When a dozen of conservatism’s best minds take on Socialism and expose it for the utopian fraud it is, attention must be paid.
In a brief foreword to a special issue of National Review,
Editor-in-Chief Richard Lowry admitted that many conservatives thought
socialism in America had been “vanquished” after the collapse of Soviet
Communism 30 years ago. But as T. S. Eliot insisted, “There is no such
thing as a Lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause.”
The experts examine socialism in its many guises, beginning with
Charles Cooke’s blunt assessment that socialism is not and never can be
“democratic.”
Cooke, the editor of NationalReview.com, writes that voters should not be fooled by the left’s attempt at rebranding.
“There is no sense in which socialism can be made compatible with
democracy as it is understood in the West.” At worst, says Cooke,
“socialism eats democracy, and is swiftly transmuted into tyranny.” At
best, socialism “stamps out individual agency, places civil society into
a straitjacket of uniform size, and turns representative government
into a chimera.”
Cooke’s description of socialism as tyrannical was confirmed by Ugo
Okere, a socialist candidate for the Chicago City Council, who explained
that “democratic socialism, to me, is about democratic control of every
single facet of our life.”
That would mean, presumably, rewriting the first words of the
Constitution to something like, “We the people of the United States in
order to form a more democratically controlled Union … ”
What has Okere’s “democratic control” produced in the socialist “paradise” of Venezuela?
Ricardo Hausmann, the former chief economist of the Inter-American
Development Bank, has written that “Venezuela’s economic catastrophe
dwarfs any in the history of the U.S., Western Europe or the rest of
Latin America.”
How catastrophic? Under Chavez-Maduro socialism, the child mortality
rate has increased 140%. Ninety percent of Venezuelans now live in
poverty. This year inflation will hit an unbelievable 10 million
percent. (That is not a typographical error.) All this in a country with
the world’s largest proven oil reserves—far greater than those of the
United States.
Cooke concludes his essay with lessons learned from 6,000 years of
civilization, including “never relinquish the right to free speech, the
right to free conscience, the right to freedom of religion, the right to
bear arms, or the right to a jury trial.”
Whatever you do, he warns, don’t be seduced by socialists bearing
promises. But if you are seduced, “get out before it’s too late. You
have nothing to lose but your chains.”
The distinguished author Joshua Muravchik, a fellow at the World
Affairs Institute, takes a historical approach to the myths of
socialism.
He writes that the initiator of Soviet terror, tyranny, and violence
was its founding father, Vladimir Lenin, who exhorted his followers to
exert “merciless mass terror against kulaks, priests, and White Guards;
persons of doubtful standing should be locked up in concentration camps”
(i.e., the Gulag).
To what end? Not just to accumulate political power, but in pursuit of a sacred mission—a socialist world.
When the farmers resisted collectivization, Lenin’s successor, Josef
Stalin, engineered a famine in which at least 5 million and perhaps as
many 10 million starved to death—the Holodomor.
If Stalin was “a tyrant of stupefying brutality,” writes Muravchik,
he was outdone by Communist rulers Mao Zedong, whose Cultural Revolution
resulted in at least one million deaths, and Pol Pot, who wiped out
one-fourth of Cambodia’s population in his attempt to emulate Mao.
Why did they kill so many? Muravchik provides the answer: “It was
their devotion to an ideal [socialism] that prompted them to slaughter
millions of unresisting innocents.”
Economist Jeffrey Tucker begins with the damning comment: “Among the
most conspicuous of socialism’s failings is its capacity to generate
vast shortages of things essential for life.”
In Maoist China, he points out, there was no meat and no fat in which
to cook anything. In Bolshevik Russia, there was never enough housing
or food, not even loaves of bread.
What happened when Nikita Khrushchev took over as Soviet leader
following Stalin’s death in 1953? He and his colleagues tried
desperately to “cobble together” a system of planning that made sense
without relying on “bourgeois” market forces.
They failed miserably. In Tucker’s words, Khrushchev “spent his last
years as a discredited, dejected, and sad old man on a park bench.”
If you love deprivation, constriction, and general limits on material
aspirations, says Tucker, plus a “tyrannical ruling class that
oppresses everyone else, you will love what socialism can and does
achieve.” Indeed, he concludes, “misery seems to be its only
contribution to economic history.”
Socialists, says National Review correspondent Kevin Williamson, are
guilty of a fatal conceit: They think they can develop a system so
powerful that it can consider every variable in society and propose
scientific answers “about how many acres of potatoes to plant, and when
and where to plant them.”
