Tag Archives: Socialism

Sorry, Stiglitz: It’s Socialism That’s Rigged — not Capitalism, by William L. Anderson

Posted on November 15, 2018 | Leave a comment

Joseph Stiglitz is a hack economist, “a one man band for growth of the state.” That’s why he won a Nobel Prize. From William L. Anderson at mises.org:

Ever since winning the Nobel Memorial Prize in “Economic Science” in 2001, Joseph Stiglitz has been a one-man advocacy band for growth of the state. After 9/11, for example, he called for the formation of a federal agency to provide security for airline passengers, which he claimed would send a “signal” for quality. (Stiglitz won his prize for “proving” that free markets are “inefficient” and always result in less-than-optimal outcomes because of asymmetric information. Only government in the hands of Really Smart People like Stiglitz can direct production and exchange consistently to efficient and “just” results.)

More than a decade ago, Stiglitz lavished praise for the socialist government of the late Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, declaring:

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez appears to have had success in bringing health and education to the people in the poor neighborhoods of Caracas, to those who previously saw few benefits of the country’s oil wealth.

He went on to claim that the Chavez policies of expropriating the capital structure of private oil companies in Venezuela would result in a more “equal” distribution of wealth in that country, something he believes is desirable everywhere. Interestingly, since Venezuela’s socialist “experiment” went south, complete with hyperinflation and one of the worst financial and economic crises ever seen in the Western Hemisphere, Stiglitz has been silent, at least when it comes to explaining why the so-called economic miracle in Venezuela was unsustainable.

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Posted in Business, Capitalism, Civil Liberties, Economics, Government, Labor

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Why Marxism Shifted from Economics to Culture, by Brian Balfour

Posted on October 29, 2018 | Leave a comment

Cultural Marxism, much in the news these days, is not some figment of right-wing imaginations, it’s the well-documented strategy of bona fide Marxists. From Brian Balfour at mises.org:

In his recent Reason magazine article, senior editor Brian Doherty assures readers that “cultural Marxism” is nothing but mere “paranoia” conjured up by the “conspiratorial right” to provide cover for their hate of “multiculturalism and gay rights and radical feminism.”

He openly mocks the idea that the unmistakable uptick in identity politics these last few decades has anything to do with “sinister machinations of commies striving to enslave us.”

One must be “mistaken” and “foolish,” according to Doherty, to believe that such concerted efforts to build coalitions based on racial, national and gender identities to replace the economic “class” identities of classical Marxism is anything more than “dubious conspiratorial theories.”

Doherty’s stance is especially puzzling, however, given the fact that socialist leaders have openly written about this strategy for decades.

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Posted in Culture, Education, Governments, History, Philosophy, Politics, Society

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Socialism Destroys, by John Stossel

Posted on October 10, 2018 | Leave a comment

Just because you put the word “Democratic” in front of socialism doesn’t make socialism any better than the failure it has repeatedly been. From John Stossel at theburningplatform.com:

Socialism is hot.

Famous actors recently made a commercial proclaiming that “democratic socialism” creates some of the best parts of America. It’s “your kids’ public school” (says Susan Sarandon), the “interstate highway system” (Rosario Dawson), “public libraries” (Jay Ferguson), “EMTs” (Ethan Embry), “workers who plow our streets” (Max Carver) and “scientists” (Danny DeVito).

Wow. I guess every popular thing government does is socialism.

The celebrities conclude: “We can do better when we do them together.”

There is sometimes truth to that, but the movie stars don’t know that America’s first highways were built by capitalist contractors. They also probably didn’t notice that the more popular parts of government — public schools, EMTs, snow plowing, libraries, etc. — are largely locally funded.

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Posted in Business, Capitalism, Government, Horseshit, Philosophy, Politics

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Misesian Destructionism: Then and Now, by Thomas DiLorenzo

Posted on October 5, 2018 | Leave a comment

Socialists want to upend the existing social order while consuming whatever it has produced. Once they’ve eaten their seed corn, they’ve got no idea how to raise a new crop. From Thomas DiLorenzo at lewrockwell.com:

In his classic 1922 book Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (first English edition published in 1936) Ludwig von Mises wrote of how the object of socialists everywhere had always been the destruction of existing society.  After that is accomplished, then they can begin making vague promises of their “utopian” society.  “Socialism is not . . . the pioneer of a better and finer world,” Mises wrote, “but the spoiler of what thousands of years of civilization have created.  It does not build; it destroys.  For destruction is the essence of it.  It produces nothing, it only consumes what the social order based on private ownership in the means of production has created . . . each step leading towards socialism must exhaust itself in the destruction of what already exists” (p. 414).

