Socialism For The Uninformed

While this was first posted back in May, it is still timely and informative, particularly for those who still think socialism is the answer to all our ills. But as history has shown us over and over again, socialism, while sounding great in theory, doesn't deliver on its promises. It's a lesson that appears must be learned again and again.

As such, I have linked to a simple primer about socialism titled “Socialism for the Uninformed” written by Thomas Sowell.

Socialism sounds great. It has always sounded great. And it will probably always continue to sound great. It is only when you go beyond rhetoric, and start looking at hard facts, that socialism turns out to be a big disappointment, if not a disaster.

While throngs of young people are cheering loudly for avowed socialist Bernie Sanders, socialism has turned oil-rich Venezuela into a place where there are shortages of everything from toilet paper to beer, where electricity keeps shutting down, and where there are long lines of people hoping to get food, people complaining that they cannot feed their families.

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The anti-capitalist policies in Venezuela have worked so well that the number of companies in Venezuela is now a fraction of what it once was. That should certainly reduce capitalist "exploitation," shouldn't it?

But people who attribute income inequality to capitalists exploiting workers, as Karl Marx claimed, never seem to get around to testing that belief against facts -- such as the fact that none of the Marxist regimes around the world has ever had as high a standard of living for working people as there is in many capitalist countries.

As I mentioned in a previous post, there have been a number of experiments doing direct side-by-side comparisons between capitalist and socialist states. Time and again the socialist states failed to thrive and eventually collapsed. There are only two long-running experiments that stand as perfect examples of how not to do things – Cuba and North Korea. Even Communist China came to realize their socialist system was doomed and could never compete with the capitalist system, so they abandoned their moribund economic model and embraced capitalism only to see the wealth of their country and its citizens grow by orders of magnitude. It is what socialism promised, but never delivered.

In any case, Read The Whole Thing. If nothing else it will give you ammunition during your next debate with another “useful idiot” of the socialist Progressive movement.