Econtalk for September 8, 2014, James Otteson on the End of Socialism:

James’ central arguments are against Socialism and in favor of a decentralized notion of Capitalism as it relates toward viewing/treating each other in society:

 

Once you start thinking about human beings as members of classes…immediately what you begin to do is to see human beings within those classes being more or less interchangeable. They are like poker chips or marbles, one is just as good as another.

The danger that has issued real horrible consequences in human history is once you begin to see people as being interchangeable, as less amongst classes, this race, this religion, this nationality, this ethnicity, then you begin to dehumanize them. They don’t seem to you like individual centers of human dignity…

By contrast, when you see human beings as being individuals…individual centers of human agency, individual centers of human dignity, that completely transforms our relationship to on another…

I no longer see/view you as interchangeable, as fungible, as a poker chip. I view you as an irreplaceable and precious asset, a precious commodity, a precious human being. Someone who brings something to the world that nobody else ever has or nobody in the future ever will. That completely transforms our relationship to one another…

When we see it that way, this is what I call a triumph of human moral agency. That’s really a transformation in how we view other people. That is what will deter us from labelling a population of people as a certain kind of group and devaluing them because they are in the wrong kinds of group. We can’t do that. Because each member of that group is unique. Each member is different then all the others and each one is irreplaceable.