The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Idea

I posted a link to the above title Revisited in my Links to Keep You Busy While I'm Gone last week. I kept the tab up because I keep grabbing quotes from it for replies in emails and on other sites. I have liked it so much that I was about to repost it just a week later, but realised I had not published the original by the same author at Unfashionable Truths, Edward Campbell The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Idea That Won't Die, which came out just after the election of Mamdani. 

If socialism fails everywhere it’s tried, why does it keep coming back—even in rich societies that should know better? Because it appeals to emotion more than economics. It offers moral clarity in a messy world: victims and villains, righteous poor, evil billionaires. It turns resentment into righteousness and politics into redemption. For people disillusioned with complexity, it feels better to blame than to build.

It also sells the oldest illusion in politics—the promise of something for nothing. Socialism sounds like a “free lunch” because it hides the cost. It treats wealth as if it appears by magic, ready to be divided up. People want fairness, but they forget scarcity. Capitalism may be harsh, but it tells the truth: everything has a cost, and pretending otherwise doesn’t make it disappear.

For those who worry that he is a cheerleader for capitalist excess, he also recently wrote The Corruption of Capitalism - How America Killed Market Discipline.  We'll come back to that soon as well.