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Memory Hole: Socialist Failures
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Libertarian Lilly
May 23, 2012, 1:22:43 PM5/23/12
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http://lewrockwell.com/north/north1141.html
Memory Hole: Socialist Failures
by Gary North
Tea Party Economist
( Recently by Gary North: $72 Billion of Tax Money Spent on Global
Non-Warming )
What is the longest-running socialist experiment? What has its success
been?
If someone asked you to defend the idea that socialism has failed, what
would you offer as your example?
Where did modern socialism begin?
In America.
That's right: in the land of the free and the home of the braves. On
Indian reservations.
They were invented to control adult warriors. They had as a goal to keep
the native population in poverty and impotent.
Did the system work? You bet it did.
Has the experiment been a failure? On the contrary, it has been a success.
When was the last time you heard of a successful Indian uprising?
Are the people poor? The poorest in America.
Are they on the dole? Of course.
Last year, the U. S. Department of Agriculture allocated $21 million to
provide subsidized electricity to residents on the reservations whose
homes are the most distant from jobs and opportunities. You can read about
this here. This will keep them poor. Tribal power means tribal impotence.
The tribes are dependent. They will stay dependent. That was what the
program was designed to achieve.
For some reason, textbooks do not offer a page or two on the corruption,
the bureaucratization, and the multi-generation poverty created by
tribal-run socialism. Here we have a series of government-run social
laboratories. How successful have they been? Where are reservations that
have systematically brought people out of poverty?
The next one will be the first.
WORKERS' PARADISES
The Soviet Union lasted as a socialist worker's paradise from 1917 until
1991. As a direct result of that experiment, at least 30 million Russians
died. It may have been twice that. China's experiment was shorter: 1949 to
1978. Perhaps 60 million Chinese died.
The system failed to deliver the promised goods. I can think of no topic
more suitable for a class in economics than a discussion of the failure of
socialism. The same is true of a course in modern world history. A course
in political science should cover this failure in detail.
They don't, of course. They do not begin with the fundamental challenge to
socialist economic theory, Ludwig von Mises' 1920 essay, Economic
Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth. Why not? Because most social
scientists, economists, and historians have never heard of it. Among
people over age 50, the few who did hear of it heard about it from some
pro-socialist or Keynesian advocate, who wrote what he had been told in
graduate school in the 1960s, namely, that the article was totally refuted
by Oskar Lange in 1936.
They are never told that when Lange, a Communist, returned to Poland in
1947 to serve in several high-level posts, the Communist government did
not invite him to implement his grand theory of "market socialism." No
other socialist nation ever did.
For 50 years, the textbooks, if they mentioned Mises at all, said only
that Mises had been totally refuted by Lange. The Establishment academics
dropped Mises down Orwell's memory hole.
On September 10, 1990, multimillionaire socialist author-economist Robert
Heilbroner published an article in the New Yorker. It was titled "After
Communism." The USSR was visibly collapsing. In it, he recounted the story
of the refutation of Mises. In graduate school, he and his peers were
taught that Lange had refuted Mises. Then he announced: "Mises was right."
Yet in his best-selling textbook on the history of economic thought, The
Worldly Philosophers, he never referred to Mises.
THE VISIBLE FAILURES
The universal failure of twentieth-century socialism began from the
opening months of Lenin's takeover of Russia. Output declined sharply. He
inaugurated a marginally capitalist reform in 1920; the New Economic
Policy. That saved the regime from collapse. The NEP was abolished by
Stalin.
Decade after decade, Stalin murdered people. The minimal estimate is 20
million. This was denied by virtually the entire intelligentsia of the
West. Only in 1968 did Robert Conquest publish his monumental book, The
Great Terror. His estimate today: closer to 30 million. The book was
pilloried. Wikipedia's entry on the book is accurate.
Published during the Vietnam War and during an upsurge of revolutionary
Marxist sentiment in Western universities and intellectual circles (see
The Sixties), The Great Terror received a hostile reception.
