The Limits of Self Interest

Thanks to Bernie Sanders the word Socialism has been pulled forcibly away from the inevitable association that those of us who remember even part of the Cold War have always had with the word.  After all, when I was growing up the greatest bogeyman of all was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the USSR.  They were the ones we were facing down with the fate of the world in our hands, our nukes and subs and planes and missiles against theirs, our freedom ringing against their oppression, our noble democracy against their "evil empire."
There was this kid I went to high school with who was an admirer, for some reason, of the Soviets.  He was always going on about how the Spetsnaz, the Soviet version of Navy Seals or Green Berets, were totally hardcore awesome.  I thought he was a bit crazy. I thought he was crazy for reasons I didn't entirely understand.  It seemed like admiring anything in an enemy or an adversary was wrong.  But, in truth, not learning from your opponent is a terrible mistake.  Not looking at what they value, and seeing for yourself if there is any merit, is like wearing a blindfold.  Hatred and fear blind us to the truth, and there is truth to be found everywhere.
Eventually, I got around to reading Karl Marx for myself, admittedly after the Cold War was comfortably over, and I noticed that his critique of the so-called free market was actually rather spot on, if slightly overzealous in his indictment of the bourgeoisie, in that he assumed that the bourgeoisie were somehow acting with a consciousness of what they were doing.  Marx and Engels cross the line of what I would call sanity when they ascribe some sort of sinister master plan to what I truly believe is just the innate action of human greed and self interest.
However, consider the following from The Communist Manifesto:

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations.  It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors," and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self interest, than callous "cash payment." It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation.  It  has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of numberless and feasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single unconscionable freedom -- Free Trade.  In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, naked, shameless direct, brutal exploitation.

Did Communism work better? Certainly not, but that does not mean that the diagnosis of the fundamental problem and limitations of self interest is not valid.  Somewhere, somehow, we need to get our heads screwed on straight and realize that, to a large extent human progress is going to lead us in circles. Marx described the dethroning of feudal oligarchs by the merchant class, who became the bourgeoisie, who in their turn inflicted the same sort of indignity on the proletariat that the kings and lords did before, but perhaps even worse because they had not the sense of duty that the best nobles had, human beings once again became chattel, only by a different mechanism.
I suspect Marx would look at the current trend of increasing income inequality and the frightful accumulation of wealth in the "one percent," and say, "I told you so." I'll use the trick Moses used on God: "Come on America, do you want to prove that those Commies were right about us?"
The theory and practice of laissez faire capitalism are proving to be as brutal to large portions of the population as Communism was.  The New Deal, which was profoundly socialist, brought us out of the Great Depression and created the safety net for the poor and the old that we spend rather a lot of time arguing about these days.  It would be madness to dismantle it.
It would be madness because our fundamental approach to money is still polluted by sin: greed, gluttony, pride, avarice, lust, most of the big ones.
The proof is, as they say, in the pudding.  Look at the world we inhabit, people who perform necessary and vital functions are undervalued, while those who literally deal in the abstractions of finance make millions.  And I'm not talking up the working class hero angle either, when I talk about people being undervalued, I'm talking about auto workers and plumbers to be sure, but I'm also talking about school teachers, nurses, some doctors and even (gulp) lawyers, particularly those lawyers who give themselves to public defense and civil service instead of going for big money working for corporations.
The system we have is rigged to allow wild success to a select few, and keep everyone else at bay with the vaguest of promises that it might come to them someday.  Consider the example of professional athletes. Colleges and minor leagues are able to thrive by dangling the mere suggestion that you might some day make the big time. The NCAA has even colluded with the NFL and the NBA to practically force high school students to attend college and work for free for at least a year before they're eligible for the big show.  When they do "make it big" they get supposedly get paid enormous amounts of money, at least if their agent is competent and no one robs them blind.  But you hear a lot of stories about athletes whose life falls apart at some point when the checks stop coming, which they can do as quick as you tear your anterior cruciate ligament.  This is no accident, this is a system that is broken and unjust at it's very core.
The only way this endures is for people to continue to wear the blinders of self interest.  When we fail to realize that we are all connected and that it is an outrage that poverty even exists in this country, exploitation will go unchallenged.
I started out down this track this morning by remembering a moment a few years ago when the town I was living in was holding public meetings regarding the installation of a municipal water supply.  The water in the town was bad to begin with, lot's of iron and sulfur, it sort of smelled funny and turned stuff brown, but to top it off, an underground gas tank had leaked years ago and some folks had benzene in their wells.  That's a like a super cancer causing sort of thing, and really not something you want to have in your tap water.  I actually heard some of my neighbors in this small town, get angry about the water project because, "My well is just fine."
It almost made my heart break.  This was a small town, everyone is all about being neighborly, until it might cost them money or "force" them to change.  Then it becomes, "sorry about the cancer juice in your water, but mine is just fine."  It definitely made me think that people (and it was not just one person that expressed that opinion by the way) cannot be simply left to their own devices.  Raw self interest will run us into the ditch every time.