By Dom Nozzi
A fundamental premise of Marxism is that life is a zero-sum game. That is, when someone gains wealth or power, someone else must lose.
In part, that means the wealthy (the “bourgeoisie”), as a group, are inherently oppressors. The lower class (the “proletariat”) must, according to Marxists, engage in revolutionary struggle to, as a group, “heroically” overthrow the wealthy and create a heavy-handed, top-down socialist paradise where all in society experience not equality of opportunity, but equality of OUTCOME. In the Marxist (and Nazi Germany) regimes, glorious ends (utopia, salvation for the downtrodden, equal outcome extremism) justify ghastly cruel means.
How ghastly are these means?
Max Borders, in his After Collapse (2021), cites the following sobering, catastrophic, genocidal, brutally cruel statistics that exemplify means that could only be justified by utopian zombie crusaders who were convinced their Marxist or fascist (“national socialism”) ideology was bringing utopia. Shamefully and tellingly, a great many on the intellectual political left – in other words, those who had “drunk the Koolaide” on rescuing the downtrodden and heroically counting on their crusade to bring on a social justice paradise – engaged in decades of rationalizing away the following atrocities.
· 61,911,000 murdered by the Soviet Gulag State (“The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.”). One report finds that Stalin was responsible for 2 million deaths during his rule. According to Wikipedia, Bolshevik repression (also known as the “Red Terror”) from 1918 to 1922 was responsible for the execution of 100,000 people.
· 35,236,000 murdered by the Communist Chinese. One report notes that Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward policy, from 1958 to 1962, led to the deaths of up to 45 million people—easily making it the biggest episode of mass murder ever recorded. Another report finds that Mao was directly responsible for the murder of 70 million people.
· 2,035,000 murdered by the communist Khmer Rouge Hell State
· 1,670,000 murdered by the Vietnamese War State
· 1,072,000 murdered by Tito’s communist slaughterhouse
· In 2005, associate professor Benjamin Valentino stated that the number of non-combatants killed by communist regimes in the Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia alone ranged from a low of 21 million to a high of 70 million.
· In 2010, professor of economics Steven Rosefielde wrote in Red Holocaust that the internal contradictions of communist regimes caused the killing of approximately 60 million people and perhaps tens of millions more.
· In 2012, academic Alex J. Bellamy wrote that a "conservative estimate puts the total number of civilians deliberately killed by communists after the Second World War between 6.7 million and 15.5 million people, with the true figure probably much higher."
· In 2017, historian Stephen Kotkin wrote in The Wall Street Journal that 65 million people died prematurely under communist regimes according to demographers, and those deaths were a result of "mass deportations, forced labor camps and police-state terror" but mostly "from starvation as a result of its cruel projects of social engineering.
Results of Various Forms of Spending and Production
1. Using your own money for yourself = High concern for quality and cost.
2. Using someone else’s money for yourself = High concern for quality and low concern for cost.
3. Using your own money for someone else = Low concern for quality, high concern for cost.
4. Using someone else’s money for someone else (socialism) = Low concern for quality, low concern for cost.
What Is the Track Record of Socialism?
Looking back over the past century, Socialism seems to have had an exceptionally poor track record. The USSR, Eastern Europe, China, and many other countries had given socialism an earnest try in the 20th century. By most accounts, these attempts have all failed. Free-market Western Europe did much better than socialist Eastern Europe. The US did much better than the USSR. China barely made any progress for decades as a socialist country, and only once they started moving towards a capitalist system, did the country suddenly grow into an economic powerhouse. Even looking at smaller countries in Asia, those that adopted capitalism and free-market policies, like Singapore, Hong Kong, and South Korea, did much better than their neighbors who followed socialist policies. For example, Richard Pipes in Communism: A History (2001), informs us that the “infant mortality rate [in North Korea] is 88 per 1,000 live births, compared to South Korea’s 8, and the life expectancy for males is 48.9 years in North Korea, compared to South Korea’s 70.4. The GDP per capita in the north is $900, I the south, $13,700.”
