9/06/2019

Why Socialism Keeps Raising Its Ugly Head

Einstein is reported to have defined insanity thus: “Doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results this time.”

And so it is with socialism. Socialists have tried the same thing over and over again, failed miserably, sometimes spectacularly, but expect when they try it this time they will succeed.

But they don’t. Ever.

How is it they don’t realize that socialism doesn’t work? How can they believe something that has been tried for almost 400 years and has not succeeded once will do so on this attempt? It’s simple: They forget history as if it has no bearing on their closely held beliefs.

What would you say to an amateur chef who baked a cake following a certain recipe only for everyone who ate a slice to fall ill quickly afterward? Being such an enthusiastic baker, they bake the same cake a second time just a few weeks later, again following the same recipe, but this time with one or two slight adjustments. Unfortunately, the result is the same – everyone who eats the cake soon ends up feeling sick.

The cake baker repeats this more than two dozen times, always modifying the recipe a little, but the basic ingredients remain more or less the same despite the fact that their guests throw up every time. Of course, there’s no way such a thing would happen. The cake baker would soon realize that there is a major problem with the recipe and throw it away.

Yet this is exactly what socialists have done.

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The latest example of socialism’s failings is Venezuela, which just a few years ago was being hailed by leading intellectuals and left-wing politicians as a model for “Socialism of the 21st Century.”

How do they explain the failure away?

“It wasn’t true socialism!” “It was undermined by capitalist saboteurs!” “It would have worked if it hadn’t been for the boycotts by US imperialists!” “It wasn’t being run by the ‘right’ people!” “We didn’t suppress/imprison/kill enough of the enemies of socialism!”

But no matter how many excuses they come up with, it doesn’t change the fact that socialism doesn’t work.

One of the things I have learned after studying socialism and its endless failures is the reason it fails is easy to figure out. As I have stated many times in the past, socialism fails because it chooses to ignore human nature, tries to get around it, or worse, tries to change it. In the end, human nature always wins the fight just as it did during the first experiment in socialism way back in 1621.