The twentieth century has witnessed
the beginning, development, and end of the most tragic experiment in human history: socialism. The experiment resulted in tremendous human losses, destruction of potentially rich economies, and colossal ecological disasters. The experiment has ended, but the devastation will affect the lives and health of generations to come.
The real tragedy of this experiment
is that Ludwig von Mises and his followers — among the best economic minds of this century — had exposed the truth about socialism in 1920, yet their warnings went unheeded. — Yuri Maltsev (1990).
Socialism is dead as an ideology and
also as a political movement. It is an example of a god that failed. Socialism
is a very specific form of economic opinion. A socialist believes that the
civil government should own the means of production. This is what socialism has
always meant.
When Ludwig von Mises refuted socialism in 1920, he had in mind exactly this outlook regarding the economy.
Here was his argument. If the government owns a nation’s capital, meaning the
tools of production, the planners cannot establish the value of these tools.
There is no free market for pricing these tools. Without free-market pricing,
there is no way for any central planning agency to determine what the most
desired consumer goods are in society. There has to be a free market in order
to price consumer goods and capital goods. There is neither in a socialist
economy. Therefore, said Mises, socialist economic planning is inherently
irrational.
That argument was ignored by the
vast majority of socialists, and it was never taken seriously by Keynesians.
But then, when the Soviet Union’s economy collapsed in the late 1980’s, it
became clear to at least Robert Heilbroner, a multimillionaire leftist economics
professor, that Mises had been right. He said so in print in an article in The
New Yorker: “After Communism.” (Sept. 10, 1990). He then called for the
substitution of ecology for socialism. He said that socialism was simply a dead
ideology.
Today, there are virtually no people
outside of North Korea, Latin America, and Zimbabwe who straightforwardly argue
in favor of socialism. North Korea and Cuba officially are Communist. They are
poverty-stricken. They have no influence anywhere. Nobody is using them as a
model. Zimbabwe is run by a tribal Marxist, and nobody is imitating it, either.
Theodore
Dalrymple’s comments on African Marxism are
to the point.
Although Marxists often claimed that
the deficiencies of the Soviet Union had nothing to do with Marxism, the
ignominious dissolution of a regime that had long claimed to be Marxist
nevertheless dealt an all-but-fatal blow to the ideology.
I met a number of so-called Marxists
in Northern Nigeria. They were young and confused, but they believed in a
vaguely Marxist explanation or analysis of their discontents. They were not
militant, except mentally. If there was a demonstration they might have joined
it, but they would not have killed. They were content with mere words.
With the downfall of the Soviet
Union there was an ideological vacuum for people seeking a total explanation of
their discontents, people who–thanks to the spread of semi-education — were
probably more numerous, and therefore more desperate, than ever. The only
alternative on hand, and one with much deeper roots than Marxism, was
fundamentalist Islam. Islam rushes in where Marxism can no longer tread.
There are of course advocates of the
welfare state. There have always been advocates of the welfare state. These
people believe in the private ownership of most capital. They believe in some
market pricing. But they believe that government officials can intervene into
the markets and redistribute wealth. They don’t care that this may reduce
economic growth. They are, as Rothbard said in 1971, driven
by envy. They are willing to see the
economy produce less in order to satisfy their demand for something closer to
economic equality.
Keynesianism is clearly not
socialistic. Keynesianism is capitalistic, and it always has been. Keynes was a
defender of capitalism. He believed that the state should intervene by either
creating money out of nothing or by borrowing from capitalists. He wanted the
state to buy goods and services in order to stimulate the economy. He wanted to
see an expansion of capitalism, but he believed that deficit spending by the
central government, and to a lesser extent monetary inflation by central banks,
could achieve the goal of reestablishing the economic productivity of
capitalism in the mid-1930’s.
Communism as a means of economic
production did not survive the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991.
That was the last gasp of socialism in Europe and Asia.
There are those in the West who do
not understand or even recognize what happened to the Soviet Union in December
1991. They do not realize or recognize that this was the last gasp of
socialism. They still want to fight the old fights. They want to invoke the old
slogans. They want people to believe that the West remains in a war against
socialism, whether domestic or international. This is no longer the case.
There are surely Communists who use
the ideology of Marxian Communism to justify their retention of political
power. This is true in Cuba, North Korea, Zimbabwe, and China. But Communism is
an ideological defense of political power in China. It is not a defense of
their reestablishment of state ownership of the means of production.
Any time you see a statement that
international socialists are doing this or that, immediately discount it. Pay
zero attention to it. International socialists are a figment of the imagination
of domestic conservatives. They have not been around in a quarter of a century.
Obama is not a socialist. The
Democrats are not socialists. I have not heard Bernie Sanders call for the
nationalization of America's corporations. They are defenders of the welfare
state. They want more taxes on the rich. They want more regulation of the
economy. They want to direct the capitalist system, in exactly the same way as
the fascists did in the 1930's. They want to retain the private ownership of
the means of production, but they want to tell the private owners what they can
or cannot do with their capital. They want to direct the productivity of
capitalism. They do not want state ownership of the means of production. They
want to use the famous carrot and stick to direct production along certain
lines, but they don't want any responsibility for having done so.
They are content to have sufficient
productivity from the corporate system so that the government can benefit from
a high percentage of the golden eggs that it hatches. Parasites don't want to
kill their hosts. Socialism is an economic philosophy of killing the host. The
Left today is made up parasites, do-gooders, and virtually no Communists or
socialists.
CONCLUSION
Mises in 1920 diagnosed the terminal
condition of socialism. The Communist nations proved his point over the next
seven decades. North Korea, Cuba, and Zimbabwe are the last socialist regimes.
They prove Mises' point. They are bankrupt in every sense. They are not the
wave of the future.
http://www.garynorth.com/public/14560.cfm
Read more at
http://teapartyeconomist.com/2015/12/05/socialism-is-dead-mises-was-right/#WllEDulwV4ooeFUg.99
Comments
Gary
North is WRONG about our current dilemma with UN Agenda 21. It is chucked full of International
Communists like George Soros and aided by Obama and the Democrats, who are the
heirs of the American Communist Party plan to shred the Constitution and
replace it with the USSR soviet governance model.
He is
wrong about many other things in this article, but I do like the title. Obama
is a Communist.
He is
right to call what we have now as Fascist, but the end-game is the New World
Order with an oligarchy of international billionaire criminals ruling the world
through a UN administered one-world Communist government.
There
would be no private property for individuals and therefore no wealth
accumulation for individuals. The
Corporate Global Businesses, Investors and Banks would rule the world. There would be no “representative government”.
It’s a 21st century Orwellian feudal system.
Keynesianism requires a “government
managed economy”, by big government, not the model described in the US
Constitution. The “small government” model with a “free private sector owned
market” is the model we need to return to as soon as we can strip away the
subsidies, unhelpful regulations and unhelpful laws.
We need
to restore our property rights and our Constitution (as written). We have never
been this close to total ruin as we are now.
Norb
Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader
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