Hostility to Conquest's account of the purges was heightened by various
factors. The first was that he refused to accept the assertion made by
Nikita Khrushchev, and supported by many Western leftists, that Stalin
and his purges were an aberration from the ideals of the Revolution and
were contrary to the principles of Leninism. Conquest argued that
Stalinism was a natural consequence of the system established by Lenin,
although he conceded that the personal character traits of Stalin had
brought about the particular horrors of the late 1930s. Neal Ascherson
noted: "Everyone by then could agree that Stalin was a very wicked man
and a very evil one, but we still wanted to believe in Lenin; and
Conquest said that Lenin was just as bad and that Stalin was simply
carrying out Lenin's programme."
The second factor (1918) was Conquest's sharp criticism of Western
intellectuals for what he saw as their blindness towards the realities
of the Soviet Union, both in the 1930s and, in some cases, even in the
1960s. Figures such as Beatrice and Sidney Webb, George Bernard Shaw,
Jean-Paul Sartre, Walter Duranty, Sir Bernard Pares, Harold Laski, D. N.
Pritt, Theodore Dreiser and Romain Rolland were accused of being dupes
of Stalin and apologists for his regime for various comments they had
made denying, excusing, or justifying various aspects of the purges.
The Left still hates the book, still attempts to say that he exaggerated
the figures.
Then came The Black Book of Communism (1999) which puts the minimum
estimate of citizens executed by Communists at 85 million, with 100
million or more likely. The book was published by Harvard University
Press, so it could not be dismissed as a Right-wing fat tract.
The Left tries to ignore it.
BLIND MEN'S BLUFF
The response of academia has been to dismiss the entire experiment as
misguided, but not inherently evil. The cost in lives lost is rarely
mentioned. Before 1991, this was even more rarely mentioned. Prior to
Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago (1973), it was considered a breach of
etiquette for an academic to do more than mention it in passing, limiting
it to Stalin's purges of the Communist Party in the late 1930s, and almost
never mentioning forced starvation as a matter of public policy. "Ukraine?
Never heard of it." "Kulaks? What are kulaks?"
The decrepit state of all socialist economies from start to finish is not
mentioned. Above all, there is no reference to critics in the West who
warned that these economies were large-scale Potempkin villages - fake
towns created by the government to mislead the Leftist faithful who came
to see the future. They returned home with glowing accounts.
There is a book about these naive, trusting souls, who were taken in
completely, Paul Hollander's Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western
Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba, 1928-1978. It was
published by Oxford University Press in 1981. It was ignored by the
intelligentsia for a decade.
The best description of these people that I have ever read comes from
Malcolm Muggeridge, who spent the early 1930s as a reporter for The
Guardian in Moscow. Everything he wrote was censored before it was sent to
England. He knew this. He could not report the truth, and The Guardian
would not have reported it if he had. This is from his volume 1 of his
autobiography, Chronicles of Wasted Time.
For resident foreign journalists in Moscow the arrival of the
distinguished visitors was also a gala occasion, for a different reason.
They provided us with our best - almost our only - comic relief. For
instance, when we heard [George Bernard] Shaw, accompanied by Lady Astor
(who was photographed cutting his hair), declare that he was delighted
to find there was no food shortage in the USSR. Or [Harold] Laski
singing the praises of Stalin's new Soviet Constitution. . . . I have
never forgotten these visitors, or ceased to marvel at them, at how they
have gone on from strength to strength, continuing to lighten our
darkness, and to guide, counsel and instruct us; on occasion,
momentarily abashed, but always ready to pick themselves up, put on
their cardboard helmets, mount Rosinante, and go galloping off on yet
another foray on behalf of the down-trodden and oppressed. They are
unquestionably one of the wonders of the age, and I shall treasure till
I die as a blessed memory the spectacle of them travelling with radiant
optimism through a famished countryside, wandering in happy bands about
squalid, over-crowded towns, listening with unshakeable faith to the
fatuous patter of carefully trained and indoctrinated guides, repeating
like schoolchildren a multiplication table, the bogus statistics and
mindless slogans endlessly intoned to them. There, I would think, an
earnest office-holder in some local branch of the League of Nations
Union, there a godly Quaker who once had tea with Gandhi, there an
inveigher against the Means Test and the Blasphemy Laws, there a staunch
upholder of free speech and human rights, there an indomitable preventer
of cruelty to animals; there scarred and worthy veterans of a hundred
battles for truth, freedom and justice - all, all chanting the praises
of Stalin and his Dictatorship of the Proletariat. It was as though a
vegetarian society had come out with a passionate plea for cannibalism,
or Hitler had been nominated posthumously for the Nobel Peace Prize.
