The Day Two Problem

Abstract

Introduction The other main category of practical obstacles that socialist-inclined policy faces is encompassed by what I call the Day Two Problem. Having now discussed the problems associated with our lack of knowledge, the Day Two Problem requires much less space to explain. It has two principal parts: the first dealing with production, the second with redistribution. Discussion of socialist-inclined policy is notably thin on the topic of production. This is especially odd since advocates of socialist-inclined policy, like Peter Singer for example, frame their positions as being motivated at least in part by the desire to alleviate poverty and its attendant miseries. But the solution to material poverty and deprivation is material wealth and abundance, and the only field of human activity known to generate material wealth and abundance is business: creation, commerce, exchange, cooperation, entrepreneurship—in other words, everything captured by the term production. Yet consider, for example, the way G. A. Cohen’s argument proceeds in his Why Not Socialism? Cohen begins by describing an imaginary camping trip attended by several different families, and he argues that the trip exhibits principles that capture his socialist vision of a just society. Cohen’s description of this camping trip is therefore quite important for his overall argument. Here is how Cohen begins his description of the trip: You and I and a whole bunch of other people go on a camping trip. There is no hierarchy among us; our common aim is that each of us should have a good time, doing, so far as possible, the things that he or she likes best (some of those things we do together; others we do separately). We have facilities with which to carry out our enterprise: we have, for example, pots and pans, oil, coffee, fishing rods, canoes, a soccer ball, decks of cards, and so forth. And, as is usual on camping trips, we avail ourselves of those facilities collectively: even if they are privately owned things, they are under collective control for the duration of the trip, and we have shared understandings about who is going to use them when, and under what circumstances, and why. (2009: 3–4)