Chapter 2 of Why Not Capitalism? features a complete, almost paragraph-by-paragraph, parody of Cohen’s Why Not Socialism?.  I mimic his argument, writing style, and phrasing. I often just borrow paragraphs but switch the words around.

The first few paragraphs describing  the capitalist clubhouse village:

Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, Donald Duck, Daisy Duck, Goofy, Clarabelle Cow, and Professor Ludwig von Drake, and many other characters, live together in a village. There is no hierarchy among them.* They have separate goals and projects, but also share common aims, such as the goal that each of them should have a fulfilling life and good time, doing, so far as possible, the kind of projects that they like best or find most meaningful. Some of these projects they do together; some they do separately.

They have various facilities to carry out their different projects. For example, there are communal spaces, such as amphitheaters, racetracks, obstacles courses, and parks. They avail themselves of these facilities collectively. They have shared understandings of what is going to use what and when, under what circumstances, and why.

There are also privately owned spaces and things. Mickey Mouse owns a clubhouse that he shares with his friends. Minnie owns and runs a “Bowtique”: a hair bow factory and store. Clarabelle Cow owns and runs a “Moo Mart” sundries store and a “Moo Muffin” factory. Donald Duck and Willie the Giant own farms. Professor von Drake owns various inventions, including a time machine and a nanotech machine that can manufacture “mouskatools” on command.

There are differences among the villagers, but their mutual understandings, and their spirit of goodwill, ensure that there are no circumstances to which anyone could mount a principled objection.

In the village, everyone does his or her part. Everyone works hard to add to the social surplus. Everyone trades value for value. Everyone is also free to pursue his or her vision of the good life without having to ask permission from others. At the same time, all the villagers are extremely kind. If anyone has any unmet needs, the others line up to help her. There is no violence or any threats of violence—force is not necessary to maintain social order.

Village life is not all about work! The villagers spend much of their time having fun. They enjoy lightly competitive or non-competitive games, going on adventures, and producing art and music. Sometimes they do these activities alone, sometimes together in small groups, and sometimes with everyone as a whole.

When bad luck strikes—e.g., when some baby ducks must be taught to fly, or when a baby dragon is lost, or when the Tick Tock Time Machine accidentally turns half the villagers into babies, or when a Gooey Goo spill creates five copies of Goofy—the villagers happily come together as a team to solve the problem, making use of their different skills and abilities.

The Mickey Mouse Clubhouse villagers cooperate with a common desire that everyone have the freedom and resources to flourish under their own conceptions of the good life. Everyone operates on principles of mutual concern, tolerance, and respect. They live together happily, without envy, glad to trade value for value, glad to give and share, glad to help those in need, and never disposed to free ride, take advantage of, coerce, or subjugate one another.

Just as Cohen compares his idealized conception of socialism to realistic capitalism, I compare idealized capitalism to realistic socialism. Realistic socialism, of course, tends to suck. Really, the only reasons to advocate socialism in the real world are 1) you are culpably bad at social science or 2) you are a misanthropist.

            You could imagine instead a version of the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse Village in which—as in socialism—the collective (or its representative, the socialist government) asserts its rights over all pieces of land or equipment, or over everyone’s bodies, minds, and talents. You could imagine that the collective or the socialist government decides who will be allowed, for example, to use the hot air balloons, or what color bows Minnie will make, or who will do what work and when, or whether one person’s organs should be extracted and given to another. You could base the Mickey Mouse Club Village on the principles of socialist work and strictly collective ownership of everything.

Now, most people would hate that. We probably wouldn’t let our children watch that kind of show. Most people would be more drawn to the first kind of Clubhouse Village than to the second, primarily on grounds of fellowship, but also, be it noted, on grounds of efficiency. (I have in mind the inordinate difficulty of trying to have a small board of central planners determine what needs to be done and how to do it.) And this means that most people are drawn to the capitalist ideal, at least in certain restricted settings.

