A 2016 Pew Foundation poll found that 69 percent of voters under the age of 30 expressed “a willingness to vote for a socialist president.” Have Americans forgotten what socialism means? Or is the younger generation simply unschooled in the subject? One suspects the latter, so here are nine things about socialism that every millennial (those born after 1982) should know.
- What socialism is. Socialism was defined in the early twentieth century as “government ownership of the means of production,” but by mid-century it had evolved to include income redistribution through the welfare state and the “progressive” income tax. The means have evolved, but the end — forced “equality” or egalitarianism — remains the same.
Socialism also involves a policy of “destructionism,” as Ludwig von Mises explained in his book Socialism. This is the purposeful destruction of the private enterprise system with onerous taxes, regulations, inflation, welfare, outright nationalization of industry. - Socialism will destroy your economic future. Socialism has been an economic failure wherever it has been implemented — whether we’re talking about Soviet socialism, Asian socialism, African socialism, Latin American socialism, or even Western European socialism. Democratic socialist Sweden failed to create any net new jobs from 1950 to 2005; and decades of nationalizing British industries after the Second World War led to Britain becoming the economic “sick man of Europe” that in 1976 had to be bailed out by the International Monetary Fund.
- You cannot fix or “reform” socialism. Socialism is always an economic failure because it is driven not by the market, not by profit and loss, not by the market-based decisions of workers, managers, investors, entrepreneurs, and customers, but by government bureaucratic planners and politicians who make decisions for ideological or political reasons.
- “Democratic” socialism can be just as disastrous as any other kind. Venezuela, Argentina, and Brazil are all economic basket cases today thanks to their brands of democratic socialism. Socialism is socialism regardless of whether it is imposed by a democracy or dictatorship.
- Socialism does not produce equality. In all socialist regimes a small political elite and their politically connected friends — the ones who direct the economy — live lavishly while everyone else is equal in one way only: they suffer an equality of poverty.
- Socialism has been responsible for the worst crimes in human history. In the twentieth century, millions of innocent people were murdered in the name of socialism. The Black Book of Communism, published by Harvard University Press in 1999, estimated the following death tolls: USSR (20 million); China (60 million); Vietnam (1 million); North Korea (2 million); Cambodia (2 million); Eastern Europe (1 million); Africa (1.7 million); and Latin America (150,000). These are not war-related deaths but mass murder of suspected dissenters by socialist governments.
- Fascism is a form of socialism. The Nazis called themselves national socialists to distinguish themselves from Russian international socialists. National Socialist economic policies represented a “violent anti-capitalistic attack,” as F.A. Hayek described it in The Road to Serfdom. “All of the leading men” of German and Italian fascism, Hayek pointed out, “began as socialists and ended as Fascists or Nazis.”
- Socialist welfare harms the poor. It does so in at least three ways — it encourages dependency rather than work; it crowds out private, charitable efforts to help the poor that are usually often far more successful; and because it destroys poor families, where welfare checks for single mothers have encouraged irresponsibility from men who no longer feel that they need to get a job and marry their “baby mother.” It was a liberal Democrat, Daniel Patrick Moynihan who pointed this out decades ago, including the terrible effects on black families in particular. Out-of-wedlock births have risen by more than 400 percent in America since 1960 — and children born to single parents are three times more likely to suffer behavioral problems; twice as likely, if they’re girls, to have children out of wedlock; and twice as likely, if they’re boys, to become involved in crime.
- The “progressive” income tax penalizes hard work, encourages tax evasion, and fuels the deadly sin of envy. That is why “a heavy progressive or graduated income tax” was the second plank in the ten-plank platform of The Communist Manifesto. It has always been every socialist’s favorite tool of “destructionism.”
Socialist countries are the most polluted in the world (think Brazil); socialized medicine is plagued everywhere by shortages, poor-quality care, and crippling bureaucracy; socialist or government-run industries, from the Post Office to the Department of Motor Vehicles, are universally denounced as bureaucratic blackholes; and socialized or “public” schools are inferior to private schools – especially in low-income neighborhoods. The road to Third World poverty and misery – and worse — is paved with socialist ideology. It’s not what you want for your future.
Thomas DiLorenzo is professor of economics at Loyola University Maryland and a member of the senior faculty of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. His latest book is The Problem with Socialism (Regnery, July 18, 2016).