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.
3 comments:
Leading in to my review of Francis Spufford's book "Red Plenty", I said:
'The idea of centralized economic planning is a very seductive one. It just seems to make sense that such planning would lead to more efficiency…less waste…and certainly less unnecessary human suffering than an environment in which millions of decision-makers, many of them in competition with one another, are making their own separate and uncoordinated decisions, resulting in pointless product redundancy, economic cycles driving unemployment, and lots of other bad things.'
It actually requires a fair level of intellectual sophistication...and/or knowledge of history...or personal experience...to see the problems with this line of thinking.
Even if by some miracle Communism had succeeded in providing material abundance, would it have been worth the millions of corpses, the gulags, the destruction of freedom, the prostition of art to politics, etc., etc.? Amazingly, some people will answer "yes". They must be possessed by demons.
@ G. Poulin. Yes, it is hard to make theoretical people in the future more important than actual ones today. It is being in love with a vision of mankind rather than human beings.
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