This phenomenon did not end in the 1930s. It went on to the last gasp of
the Soviets' economic deception. The long-term moral and intellectual
bankruptcy of the West's intellectual leaders was finally exposed in 1991
by the acknowledged economic bankruptcy and tyranny of the Marxist regimes
that the West had accepted as a valid alternative to capitalism.
No better example of this intellectual self-deception can be found than
the case of Paul Samuelson, economics professor at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, the first American to win the Nobel Prize in
economics (1970), former Newsweek columnist, and the author of by far the
most influential economics textbook of the post-war world (1948-present):
at least three million copies, 31 foreign languages. He announced in the
1989 edition of his textbook: "The Soviet economy is proof that, contrary
to what many skeptics had earlier believed, a socialist command economy
can function and even thrive."
Mark Skousen found that gem. He also found this one, far more damning.
THE SOVIET EXPERIMENT
Felix Somary records in his autobiography a discussion he had with the
economist Joseph Schumpeter and the sociologist Max Weber in 1918.
Schumpeter was an Austrian economist who was not an Austrian School
economist. He later wrote the most influential monograph on the history of
economic thought. Weber was the most prestigious academic social scientist
in the world until he died in 1920.
Schumpeter expressed happiness regarding the Russian Revolution. The USSR
would be a test case for socialism. Weber warned that this would cause
untold misery. Schumpeter replied: "That may well be, but it would be a
good laboratory." Weber responded: "A laboratory heaped with human
corpses!" Schumpeter retorted: "Every anatomy classroom is the same
thing." (Felix Somary, The Raven of Zurich [New York: St. Martin's, 1986],
p. 121.)
Schumpeter was a moral monster. Let us not mince words. He was a highly
sophisticated man, but he was at bottom a moral monster. Anyone who could
dismiss the deaths of millions like this is a moral monster. Weber stormed
out of the room. I don't blame him.
Weber died in 1920. That was the year in which Mises' essay appeared:
Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth. Weber gave it a
footnote in his masterpiece, published posthumously as Economy and Society
(p. 107). Weber understood its importance as soon as he read it. Academic
economists did not. Even today, there are few references to it.
Mises explained analytically why the socialist system is irrational: no
capital markets. No one knows what anything should cost. He said that the
systems would either violate the commitment to total planning or else fail
totally. He has never been forgiven for this breach of etiquette. He was
right, and the intellectuals were wrong. The socialist commonwealths have
collapsed, except for North Korea and Cuba. Worse, he was right in terms
of simple market theory that any intelligent person can understand. That
article is a testimony to the West's intellectuals: "There are none so
blind as those who refuse to see."
THE PROOF OF THE PUDDING
Mises believed that the proof of the pudding is in the recipe. If it adds
salt instead of sugar, it will not be sweet. But academia is committed
officially to empiricism. It thinks statistical tests should confirm
theory. But the tests came for decades. The socialist economies failed
them and then published fake statistics. But still the West's
intellectuals insisted that the socialist ideal was morally sound. They
insisted that the results will eventually prove the theory right.
Nikita Khrushchev was famous for saying this to Nixon in the famous
"kitchen debate" of 1959. He had been a bureaucrat who survived under
Stalin by overseeing the murder of tens of thousands of people in Ukraine.
