The
World's Greatest Generator Of Poverty, by Tyler Durden 8/20/16, Submitted by Allen Mendenhall via The
Mises Institute,
If you’re
looking for a short introduction to socialism that rewards rereading, Thomas
DiLorenzo’s The Problem With Socialism is it.
Perhaps
your son or daughter has returned from college talking about collective control
of the means of production and sporting Bernie Sanders t-shirts. Perhaps you’re
a political novice looking for informed guidance.
Perhaps
you’re frustrated with America’s economic decline and deplorable unemployment
rates. Perhaps you listened with bewilderment as some pundit this election
season distinguished democratic socialism from pure socialism in an attempt to
justify the former.
Whoever
you are, and whatever your occasion for curiosity, you’re likely to find
insight and answers from DiLorenzo. A
professor of economics at Loyola University Maryland, DiLorenzo opens his book
with troubling statistics: 43% of millennials, or at least those between ages
18 and 29, view socialism more favorably than capitalism, and 69% of voters
under 30 would vote for a socialist presidential candidate.
Socialism—depending
on how it’s defined in relation to communism—may have killed over 100 million
people and impoverished countless others over the course of the 20th Century.
So why
have the youth (full disclaimer: by certain measures, at 33, I’m considered a
millennial myself) welcomed this ideology that’s responsible for mass killings,
organized theft, war crimes, forced labor, concentration camps, executions,
show trials, ethnic cleansing, disease, totalitarianism, censorship,
starvation, hyperinflation, poverty, and terror? Why have
death, destruction, and abject destitution become so hip and cool? Because of
effective propaganda and utopian promises of “free” everything.
The
problem is, as anyone who’s ever studied economics knows, there’s no such thing
as free stuff. Somebody pays at some point. “What
socialists like Senator Sanders should say if they want to be truthful and straightforward,”
DiLorenzo thus avers, “is not that government can offer citizens anything for
free, but that they want healthcare (and much else) to become a government-run
monopoly financed entirely with taxes. Taxes hide, but do not eliminate, the
cost of individual government programs.”
And these
programs are far more expensive to society than they would be on the free
market. The predicable rejoinder to such a claim — repeated ad nauseam by
television personalities—is that socialism works, nay thrives, in, say, Sweden.
DiLorenzo
corrects the record: “Socialism nearly wrecked Sweden, and free market reforms
are finally bringing its economy back from the brink of disaster.”
Strong
language, but DiLorenzo maps the history and supplies the data to back it up.
“The real source of Sweden’s relatively high standard of living,” he explains,
has “everything to do with Sweden avoiding both world wars and jumping into the
industrial revolution when its economy was one of the freest, least regulated,
and least taxed in Europe.”
Other
common binary assumptions are reversed in these pages: socialism causes
pollution whereas capitalism protects the environment; socialism leads to war
whereas capitalism is peaceful; socialism consolidates power among an elite few
whereas capitalism decentralizes and disperses power, which ultimately resides
with individual consumers making small economic adjustments based on their
particular needs.
Even
socialized medicine proves more inequitable than market-based alternatives. Proponents
of Canadian-style healthcare ignore the fact that “Canadian health care is
actually far more expensive, and the quality far less than it would be if
doctors and hospitals had to compete for patients on the basis of quality and
price.”
Coloring
his analysis with references to the Austrian economists Ludwig von Mises,
Friedrich Hayek, and Murray Rothbard, DiLorenzo undertakes a variety of other
issues implicated by socialism: egalitarianism, fascism, income taxation, wage
and price controls, monopolies, public schooling, and more.
Had I
been his publisher, I would have insisted that he also include disturbing,
graphic, and gruesome images of real, dead human bodies stacked on real, dead
human bodies, of ransacked churches, and of confiscated property—alarmingly
tangible consequences and horrifying illustrations of pure, realized socialism.
Senator
Sanders and most of his followers mean well, of course, and genuinely and in
good faith advocate policies they believe to be in the best interests of the United
States. Yet the history of the cause they champion is fundamentally at odds
with their desired goals.
DiLorenzo
has the courage to call socialism what it is: “the biggest generator of poverty
the world has ever known.” For young students especially, his concise primer
could make the difference between feeling the Bern, and getting burned.
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