Socialism In Stages

Even soft, incremental expansions of government produce poverty.

by Dan Oliver, Jr. - December 15th, 2009 - National Review

America debated three strategies during the Cold War. The Right wanted “roll back” — dreams of Patton driving his tank into Red Square. The Left wanted détente — which is French for “surrender.” The country loosely followed containment, a program outlined by George Kennan in 1946, which argued that the political contradictions of the Soviet state would eventually cause its own demise. America had but to be patient.

Kennan may have been the first to realize that a society based on Communism would not survive politically, but it was Ludwig von Mises, in his 1922 work Socialism, who demonstrated that any such society could not survive economically.

It is the intellectual incompetence of our American school system that has seriously undermined our society. The problem with the incremental socialism that is taking over America is simple. Our own people are too uneducated to understand what is happening. Thanks to teachers who wanted a perfect society built along their passionate belief in socialism we have a citizenry that cannot think.

Why is it so hard to believe in the results that capitalism has delivered? Why is it so hard for people to compare the two systems and pick the one that has proved to work? Why do people so fervently desire the prefection of perceived results that they will turn over their nation to a system that always is corrupt and evil and over the long haul always fails?

Wishful thinking is not going to change the world. Plenty of leading thinkers have explained again and again why socialism doesn't work. Yet again and again, smart people delude themselves with the belief that - THIS TIME - they can make it work.

It doesn't.