I accept that none of these countries truly perfected or achieved ideal socialist policies. I accept that a great chunk of the problem was with the abuse of power, inherent among the leaders of these countries. But surely if a political system is too hard to implement correctly, and if it's too prone to abuse of power, that has to be counted as a strike against the political system as well.
As noted by Pipes (Communism: A History, 2001), “Communism was not a good idea that went wrong. It was a bad idea. From the day the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in 1917, there have been dozens of attempts made in every part of the world to install societies based on Communist principles. Moscow generously supported them with money, weapons, and guidance. Virtually all failed. In the end, Communism collapsed in Russia, too, and today survives in only a few countries – China, North Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba – and even there it is in the process of erosion: the Communists hold on to power but at the price of making far-reaching concessions to capitalism. Given this dismal record, it is reasonable to assume that there is something flawed either with the premises of Communism, or its program, or both…[The inability to change human nature has] forced communist regimes to resort to violence as a routine means of governance.”
Looking back in the past century, numerous different countries around the world made an earnest attempt at socialism. In the aggregate, they did not fare as well as the countries that attempted capitalism. Why do you think socialism should still be attempted given this track record?
https://www.reddit.com/r/socialism/comments/21s2nl/socialisms_track_record/
“Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.” ― Thomas Sowell
During the twentieth century, a succession of economists believed they had decisively refuted socialism as a system of political economy. From Ludwig von Mises to Friedrich Hayek, and from Milton Friedman to James Buchanan, they argued that centralized economic planning could not succeed in allocating our limited resources well or efficiently, and would inevitably lead to shortages, oversupplies, and decreasing prosperity. They took the failures of attempted socialist economies during the twentieth century as evidence that they were right.
And yet, increasingly many people today support centrally planned economies, and even claim to support socialism itself. Why? Did the economists miss something? Why did they believe that socialism would not work?
Over the last 100 years, over two dozen countries have attempted to implement socialist economies. The list includes not just the Soviet Union, Cuba, and North Korea, but Yugoslavia, Albania, Poland, Vietnam, Bulgaria, Romania, Venezuela, Somalia, Ethiopia, Cambodia, and many others. Countries in nearly every continent, with virtually every climate represented, with varying histories, cultures, languages, and traditions have tried—and consistently failed. In every case, the economies declined or collapsed, suffered reductions in prosperity and growing poverty, and in most cases eventually abandoned the attempts. Of course, the depressing results were not just in declining wealth: some 100 million innocent people have been killed by their own governments in the name of socialist, communist, and Marxist ideals.
The list of socialist nations over the past century illustrates, invariably, the failure of socialism. In each of these nations, we saw significant shortages, oversupplies, and decreasing prosperity:
Soviet Union
China
Cambodia
Cuba
East Germany
Ethiopia
North Korea
Poland
Romania
Venezuela
The photo below visually and starkly shows the success or desirability of socialism vs capitalism…
.
Level of support for socialism
Erin Duffin, Jun 21, 2022:
The popularity of socialism in the United States has been increasing among people who identify as Democrats, rising from 50 percent in 2010 to 65 percent in 2021. Over the same time period, support shrunk among Republicans from 19 percent to 10 percent.
Support for socialism jumps by nearly 10 percent among US youth amid pandemic depression
David Fitzgerald, Gabriel Black, October 22, 2020:
This year’s annual survey by the anti-communist Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, conducted by leading pollster firm YouGov, found an immense increase in support for socialism over the last year, particularly among those between the ages of 16 and 39.
Within the Gen Z group (ages 16-23), support for socialism increased nearly ten percentage points over the course of a single year: from 40 percent in 2019 to 49 percent when this poll was taken in September 2020.
Capitalism and Socialism Occur on a Continuum Measured by the Level of Economic Freedom
The economists Robert Lawson and Benjamin Powell note that “[b]oth economic theory and empirical evidence suggest that countries that embrace markets to a greater extent and eschew socialist policies to a greater extent enable humans to live wealthier, longer, better, and more fulfilling lives.”
