INTRODUCTION
1. James Buchanan, “Economics and Its Scientific Neighbors.” In The Collected Works of James Buchanan Vol. 17 Moral Science and Moral Order (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001), 7.
2. Institute of Politics at Harvard University, “Survey of Young Americans’ Attitudes toward Politics and Public Service,” Harvard University, http://iop.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/content/160423_Harvard%20IOP_Spring%202016_TOPLINE_u.pdf.
3. Bradford Richardson, “Millennials would rather live in socialist or communist nation than under capitalism: Poll,” Washington Times, November 4, 2017, https://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/nov/4/majority-millennials-want-live-socialist-fascist-o/.
4. “Young Democratic Socialists of America,” YDSA, http://www.ydsusa.org/fall_drive.
5. Alex Thompson and Diamond Naga Siu, “Socialism is surging on college campuses,” Vice News, October 27, 2017, https://news.vice.com/en_ca/article/mb9p44/socialism-is-surging-on-college-campuses-this-fall.
6. “Red Century,” in Opinion Section, New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/column/red-century.
7. “The first Democratic debate: full rush transcript,” CBS News, October 13, 2015, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-first-democratic-debate-full-rush-transcript/.
8. Joshua Hall and Robert Lawson, “Economic Freedom of the World: An Accounting of the Literature,” Contemporary Economic Policy 32, no. 1 (2014): 1–19, https://doi.org/10.1111/coep.12010.
9. Johan Norberg, “How Laissez-Faire Made Sweden Rich,” Libertarianism.org, October 25, 2013, https://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/how-laissez-faire-made-sweden-rich.
CHAPTER ONE
1. We say almost because in 2012 the Center for Participant Education, a student organization at Bob’s alma mater, Florida State University, held a program extolling the virtues of “Democratic North Korea.” See https://archive.org/details/ralphieleaks_gmail_CPE5.
2. Valley News Editorial Board, “Close The Gaps: Disparities That Threaten America,” Bernie Sanders Senate website, August 5, 2011, https://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/must-read/close-the-gaps-disparities-that-threaten-america.
3. David Sirota, “Hugo Chavez’s economic miracle,” Salon, March 6, 2013, http://www.salon.com/2013/03/06/hugo_chavezs_economic_miracle/.
4. North Korea and Cuba aren’t rated. The latest economic freedom ratings are available online here: https://www.fraserinstitute.org/economic-freedom.
5. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (New York: Modern Library, 1937 [1776]), 423.
6. Sabrina Martin, “Venezuelan Regime Threatens to Expropriate Bakeries, Jeopardizing Bread,” PanAm Post, March 13, 2017, https://panampost.com/sabrina-martin/2017/03/13/venezuela-regime-threatens-expropriate-bakeries-jeopardizing-bread/.
7. Tim Worstall, “Congratulations to Bolivarian Socialism: Venezuela is Now The Country with No Beer,” Forbes, April 30, 2016, https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2016/04/30/congratulations-to-bolivarian-socialism-venezuela-country-with-no-beer/#53de85c51e53.
8. John Otis, “Venezuela Is Running Out of Beer Amid Severe Economic Crisis,” National Public Radio, May 31, 2016, https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/05/31/480126445/venezuela-is-running-out-of-beer-amid-severe-economic-crisis.
9. Vivian Sequera, “Venezuelans report big weight losses in 2017 as hunger hits,” Reuters, February 21, 2018, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-food/venezuelans-report-big-weight-losses-in-2017-as-hunger-hits-idUSKCN1G52HA.
10. Jeffrey Tayler, “Oliver Stone’s Disgraceful Tribute to Hugo Chávez,” Foreign Policy, May 13, 2014, https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/05/13/oliver-stones-disgraceful-tribute-to-hugo-chavez/.
11. Antonio Maria Delgado, “In Venezuela, inflation quadruples to 18,000 percent in two months, with no end in sight,” Miami Herald, May 2, 2018, http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/venezuela/article210282264.html.
12. William Neuman and Nicholas Casey, “Venezuela Election Won By Maduro Amid Widespread Disillusionment,” New York Times, May 20, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/20/world/americas/venezuela-election.html.
13. Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944), 69–70.
14. Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 9.
15. Alexandra Ulmer, “Phone Calls, Dismissal Threats: Venezuela Pressures State Workers to Vote,” Reuters, https://mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKBN1AE08P.
1. Commercial air service to Cuba from the United States was restored on August 31, 2016.
2. Ashley Cowburn, “Cubans Facing Beer Shortage As Thirsty American Tourists Put Island’s Main Brewery Under Strain,” The Independent, April 10, 2016, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/cubans-facing-beer-shortage-as-american-tourist-influx-puts-island-s-main-brewery-under-strain-a6977156.html.
3. While the National Socialists in Germany and the Fascists in Italy were not Marxist socialists, their ideologies were explicitly socialist.
4. Salim Lamrani, “Cuba’s Health Care System: A Model For the World,” HuffPost, August 8, 2014, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/salim-lamrani/cubas-health-care-system-_b_5649968.html.
5. Gilbert Berdine, Vincent Geloso, and Benjamin Powell, “Cuban Longevity: Health Care or Repression?” Health Policy and Planning 33, no. 6 (2018): 755–57.
