I listened to some of Glenn Beck’s show from today. He launched the first hour with a typically uninspiring interview with John McCain; it was low on content, low on charisma, and low on novelty. I don’t hate the guy, but while there were a good many Republican candidates this year who struck me as lackluster at best and creepy at worst, I find myself increasingly thinking that the party has elevated the weakest one in the field.

But one little snippet of the interview was not just uninspiring; it went to the heart of the problems I have with McCain. I understand the guy’s not a libertarian; he says that every now and then, and I very much believe him. But there’s more to it than that: I don’t believe that John McCain has a political philosophy at all.

Sure, he’s got his hot button issues: he’s against earmarks, against torture, against high taxes, and so on. But what is he FOR? And is it a cohesive philosophy? My impression is that he’s 3 parts politician and 1 part man, informed by polls and given voice through prepared speeches and catchphrases. And that’s probably better than most of what’s in Congress, but it’s not good enough to be the Republican nominee, and it’s not good enough to be President of the United States.

Glenn Beck asks him about why socialism is bad. Predictably, McCain’s against it, but for all the wrong reasons. The reasons he gives are incidental and all too common among so-called conservatives and libertarians, among others opposed to socialism, in America:

GLENN: Senator McCain, I hear people actually write me, say to me — I have a sister who said to me, “You know what, what’s the big deal with socialism. So what. He’s socialist. Why is that bad.” Could you please explain why socialism is bad?

SENATOR McCAIN: It doesn’t work, number one. It’s been tried many times. Second of all, redistributing the wealth creates disincentives to entrepreneurship, capitalism, small business, free enterprise. If people know that their hard earned — the fruits of their hard earned labor are going to be taken from them and given to others, then they are obviously going to have disincentives to work. The fundamentals of the free enterprise system is that less government is the best government. Now, there are times for government, in emergencies, in wars and, you know, many other areas where we can interpret it, but the fact is that government should let free enterprise, small business and capitalism function and, of course, it has to be — has to have regulation. Of course there has to be transparency. Of course Teddy Roosevelt was right where he said unbridled capitalism leads to corruption. But let’s not take people’s hard earned money that they worked to save and pass on to their children or build their businesses, let’s not take it away from them and give it to others. That’s — socialism is antithetical to progress and job creation and wealth, progress for all of society.

Number one isn’t that it doesn’t work. That’s one step away from an argument or a study or “research” that shows that it DOES work, at which point McCain will be left scrambling for some technicality about why the research is flawed. Or — far worse — it’s too easy for socialists to claim that past socialist experiments failed because there wasn’t enough monitoring, enough control, enough reports, enough information to allocate goods properly. Once it’s technologically feasible, the argument might go, perhaps Orwellian telescreens in every home would provide that necessary feedback to the government to make it all run smoothly.

For all his claims that he’s no economist (and indeed, he’s not), McCain has given an economist’s answer: valueless and mindful only of efficiency. We can all have a long, exhilarating discussion about how capitalism utilizes the information conveyed in market prices to allocate scarce resources more efficiently than any other system developed by the mind of man, and how the lack of such information crushes socialistic societies under twin burdens of waste and want. Well, at least I wouldn’t mind it. I’m probably in the minority.

Number one, and the only number that’s needed, is that socialism is grossly unethical and antithetical to America’s foundational ideas of rights and liberty. It’s wrong because it inverts the relationship between man and society so that rather than each man being an end unto himself, he is a means for the accomplishment of the “good of society.” Society, meanwhile, is a non-entity, so it’s impossible to define what its “good” is — the average good of everyone, the total good of everyone, equality, happiness, wealth, religion — but in any case there will be a long line of politicians and rulers willing to define it for you anyway, and make it so. Any right that you take for granted now, whether it be “conservative” (your wealth, your family, your guns, your religion) or “liberal” (your speech, your sexuality, your drugs, your privacy), will be abrogated without mercy when the political winds shift and the powers that be find your way of life destructive to the healthy whole.

In short, the glory of man will be eschewed for the glory of society. It’s a cruel irony indeed, because society is only a thing made up of men; and the poor, purposeless, mechanistic, suspicious dullards burdened by the yoke of full-fledged socialism will be counted with the vassals of feudalistic Europe as among the least glorious men ever to have lived.

THAT is why socialism is bad.