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QotD: Socialism
Accepting Socialism is basically admitting you can’t compete in the real world. You’re saying “I’m willing to give up my liberty, my religion, and my dreams as long as the state will take care of me.” Accepting Socialism is accepting failure. It’s the complete opposite of America. – Quang Nguyen
Quang Nguyen is a refugee from Communism. He fled Vietnam and moved to the United States and today he is a state representative in Arizona. If anyone knows socialism and the evil it perpetuates close up and personally, it is him. He lost most of his family to socialistic communism, and had to start over with the clothes on his back and no more. He pushed back in the Arizona legislature against those who minimized socialism’s threat.
He speaks from the experience of having lived in both Vietnam and the United States. And he is the type of immigrant who makes our country stronger because he appreciates what liberty really means.
Published in Politics
Preach it!
I don’t need to. Quang Nguyen does it better than I ever could.
The only thing that is impressive about Socialism is the body count.
What the founding fathers got right was understanding human nature and to create a system which will guard against the worst aspects of it. Socialism/Marxism believed they could change human nature (e.g. New Soviet Man)
We need to be careful not to underrate the opposition. Not *all* advocates of socialism are motivated by the belief that they can’t compete and will be happy to be on a level of equality with everyone else. Some such advocates believe that under socialism, their status and income would be much higher: this belief seems common among people with advanced degrees. And some are motivated by the intellectual case for central planning, which can be very seductive. Superficially, it just seems to make sense that such planning would lead to more efficiency…less waste…and certainly less unnecessary human suffering than an environment in which millions of decision-makers, many of them in competition with one another, are making their own separate and uncoordinated decisions, resulting in pointless product redundancy, economic cycles driving unemployment, and lots of other bad things.
In order to see the flaws with this logic, one needs either pretty good abstract thinking capability, historical knowledge, or personal experience (or some combination of these factors). Francis Spufford’s book Red Plenty provides a vivid description of the realities of Soviet economic planning, as viewed by those on the front lines of that process. And Bitter Waters, written by the deputy manager of a Stalin-era Soviet factors, describes what it was like to run a factory and try to do good work under such a system.
I strongly believe that without learning the basics of so-called “Austrian” or “logical” or “scientific” economics, including Mises’s theory of the so-called socialist calculation problem, a person cannot see the flaws in socialist thinking, regardless of historical knowledge or personal experience. I believe that very good abstract thinking capability is a pre-requisite to understanding economics, but by itself it can do nothing in this regard.
And that says it all.
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