But free-market economists Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek (a Nobel
Laureate) showed that “complete knowledge was not attainable on social,
economic, or political questions.”
Therefore, says Williamson, the more intelligent and non-ideological governments have largely given up on central planning.
Even the Nordic social democracies, so dear to the self-styled
socialists of the United States, “mostly have been divesting themselves
of state enterprises.”
Reasonably successful state-run enterprises, such as the Swiss
railroads, “have been converted into stock corporations or reformed in
other market-oriented ways.”
The subtitle of Hayek’s last work “The Fatal Conceit” is “The Errors
of Socialism.” Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., have failed to learn from those errors, says
Williamson, asserting that “you cannot call yourself the party of
science and the party of socialism too. You have to choose one or the
other.”
Socialists flaunt their compassion, argues former National Review
Editor-in-Chief John O’Sullivan, because it gives them an excuse to
impose their will on others “unlawfully and even murderously.”
Modern socialists tend to disapprove of placing conditions on aid to
the poor—“workfare”—viewing the receipt of aid as “an unqualified
right.”
That sounds generous, says O’Sullivan, but it traps the poor “in long
term dependency” and undermines what the scholar Shirley Letwin calls
the “vigorous virtues” among their neighbors.
Before a single socialist regime had established itself, says
O’Sullivan, 19th-century writers like Fyodor Dostoevsky, W. H. Matlock,
and Rudyard Kipling saw “the horrors that lay concealed within
socialism’s humanitarian promise.” Their examination of country after
country refutes the fraying excuse that socialism has never been tried.
In the later stages of Soviet Communism, for example, a woman would
sell herself for a pair of jeans; in Venezuela today, “people exchange
family heirlooms for a little food.”
Although the French welfare state is often offered as a shining
example of progressivism, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, a fellow at the Ethics
and Public Policy Center, declares you must look at “actual France, not
the fantasy France of progressive propaganda.”
He challenges the French elite who believe they have the right “to order society for the benefit of everyone.”
Given the results of their leadership—low growth, mass unemployment,
social strife, and a general mood of pessimism—Gobry suggests that “they
might want to rethink their idea of progress.”
BT (Before Thatcher), the Great Britain of the 1970s was generally
described as “the sick man of Europe,” due to its prolonged experiments
with statism and the pervasive stagnation they produced.
In 1960, according to historian Andrew Stuttaford, the U.K. boasted
Europe’s most productive economy, but that was before the Labour Party
came to power and nationalized almost every industry in sight.
The mid-1970s were hard on most Western economies, but the U.K.
“appeared to be in a hell of its own,” says Stuttaford. Inflation shot
up 300%. Gross domestic product fell, unemployment rose, the pound
crumbled, industry buckled, “and some of Britain’s best and brightest
headed for the exit.”
The winter of 1978 was characterized by grotesque images—the dead
unburied, the sick untreated, the trash piling up in the streets.
Just months later, promising radical change, Margaret Thatcher walked
into 10 Downing Street and proceeded to denationalize coal, steel, and
utilities; bring down inflation; spur economic growth; and refuse to
give into organized labor’s draconian demands.
Her message: “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.”
Markets, not bureaucrats, are better for the environment, asserts
Shawn Regan, a fellow at the Property and Environment Research Center,
pointing out that Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union “were the most
polluted and degraded places on earth.”
He quotes the economist Murray Feshbach and journalist Alfred
Friendly Jr. as writing that when historians conduct an autopsy of
Soviet Communism, “they may reach the verdict of death by ecocide.”
Closer to home, says Regan, the attempts of Cuban socialists to
maximize production at all costs “has caused extensive air, soil, and
water pollution.”
In Venezuela, socialist policies have contaminated drinking water
supplies, fueled rampant deforestation, and caused frequent oil spills.
The principal guilty party is the state-owned energy company.
Rarely, if ever, will Ocasio-Cortez and other sponsors of the Green
New Deal concede the painful truth about socialism’s dismal
environmental legacy.
Imagine a shoe store with just one brand of sneakers—now apply that
to medical care. So begins journalist and health care expert Avik Roy,
who explains the pluses and minuses of the British National Health
Service, so beloved by Sanders and other American “democratic”
socialists.
Because the British health system is funded entirely by taxes and is
“free” to patients, there are no premiums, no co-pays, no deductibles.
How then does the system prevent excess consumption and control costs?