He told Nixon, "We will bury you." He was wrong.
College students are not informed of either the theory of socialism nor
the magnitude of its failures, both economically and demographically. In
the pre-1991 era, this was easier than it is today. The intelligentsia now
has to admit that capitalism is more productive than socialism. So, the
tactic now is to say that it is morally deficient. Worse, it ignores
ecology. This was Heilbroner's recommended strategy in his 1990 article.
He said that socialists would have to switch from charging capitalism with
inefficiency and waste to charging it with environmental destruction.
CONCLUSION
The comprehensive nature of the failure of socialism is not taught in
college textbooks. The topic is glossed over wherever possible. It was
easier to impose sanctions against anyone in the related worlds of
academia and journalism before 1991.
Deng Xiaoping announced his version of Lenin's New Economic Policy in
1978. But that did not get much publicity.
In 1991, Humpty-Dumpty fell. All the kings horses and all the king's men
could not put him together again. Gorbachev presided over the final gasp
in 1991. He received "Time Magazine's Man of the Decade" in 1990. In 1991,
he became an employed ex-dictator. Socialism failed . . . totally. But the
intelligentsia still refuses to embrace the free market social philosophy
of Mises, the man who predicted the failures of socialism, and who
provided arguments to support his universal condemnation.
That is why it is a good idea to predict the demise of bad economic
policies, along with your analysis. "I told you so, and I told you why"
beats "I told you so."
May 23, 2012
Gary North [send him mail] is the author of Mises on Money. Visit
http://www.garynorth.com. He is also the author of a free 20-volume
series, An Economic Commentary on the Bible.
Copyright © 2012 Gary North
Memory Hole: Socialist Failures
by Gary North
Tea Party Economist
( Recently by Gary North: $72 Billion of Tax Money Spent on Global
Non-Warming )
What is the longest-running socialist experiment? What has its success
been?
If someone asked you to defend the idea that socialism has failed, what
would you offer as your example?
Where did modern socialism begin?
In America.
That's right: in the land of the free and the home of the braves. On
Indian reservations.
They were invented to control adult warriors. They had as a goal to keep
the native population in poverty and impotent.
Did the system work? You bet it did.
Has the experiment been a failure? On the contrary, it has been a success.
When was the last time you heard of a successful Indian uprising?
Are the people poor? The poorest in America.
Are they on the dole? Of course.
Last year, the U. S. Department of Agriculture allocated $21 million to
provide subsidized electricity to residents on the reservations whose
homes are the most distant from jobs and opportunities. You can read about
this here. This will keep them poor. Tribal power means tribal impotence.
The tribes are dependent. They will stay dependent. That was what the
program was designed to achieve.
For some reason, textbooks do not offer a page or two on the corruption,
the bureaucratization, and the multi-generation poverty created by
tribal-run socialism. Here we have a series of government-run social
laboratories. How successful have they been? Where are reservations that
have systematically brought people out of poverty?
The next one will be the first.
WORKERS' PARADISES
The Soviet Union lasted as a socialist worker's paradise from 1917 until
1991. As a direct result of that experiment, at least 30 million Russians
died. It may have been twice that. China's experiment was shorter: 1949 to
1978. Perhaps 60 million Chinese died.
The system failed to deliver the promised goods. I can think of no topic
more suitable for a class in economics than a discussion of the failure of
socialism. The same is true of a course in modern world history. A course
in political science should cover this failure in detail.
They don't, of course. They do not begin with the fundamental challenge to
socialist economic theory, Ludwig von Mises' 1920 essay, Economic
Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth. Why not? Because most social
scientists, economists, and historians have never heard of it. Among
people over age 50, the few who did hear of it heard about it from some
pro-socialist or Keynesian advocate, who wrote what he had been told in
graduate school in the 1960s, namely, that the article was totally refuted
by Oskar Lange in 1936.
They are never told that when Lange, a Communist, returned to Poland in
1947 to serve in several high-level posts, the Communist government did
not invite him to implement his grand theory of "market socialism." No
other socialist nation ever did.