A ranking of economic freedom clearly shows that the more economically free a nation (that is, the more capitalist), the more prosperous (and, I would add, the higher the quality of life or standard of living). The ranking conversely shows that the less economically free a nation (that it, the more socialist), the less prosperous (and, I would add, the lower the quality of life or standard of living).
Note that most Americans who support “democratic” socialism point to the examples of “Scandinavian Socialism.” But as the following rankings show, nearly all Scandinavian countries have a higher level of economic freedom (that is, are less socialist and more capitalist) than the United States.
https://www.heritage.org/index/about
https://www.heritage.org/index/ranking
Why is Hong Kong Not on the Above Economic Freedom Rankings?
Hong Kong sat atop the Heritage Foundation’s annual Index of Economic Freedom for 25 years. When the 27th edition of the index is released Thursday, Hong Kong won’t be found.
In explaining the decision to remove Hong Kong (and Macau) from the index, the editors noted that while both special administrative regions “offer their citizens more economic freedom than is available to the average citizen of China . . . developments in recent years have demonstrated unambiguously that those policies are ultimately controlled from Beijing.”
Indeed, the loss of political freedom and autonomy suffered by Hong Kong over the past two years has made that city almost indistinguishable in many respects from other major Chinese commercial centers like Shanghai and Beijing.
Extractive Versus Voluntary Free Market Economy
In his book, The Seven Deadly Economic Sins (2021), James R. Otteson points out that “[i]t was around [AD 1800]…that the idea began to spread that cooperative exchanges [competitive, free-market, voluntary] are not only allowable but morally commendable, and that extractive exchanges [involuntary conquest, slavery, theft] are not morally neutral but morally objectionable.
“As the idea spread,” Otteson informs us,
more and more positive-sum exchanges took place, leading to the explosion of wealth that the world has seen over the last two centuries. And that increase in wealth has been not only spectacular but historically unprecedented. The average person alive in 1800 was no wealthier than the average human alive 100,000 years ago: both lived on less than $3 per person per day in contemporary dollars. By contrast, the average person alive in the world today enjoys $48 per day, a 16-fold increase. In the US today, people on average enjoy $164 per day, an incredible 55-fold real increase. In 1900, approximately 90 percent of all people on earth lived at the low historical average of under $3 per person per day, which the United Nations defines as ‘absolute poverty.’ Today, that proportion stands at approximately 9 percent, and it is falling rapidly, Indeed, we are on the brink of reducing the proportion of people living at absolute poverty to zero – an incredible achievement, though one that almost no one seems to know about…almost all of us are gaining, with more gaining each year…Phelps (2013) calls it ‘mass flourishing’: for the first time in human history, even the low, the disrespected, and the disenfranchised have been able to improve their condition, and to an extent never seen before.”
In our age, “communist” and “socialist” ideology has smuggled the utterly failed, ruinous idea of the zero-sum extractive economy back into our world. This ideology is a direct assault on prosperity and quality (as we can see in the former Soviet Union, East Germany, North Korea, Venezuela, and Cuba) by elevating the interests of the group over the rights of the individual.
By vilifying or privileging groups based on whether they are “oppressor” or “oppressed” groups, these failed ideologies are focused not on using the profoundly effective free market, voluntary, capitalist tools to significantly expand prosperity and quality, but instead on “heroically” and “morally” extracting wealth from “oppressors” and funnel that wealth to the “oppressed.” This is done through punishing taxation.
It must also be pointed out that public sector provision of goods and services is a form of an extractive economy -- by extracting money in the form of taxation from citizens.
This puts an extreme, counterproductive drag on societal economics, and indicates that a powerful prosperity and quality boost can be provided by privatizing as many goods and services as possible in a society. That is, to have society move from being extractive to being more free-market voluntary.