a sculpture, this chiselling would represent a considerable achievement. But a chip is, in fact, a functional city for a population of busy electrons. They buzz about, flying our airplanes, powering the stock market, and, increasingly, thinking on our behalf. Unlike rockets, which are produced in relatively meagre quantities, microchips are stamped out by the billion. This is the most impressive thing about them. Or, maybe, about us.

Microchips are mass-produced, like any tchotchke, at factories.