This scenario has been played out in country after country that adopted socialism, from the Soviet Union to Venezuela.  The Soviets lived off the capital accumulated by previous generations (and by property stolen from other countries through military conquest); British “Fabian” socialism consumed capital until it all imploded with the “British Disease” of the 1970s; Capitalist Sweden adopted socialism in the 1950s with the result that not a single net new job was created for the ensuing 55 years, 500 percent interest rates in the 1980s, and a struggle to de-socialize ever since.  And of course once-prosperous Venezuela completely destroyed itself in a mere decade after Hugo Chavez, the latest in a long line of Castro-loving communist presidents, nationalized virtually all of industry and imposed universal price controls.

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Posted in Business, Capitalism, Civil Liberties, Collapse, Government, History, Labor, Law, Philosophy

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Venezuela’s Socialism…And Ours, by Ron Paul

Posted on October 2, 2018 | Leave a comment

The US may not be as socialistic as Venezuela…yet, but it’s only a matter of degree and perhaps time. From Ron Paul at ronpaulinstitute.org:

This week we witnessed the horrible spectacle of Nikki Haley, President Trump’s Ambassador to the United Nations, joining a protest outside the UN building and calling for the people of Venezuela to overthrow their government.

“We are going to fight for Venezuela,” she shouted through a megaphone, “we are going to continue doing it until Maduro is gone.”

This is the neocon mindset: that somehow the US has the authority to tell the rest of the world how to live and who may hold political power regardless of elections.

After more than a year of Washington being crippled by evidence-free claims that the Russians have influenced our elections, we have a senior US Administration official openly calling for the overturning of elections overseas.

Imagine if President Putin’s national security advisor had grabbed a megaphone in New York and called for the people of the United States to overthrow their government by force!

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Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, Insurrection, Politics

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In Socialist Venezuela the Poor Starve to Death While the Politically Powerful Feast, by Tho Bishop

Posted on September 21, 2018 | Leave a comment

Every time socialism fails, it’s proponents claim that it wasn’t “really” socialism. Now it’s failing again, this time in Venezuela, and it won’t be long before we’ll learn that it wasn’t socialism, although Maduro and Chavez before him both claimed to be socialists. From Tho Bishop at mises.org:

The socialist policies of the Venezuela government continue to impose a living hell on its people. Hyperinflation has turned its currency to literal garbage. Mortality rates have skyrocketed for groups such as infants, pregnant mothers, and the elderly as clinics have shut down and medicine grown scarce. Food has disappeared from store shelves forcing the population to consume pets and zoo animals. A recent poll found that 78% of Venezuelans “reported trouble keeping themselves fed.”

Of course, this is not true for all Venezuelans.

Earlier this week President Nicolas Maduro was seen in a plush Istanbul restaurant lavishly dining on expensive steaks while smoking fine cigars, the check paid for by the wealth his regime has drained from his people. Once again we see that under socialism “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” Continue reading →

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Posted in Collapse, Crime, Cronyism, Government, History, Philosophy, Politics

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Progressives: The Real World vs. Neverland, by David C. Stolinsky

Posted on September 2, 2018 | Leave a comment

Faith, hope, and pixie dust is not much of a political philosophy. From David C. Stolinsky at gatestoneinstitute.org:

  • Many of these children in adult bodies were told, and actually believed, that better health care for everyone, including an unlimited number of illegal immigrants, would be attainable at a low cost, if only the government were to run it.
  • Many children in adult bodies also seem not to know that Socialism failed in the Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Romania, Albania, Bulgaria, China, North Korea, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, and Cuba, and is now failing in Venezuela. The irrational wish is evidently stronger than rational arithmetic.
  • These victims of arrested emotional development seem to confuse good motives with good results. They want better health care for a greater number of people at a lesser cost; so they fantasize that they can achieve it without denying care to those who are too old, too sick or too expensive to receive it. They kind-heartedly want a “more equal distribution of wealth”; so they fantasize that they can maneuver it without penalizing and discouraging the productive members of society, while rewarding and encouraging the unproductive ones.

“Not to know what happened before you were born is to remain forever a child,” Cicero astutely observed. For many self-described progressives today, however, this seems not to be a drawback. On the contrary, like adolescents — insisting that they are grown-ups when their parents get in the way of their fun, but then running home for all their basic needs and creature comforts — such people seem to give no thought to the past and equally little to the future.

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Posted in Crime, Debt, Economics, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Government, Media, Politics

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