Why Are People Still Socialists?

Source: AP Photo/Charles Krupa

As Democrat politicians across the country from mayors to Congressmen and Senators openly demand socialism for the U.S., capitalists should wonder why free market economics hasn’t survived the onslaught of socialism for the past 150 years? Laissez-faire reigned in the Dutch Republic from 1600 until Napoleon crushed it, and it dominated the UK and U.S. throughout the 19th century.

Capitalism has enjoyed brilliant defenders: Frederick Bastiat in France and Francis Wayland in the U.S. as well as the great British and French economists of the 19th century. In the 20th we were blessed with Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard and many more. More recently we’ve enjoyed the luminous books of Drs. Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams. All presented overwhelming evidence that socialism impoverishes and brutalizes the people while free markets enrich and liberates. But they have failed to convince a majority.

Why is it that socialism can fail miserably everywhere it has been tried for 150 years and still hold such an attraction for most people? It’s not just the lies that socialists tell, claiming none of those failed attempts were true socialism, that real socialism has never been tried. Intelligent people can see through the lies.

The failure is tactical. Defenders of capitalism have relied on economic consequences to persuade: capitalism works; socialism doesn’t. Socialists have won because they appeal to morality. The great poet T.S. Eliot understood this. Russel Kirk wrote in Eliot and his Age that for Eliot, “Economics must recognize the higher authority of ethics.”

Continue reading the article at Townhall Finance.

Socialists frighten about climate change and AI

I’m sure Elon Musk would be highly offended to know that he is a promoter of Marxism. After all, look at the number of businesses he has started. But he has admitted he only started those companies to promote change to cleaner forms of energy until the governments of the world recognize the problem of global climate change and pass the necessary laws to save us. By promoting global climate change (GCC) hysteria and fear about artificial intelligence (AI), while asserting that the problems are so large only governments can solve them, he is unwittingly promoting socialism. It’s an old socialist technique.

After centuries of attempts at socialism beginning with the Spartans, Plato’s Republic and Christian monasteries, atheists and deists (sentimental atheists) introduced the latest iteration of socialism in early 19th century France. Henri de Saint-Simon convinced his followers that the problems of the world were so large than only powerful states could solve them. He considered the chief problems to be poverty and inequality. Socialists were shocked and awed by the meager advances in the natural sciences so Saint-Simon proposed that a junta of scientists, led by a mathematician, should work together to solve France’s problems and dictate the solutions to compliant citizens. That has been the model for socialism since.