For 50 years, the textbooks, if they mentioned Mises at all, said only
that Mises had been totally refuted by Lange. The Establishment academics
dropped Mises down Orwell's memory hole.
On September 10, 1990, multimillionaire socialist author-economist Robert
Heilbroner published an article in the New Yorker. It was titled "After
Communism." The USSR was visibly collapsing. In it, he recounted the story
of the refutation of Mises. In graduate school, he and his peers were
taught that Lange had refuted Mises. Then he announced: "Mises was right."
Yet in his best-selling textbook on the history of economic thought, The
Worldly Philosophers, he never referred to Mises.
THE VISIBLE FAILURES
The universal failure of twentieth-century socialism began from the
opening months of Lenin's takeover of Russia. Output declined sharply. He
inaugurated a marginally capitalist reform in 1920; the New Economic
Policy. That saved the regime from collapse. The NEP was abolished by
Stalin.
Decade after decade, Stalin murdered people. The minimal estimate is 20
million. This was denied by virtually the entire intelligentsia of the
West. Only in 1968 did Robert Conquest publish his monumental book, The
Great Terror. His estimate today: closer to 30 million. The book was
pilloried. Wikipedia's entry on the book is accurate.
Published during the Vietnam War and during an upsurge of revolutionary
Marxist sentiment in Western universities and intellectual circles (see
The Sixties), The Great Terror received a hostile reception.
Hostility to Conquest's account of the purges was heightened by various
factors. The first was that he refused to accept the assertion made by
Nikita Khrushchev, and supported by many Western leftists, that Stalin
and his purges were an aberration from the ideals of the Revolution and
were contrary to the principles of Leninism. Conquest argued that
Stalinism was a natural consequence of the system established by Lenin,
although he conceded that the personal character traits of Stalin had
brought about the particular horrors of the late 1930s. Neal Ascherson
noted: "Everyone by then could agree that Stalin was a very wicked man
and a very evil one, but we still wanted to believe in Lenin; and
Conquest said that Lenin was just as bad and that Stalin was simply
carrying out Lenin's programme."
The second factor (1918) was Conquest's sharp criticism of Western
intellectuals for what he saw as their blindness towards the realities
of the Soviet Union, both in the 1930s and, in some cases, even in the
1960s. Figures such as Beatrice and Sidney Webb, George Bernard Shaw,
Jean-Paul Sartre, Walter Duranty, Sir Bernard Pares, Harold Laski, D. N.
Pritt, Theodore Dreiser and Romain Rolland were accused of being dupes
of Stalin and apologists for his regime for various comments they had
made denying, excusing, or justifying various aspects of the purges.
The Left still hates the book, still attempts to say that he exaggerated
the figures.
Then came The Black Book of Communism (1999) which puts the minimum
estimate of citizens executed by Communists at 85 million, with 100
million or more likely. The book was published by Harvard University
Press, so it could not be dismissed as a Right-wing fat tract.
The Left tries to ignore it.
BLIND MEN'S BLUFF
The response of academia has been to dismiss the entire experiment as
misguided, but not inherently evil. The cost in lives lost is rarely
mentioned. Before 1991, this was even more rarely mentioned. Prior to
Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago (1973), it was considered a breach of
etiquette for an academic to do more than mention it in passing, limiting
it to Stalin's purges of the Communist Party in the late 1930s, and almost
never mentioning forced starvation as a matter of public policy. "Ukraine?
Never heard of it." "Kulaks? What are kulaks?"
The decrepit state of all socialist economies from start to finish is not
mentioned. Above all, there is no reference to critics in the West who
warned that these economies were large-scale Potempkin villages - fake
towns created by the government to mislead the Leftist faithful who came
to see the future. They returned home with glowing accounts.
There is a book about these naive, trusting souls, who were taken in
completely, Paul Hollander's Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western
Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba, 1928-1978. It was
published by Oxford University Press in 1981. It was ignored by the
intelligentsia for a decade.