To reinforce this point, consider what it would be like if the villagers stop acting like capitalists and start acting like socialists:

a. Donald decides to forcibly nationalize and control all of the farmland, murdering millions in the process, and causing a massive famine that murders tens of millions more. He uses terror tactics to assert his control. He says [quoting Lenin], “We shall return to terrorism, and it will be an economic terrorism.” But his fellow villagers mutter, in fear, under their breath (when they are sure no one is spying on them), “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Donald Duck, don’t be such a schmuck. You don’t know what these farmlands mean to us, and what role they play in our lives. You don’t know how to farm, what to grow, or how to grow it. Please stop seeing us landowning peasant farmers as enemies of the state!”

b. Things do not go as well as Donald planned, and the other villagers begin to resist. Goofy stifles dissent by creating gulags in the coldest reaches of Disney World. Anyone he deems an enemy is sent to the gulag to be tortured and worked to death. Prisoners receive rations so meager that none have enough energy to meet their work quotas. Yet, the rule of the gulag is that less they work, the less they eat. And so, the prisoners’ bodies wither from starvation and strain, their fingers turn black from frostbite, and their bones break from scurvy. One of Goofy’s prisoners thinks, on his second day in the gulag, “Is this unbearable, or is this something I can survive?…What is it like to break down?” The work is so horrid that many prisoners chop off their own feet—they decide they prefer to die of disease in the gulag hospitals than work themselves to death in fields or mines. Many become what other prisoners call the “the goners” or “the garbage-eaters”—inmates insane from hunger and stress, who wander the prison eating shit, dirt, and trash. Only one group flourishes in Goofy’s gulag: the urkas criminal gang, whose members “tattoo themselves with masturbating monkeys, who [have] their women assist them in the rapes of nuns and politicals,” and whom the “gulag officially designate[s]” as “Socially Friendly Elements.”  [Etc. The horrors go on from there.]

The capitalist villagers live by five principles: 1) the principle of voluntary community, 2) mutual respect, 3) reciprocity, 4) social justice, and 5) beneficence. After describing these principles and how the capitalist village lives by them at some length, I mimic Cohen in saying that these principles are anti-socialist. The paragraphs below imitate a move Cohen makes against capitalism, but it works even better against socialism.

These five principles are in some deep sense anti-socialist. Under socialism, we have seen, there is mutuality, but this is only a by-product of a fundamentally non-reciprocating attitude. The immediate motive toward productivity in a socialist society is (not always but typically) some mixture of fear and greed in proportions that vary with the details of the person’s political position and personal character. It is true that people can and do engage in socialist activity under other inspirations (some positive, such as genuine altruism; some negative, such as the desire to dominate others), but the motives of greed and fear are what socialist societies bring to prominence, and that includes greed on behalf of, and fear for the safety of, one’s family.

Even when one has wider concerns than one’s mere self, the socialist position is greedy and fearful in that one’s fellow socialist citizens are predominantly seen at best as possible sources of enrichment at best and at worst as possible threats or mouths to feed. These are horrible ways of seeing other people, however much we have become habituated and inured to them after a century of socialist civilization.

In the USSR or Cuba, cooperation is based largely on greed and fear. A person does not care fundamentally, within socialist interaction, about how well or badly anyone other than herself fares. They cooperate with other people not because they believe cooperating is a good thing in itself, not because they want all people to flourish, but because they seek to gain and they know that they can do so only if they cooperate with others, or because they worry they will be punished or murdered if they do not do as they are told. In the mutual provisioning of a socialist society, we are essentially indifferent to the fate of the farmer whose food we eat: there is no or little community, respect, or beneficence among us, as those values were articulated above. In this kind of system, what we tend to find is that the people pretend to work and the government pretends to pay.

Steve Horwitz take note: Here’s another paragraph (parodying Cohen) in which Rush gets a shout out:

I continue to find appealing the sentiment of a libertarian song I learned in my childhood, which begins as follows: “And the men who hold high places, must be the ones who start, to mold a new reality, closer to the heart, closer to the heart.” The point is often made, in resistance to the sentiment of the song, that one cannot be friends with the billions of people who compose our large international society: that the ideas is at best impossible to realize, and, so some add, it is even incoherent, because of the exclusivity that goes with friendship. But this song need not be interpreted in that fashion. General social friendship—community—is not an all or nothing thing. It is surely a welcome thing when there is more rather than less community present in society.

Thus, alas, I think Jason Kuznicki’s criticism of Cohen on universal empathy (and, by extension, his criticism of me for following Cohen) is based on a misinterpretation.

The final bits of the parody: