People also often mouth another noxious, complementing bromide: “Socialism is good in theory but terrible in practice, because petty human nature always interferes.”

When they say “socialism” in this context, people are seldom referring to much of what socialism has rightly come to be associated with -- dictatorship.

What they instead mean is what’s normally perceived as the ideal that socialists have tried but failed to reach -- a perfectly altruist-collectivist world in which everyone sacrifices oneself for everyone else, not under coercion as in communist North Korea, but by their own free will.

But even this vision of society is ghastly. It’s a great tragedy that people see a community such as this as being morally superior to a free-market civilization that reveres individual achievement.

In an altruist society against selfish profit, you wouldn’t be able to work for your own money and buy what you want for yourself, even though you are a greater expert on what you yourself want and need more than anyone else is. After all, haven’t even our dearest loved ones given us Christmas presents that we don’t really want?

But, in a society where everyone is expected to be unselfish, that’s how life would be very every day. It would be selfish of you to purchase items that you want with money that you selfishly decided to earn for yourself. You’d only be able to live on what others gave you.

And if you told your benefactors that you wanted an offering other than what they handed you, that’d be selfish, so you’d have to keep your mouth shut.

That would make for a society much unhappier than one in which each individual was free to buy what he wanted for himself as well as for others, knowing full well that other people have a perfectly selfish right to take an unwanted gift back to the store it was purchased from and exchange it for something more preferable. As important as this economic system's infeasibility is that it also doesn’t take into account a person’s right to his own happiness as a perfectly individualist free-market society would. So this altruist utopia is not only impractical, but deliberately dreary.

And yet, not even the above scenario embodies perfect self-sacrifice. If someone gives you something that you need to survive, such as food, it’s still selfish of you to accept it. The most unselfish act you could perform would be to refuse all gifts that you need, such as food and water.

You’d give away your food to others, to be unselfish, and those other people would have to give their food away to be unselfish as well. Eventually, the food would go to waste and everyone would die from self-neglect.

That is the perfectly self-sacrificial society. To wish that sort of civilization upon human beings is not humanitarian as most people presume. It’s misanthropic to push mass suicide or pointless asceticism as a virtue.

The fact is that a theory, even a philosophical one like altruist ethics, is supposed to explain what will work in the real, physical world -- i.e., “in practice.” In other words, if something like socialism or altruism doesn’t work in practice, then it’s an invalid theory.

In fact, to even ask people to sacrifice their own happiness, rather than encourage them to live for their dreams and respect the rights of others to do the same, is to formulate a mean-spirited theory. What’s petty isn’t selfish human nature, but socialist theory itself.

It’s not that human nature and human beings aren’t good enough for absolute altruism. It’s that absolute altruism isn’t good enough for human nature and human beings.

Instead of clinging to the bromidic conception of a totally altruist society, where everyone sacrifices his own happiness, as the moral ideal, we should instead embrace a vision that is far more practical and concomitantly more moral.

This means an individualist free-market society that encourages, not unconditional servitude to others, but each individual’s pursuit of his own ambitions, working for his own profit, purchasing what he wants, and bestowing gifts upon only those he thinks are deserving -- respecting the inalienable right of everyone else to do the same, unfettered.

Stuart K. Hayashi is the president of the Reason Club of Honolulu and an undergraduate in Entrepreneurial Studies at Hawaii Pacific University, though his opinions do not necessarily reflect that of either institution. He can be reached at radical_individualist@hotmail.com

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