Roy says there are two principal ways: first, by controlling the fees
that doctors, hospitals, drug companies, etc. receive; and second, by
“aggressively restricting the … costly services that would otherwise
blow up” the health care budget.
Notwithstanding Sanders’ contrary opinion, says Roy, “the NHS is no paradise.”
NHS doctors “routinely” conceal from patients information about new
therapies the service does not pay for, so as not to “distress, upset or
confuse them.”
Terminally ill patients are “incorrectly classified” as close to
death to allow the withdrawal of expensive life support. Most NHS
patients expect to wait five months for a hip operation or knee surgery,
says Roy, but the actual waiting times are worse: 11 months for hips
and 12 months for knees, compared with a wait of three to four weeks for
such procedures in the United States.
NHS problems like limitations on access to care and dishonest
statistics “will be familiar to those enrolled in America’s homegrown
version of socialized medicine: the Veterans Health Administration.”
Understandably, writes Roy, American socialists are not calling for “VA care for all” but for “Medicare for All.”
Medicare features like subsidized premiums and unlimited access, says
Roy, make the program popular with seniors who receive about $3 in
benefits for every dollar they pay into Medicare. But the lack of
controls has turned the program into an “oppressive fiscal burden.”
According to the trustees, the Medicare hospital trust fund will run
out of money in 2026, less than a decade away. The ultimate price tag of
Medicare for All is an incomprehensible $30 trillion.
The solution may be debatable (The Heritage Foundation, for example,
favors block grants to the states and health savings accounts), but the
answer is not “the Anglo-Canadian version of socialized medicine that
tramples on individuals’ rights to seek the care and coverage that they
want.”
The real reason why American socialists are 24/7 news, says
Washington Examiner editor Timothy Carney, is the widespread “social and
cultural poverty” in America.
The root cause of both Occupy Wall Street and Bernie 2016 was a
“prevailing sense of alienation.” Young people, Carney says, “felt that
they lost the ability to make a difference in the world.” They were a
vacuum waiting to be filled.
Modern American society “in which community is weaker and people are
more alienated,” says Carney, has proven a fertile ground for socialism.
The political reaction from socialists and their fellow travelers is “a
demand for a bigger federal safety net.”
Carney reports, for example, that the People’s Policy Project, a
socialist think tank, calls for a raft of federal programs, including 36
weeks of federally funded paid parental leave, federally funded child
care, a federal benefit for stay-at-home mothers, and federally funded
pre-K.
The conservative response, Carney argues, should be “community.” That
is, an extended family, neighbors, parishes, shuls, civic associations,
dinner clubs, swim clubs, and all the other communal variations.
Such institutions—Edmund Burke’s “little platoons”—help families stay
together, mothers and fathers “stay sane,” and new parents “navigate
the daunting path of parenthood.”
Carney warns that the less we’re connected to one another via
community institutions, and the more isolated we are, the more we grasp
for something big to protect us. “For young Americans that’s often the
state.”
Socialism is not only or even principally an economic doctrine,
concludes the British author Theodore Dalrymple, “it is a revolt against
human nature.” It refuses to believe that man is a fallen creature and
seeks to improve him “by making all equal one to another.”
The development of the New Man was and is the goal of all Communist tyrannies, beginning with the Soviet Union.
Notwithstanding the disastrous results when such futile dreams are
taken seriously by ruthless men in power, Dalrymple says, there are
those who will continue to dream of “a life so perfectly organized that
everyone will be happy.”
National Review’s analysts believe that such dreams will inevitably
become nightmares as they have in the 40 some nations that suffered
under socialism.
The record of failure without exception is clear. It remains for
conservatives to expose the impossible promises of the socialists,
drawing on the conclusions of National Review’s experts:
- Socialism is not compatible with the Constitution.
- Socialism, the idea that millions killed for, is a mirage.
- Socialism is very good at generating vast shortages of the essential things in life.
- Socialism can never know enough to plan all our lives every day.
- Socialism tries to make all of us equal to one another.
- Socialism is very good at promising all the benefits we’ll never see.
- Socialism in Great Britain had one outstanding success—Margaret Thatcher.
- Socialism was responsible for making Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union the most polluted and degraded places on earth.
- Socialized medicine as practiced in Great Britain and Canada is bad for people’s health.
- American socialism is on the rise because of widespread social and cultural poverty in America.
What is to be done? It rests with you and me. We must get to
work exposing socialism for the fraud and failure it is and taking back
our culture and our country.
https://www.heritage.org/conservatism/commentary/the-totally-utterly-irrefutable-case-against-socialism
