Willis Eschenbach / July 22, 2018

My cmnt: I include this excerpt from one of my favorite sites: Skating Under the Ice. Click the link to read the whole article and any of the other juicy gems from Willis.

I see that we now have socialists coming out of the political woodwork. This is quite strange to me because there has never been a successful socialist state. Socialism has been tried many, many times—in the USSR, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, the People’s Republic of Albania,  Czechoslovakia, Ethiopia, the People’s Republic of Angola, Belarus, the Peoples Republic of Benin, East Germany, Hungary, Venezuela, North Korea, Mongolia, Poland, Cuba, Romania, Myanmar, Cuba, South Yemen, the Peoples Republic of Bulgaria, Laos and Yugoslavia.

And in each and every one of these countries, socialism has not just failed—it has cratered with a huge toll in human suffering, economic deprivation, and death. Every time. No exceptions.

However, the socialist folks always have a ready-made excuse for the failure of socialism in all of these countries … in humorous form, the excuse goes like this:

Q: What’s the difference between Nazism and Socialism?

A: Nobody ever tried to excuse Nazism’s failures by saying “But it wasn’t TRUE Nazism” …

Here’s the most prominent American Socialist these days, engaging in a calm, measured, collegiate, reasonable debate on the merits of TRUE socialism:

Bernie Sanders is a millionaire “socialist” who just accidentally happens to own three houses, all of them probably nicer than yours. I guess George Orwell was right when he wrote that all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others … but I digress.

So … just what is this “socialism” that everyone is on about? At its core, it is an economic system where the government owns and controls the means of production and distribution of wealth. Here’s a dictionary definition:

Socialism: a political and economic theory of social organization that advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.

And here is Merriam-Webster on the subject:

Socialism: any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods.

Of course, in practice, the “community as a whole” or “the collective” or “the people” is just bafflegab for “the government”. In none of the socialist countries listed above did “the community as a whole” or “the workers” or “the people” end up making any of the important decisions. All power ended up in the hands of the central government, each and every time.