The best description of these people that I have ever read comes from
Malcolm Muggeridge, who spent the early 1930s as a reporter for The
Guardian in Moscow. Everything he wrote was censored before it was sent to
England. He knew this. He could not report the truth, and The Guardian
would not have reported it if he had. This is from his volume 1 of his
autobiography, Chronicles of Wasted Time.
For resident foreign journalists in Moscow the arrival of the
distinguished visitors was also a gala occasion, for a different reason.
They provided us with our best - almost our only - comic relief. For
instance, when we heard [George Bernard] Shaw, accompanied by Lady Astor
(who was photographed cutting his hair), declare that he was delighted
to find there was no food shortage in the USSR. Or [Harold] Laski
singing the praises of Stalin's new Soviet Constitution. . . . I have
never forgotten these visitors, or ceased to marvel at them, at how they
have gone on from strength to strength, continuing to lighten our
darkness, and to guide, counsel and instruct us; on occasion,
momentarily abashed, but always ready to pick themselves up, put on
their cardboard helmets, mount Rosinante, and go galloping off on yet
another foray on behalf of the down-trodden and oppressed. They are
unquestionably one of the wonders of the age, and I shall treasure till
I die as a blessed memory the spectacle of them travelling with radiant
optimism through a famished countryside, wandering in happy bands about
squalid, over-crowded towns, listening with unshakeable faith to the
fatuous patter of carefully trained and indoctrinated guides, repeating
like schoolchildren a multiplication table, the bogus statistics and
mindless slogans endlessly intoned to them. There, I would think, an
earnest office-holder in some local branch of the League of Nations
Union, there a godly Quaker who once had tea with Gandhi, there an
inveigher against the Means Test and the Blasphemy Laws, there a staunch
upholder of free speech and human rights, there an indomitable preventer
of cruelty to animals; there scarred and worthy veterans of a hundred
battles for truth, freedom and justice - all, all chanting the praises
of Stalin and his Dictatorship of the Proletariat. It was as though a
vegetarian society had come out with a passionate plea for cannibalism,
or Hitler had been nominated posthumously for the Nobel Peace Prize.
This phenomenon did not end in the 1930s. It went on to the last gasp of
the Soviets' economic deception. The long-term moral and intellectual
bankruptcy of the West's intellectual leaders was finally exposed in 1991
by the acknowledged economic bankruptcy and tyranny of the Marxist regimes
that the West had accepted as a valid alternative to capitalism.
No better example of this intellectual self-deception can be found than
the case of Paul Samuelson, economics professor at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, the first American to win the Nobel Prize in
economics (1970), former Newsweek columnist, and the author of by far the
most influential economics textbook of the post-war world (1948-present):
at least three million copies, 31 foreign languages. He announced in the
1989 edition of his textbook: "The Soviet economy is proof that, contrary
to what many skeptics had earlier believed, a socialist command economy
can function and even thrive."
Mark Skousen found that gem. He also found this one, far more damning.
THE SOVIET EXPERIMENT
Felix Somary records in his autobiography a discussion he had with the
economist Joseph Schumpeter and the sociologist Max Weber in 1918.
Schumpeter was an Austrian economist who was not an Austrian School
economist. He later wrote the most influential monograph on the history of
economic thought. Weber was the most prestigious academic social scientist
in the world until he died in 1920.
Schumpeter expressed happiness regarding the Russian Revolution. The USSR
would be a test case for socialism. Weber warned that this would cause
untold misery. Schumpeter replied: "That may well be, but it would be a
good laboratory." Weber responded: "A laboratory heaped with human
corpses!" Schumpeter retorted: "Every anatomy classroom is the same
thing." (Felix Somary, The Raven of Zurich [New York: St. Martin's, 1986],
p. 121.)
Schumpeter was a moral monster. Let us not mince words. He was a highly
sophisticated man, but he was at bottom a moral monster. Anyone who could
dismiss the deaths of millions like this is a moral monster. Weber stormed
out of the room. I don't blame him.
Weber died in 1920. That was the year in which Mises' essay appeared:
Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth. Weber gave it a
footnote in his masterpiece, published posthumously as Economy and Society
(p. 107). Weber understood its importance as soon as he read it. Academic
economists did not. Even today, there are few references to it.
Mises explained analytically why the socialist system is irrational: no
capital markets. No one knows what anything should cost. He said that the
systems would either violate the commitment to total planning or else fail
totally. He has never been forgiven for this breach of etiquette. He was
right, and the intellectuals were wrong. The socialist commonwealths have
collapsed, except for North Korea and Cuba. Worse, he was right in terms
of simple market theory that any intelligent person can understand. That
article is a testimony to the West's intellectuals: "There are none so
blind as those who refuse to see."
THE PROOF OF THE PUDDING
Mises believed that the proof of the pudding is in the recipe. If it adds
salt instead of sugar, it will not be sweet. But academia is committed
officially to empiricism. It thinks statistical tests should confirm
theory. But the tests came for decades. The socialist economies failed
them and then published fake statistics. But still the West's
intellectuals insisted that the socialist ideal was morally sound. They
insisted that the results will eventually prove the theory right.
Nikita Khrushchev was famous for saying this to Nixon in the famous
"kitchen debate" of 1959. He had been a bureaucrat who survived under
Stalin by overseeing the murder of tens of thousands of people in Ukraine.
He told Nixon, "We will bury you." He was wrong.
College students are not informed of either the theory of socialism nor
the magnitude of its failures, both economically and demographically. In
the pre-1991 era, this was easier than it is today. The intelligentsia now
has to admit that capitalism is more productive than socialism. So, the
tactic now is to say that it is morally deficient. Worse, it ignores
ecology. This was Heilbroner's recommended strategy in his 1990 article.
He said that socialists would have to switch from charging capitalism with
inefficiency and waste to charging it with environmental destruction.
CONCLUSION
The comprehensive nature of the failure of socialism is not taught in
college textbooks. The topic is glossed over wherever possible. It was
easier to impose sanctions against anyone in the related worlds of
academia and journalism before 1991.
Deng Xiaoping announced his version of Lenin's New Economic Policy in
1978. But that did not get much publicity.
In 1991, Humpty-Dumpty fell. All the kings horses and all the king's men
could not put him together again. Gorbachev presided over the final gasp
in 1991. He received "Time Magazine's Man of the Decade" in 1990. In 1991,
he became an employed ex-dictator. Socialism failed . . . totally. But the
intelligentsia still refuses to embrace the free market social philosophy
of Mises, the man who predicted the failures of socialism, and who
provided arguments to support his universal condemnation.
That is why it is a good idea to predict the demise of bad economic
policies, along with your analysis. "I told you so, and I told you why"
beats "I told you so."
May 23, 2012
Gary North [send him mail] is the author of Mises on Money. Visit
http://www.garynorth.com. He is also the author of a free 20-volume
series, An Economic Commentary on the Bible.
Copyright © 2012 Gary North
Libertarian Lilly
May 23, 2012, 1:24:32 PM5/23/12
to
Charles Packer
May 25, 2012, 6:35:50 AM5/25/12
to
On May 23, 1:24 pm, Libertarian Lilly <L...@nospam.com> wrote:
> What is the longest-running socialist experiment? What has its success
> been?
> ...
> What is the longest-running socialist experiment? What has its success
> been?
> Has the experiment been a failure? On the contrary, it has been a success.
> When was the last time you heard of a successful Indian uprising?
> Are the people poor? The poorest in America.
Hmm...I'm employed by one of their enterprises.
> When was the last time you heard of a successful Indian uprising?
> Are the people poor? The poorest in America.
6000+ employees, $1 billion in revenues...
http://tinyurl.com/bqtng58
--
Charles Packer
http://cpacker.org/whatnews
mailboxATcpacker.org
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