6. Peter T. Leeson, Russell S. Sobel, and Andrea M. Dean, “Comparing the spread of capitalism and democracy,” Economics Letters 114, no. 1 (2012): 139–41.
CHAPTER THREE
1. Rainer Dormels, “Profiles of the Cities of DPR Korea–Sinuiju,” in North Korea’s Cities: Industrial Facilities, Internal Structures and Typification, Jimoondang, (2014): 119, https://koreanologie.univie.ac.at/fileadmin/user_upload/p_koreanologie/North_Korean_Cities/Sinuiju/Sinuiju.pdf.
2. Stephane Courtois, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Panne, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karel Bartosek, Jean-Louis Margolin, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 561.
3. Yeonmi Park, In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom (New York: Penguin, 2016).
4. Michael Seth, A Concise History of Modern Korea: From the Late Nineteenth Century to the Present (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), 119.
5. Seth, A Concise History of Modern Korea, 119, 121.
6. “Seoul,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seoul.
7. “South Korea,” World Bank, http://databank.worldbank.org/data/home.aspx.
8. “North Korea,” The World Factbook, Central Intelligence Agency, https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/kn.html.
9. Park, In Order to Live, 129–30.
CHAPTER FOUR
1. Frank Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–1962 (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011), xii–xiii.
2. Matt Kibbe, “China’s Socialist God,” Free the People, March 19, 2018, https://freethepeople.org/chinas-socialist-god/.
3. Quoted in Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine, 70.
4. Bradley Gardner, China’s Great Migration: How the Poor Built a Prosperous Nation (Oakland: Independent Institute, 2017), 39.
5. Tom Phillips, “The Cultural Revolution: all you need to know about China’s political convulsion,” Guardian, May 10, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/11/the-cultural-revolution-50-years-on-all-you-need-to-know-about-chinas-political-convulsion.
6. Valerie Strauss and Daniel Southerl, “How Many Died? New Evidence Suggests Far Higher Numbers for the Victims of Mao Zedong’s Era,” Washington Post, July 17, 1994, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1994/07/17/how-many-died-new-evidence-suggests-far-higher-numbers-for-the-victims-of-mao-zedongs-era/01044df5-03dd-49f4-a453-a033c5287bce/?utm_term=.fc4752f76617.
7. Gardner, China’s Great Migration, 21, 15.
8. Ibid., 40.
9. Ibid., 2.
10. Jun Mai, “Liberal economics think tank Unirule locked out of its office for ‘security reasons’ ahead of forum,” South China Morning Post, May 13, 2017, http://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/2094217/liberal-economics-think-tank-unirule-locked-out-its.
11. Chris Buckley, “In Beijing, Doors Shut on a Bastion of Independent Ideas,” New York Times, July 11, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/11/world/asia/china-unirule-institute.html#click=https://t.co/aVtzwOKABD.
12. Buckley, “In Beijing, Doors Shut on a Bastion of Independent Ideas.”
13. Nectar Gan, “Chinese government pressured property agent into welding iron gates to liberal think tank office doors, penning in workers, director says,” South China Morning Post, July 12, 2018, https://m.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/2154872/chinese-liberal-think-tank-blames-government-after?amp=1.
CHAPTER FIVE
1. Courtois et al., Black Book of Communism, 78.
2. Ibid., 98.
3. Ibid., 99.
4. Ibid., 102.
5. Ibid., 121.
6. Bryan Caplan, “Lenin the Prohibitionist,” The Library of Economics and Liberty, February 14, 2014, http://www.econlib.org/archives/2014/02/lenin_the_prohi.html.
7. S. J. Taylor, Stalin’s Apologist: Walter Duranty: The New York Times’s Man in Moscow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 3.
8. Taylor, Stalin’s Apologist, 175.
9. Ibid., 182.
10. Ibid., 83.
11. Ibid., 163.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid., 205.
14. Lawrence W. Reed, “A Revolution to Always Remember but Never Celebrate,” Foundation for Economic Education, October 16, 2017, https://fee.org/articles/a-revolution-to-always-remember-but-never-celebrate/?utm_source=zapier&utm_medium=facebook.
15. Taylor, Stalin’s Apologist, 207.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid., 210, 219.
18. Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (New York City: Oxford University Press, 1986), 306.
19. For a concise elaboration of the economic tradeoffs involved in this process see: Bryan Caplan, “Communism,” The Library of Economics and Liberty, https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Communism.html.
20. To be fair to the column’s author, it was the Times’ editor who picked the title. And the studies the author references looked at women in other socialist countries behind the Iron Curtain, not the Soviet Union. Kirsten R. Ghodsee, “Sources for my New York Times Op-Ed – ‘Why Women had Better Sex Under Socialism,’ ” Harvard University Blog, August 16, 2017, https://scholar.harvard.edu/kristenghodsee/blog/sources-my-new-york-times-op-ed-why-women-had-better-sex-under-socialism.
21. Francine Du Plessix Gray, Soviet Women: Walking the Tightrope (New York: Anchor Books, 1990), 34.
22. Du Plessix Gray, Soviet Women, 98.
23. Ibid., 20–21.
24. Ibid., 15.
25. Ibid., 14.
26. Ibid., 20.
27. Ibid., 19.
28. Ibid., 17.
29. Ibid., 73.
CHAPTER SIX
1. Much of this discussion is based on a short book I co-authored with Larisa Burakova about the Georgian reforms for the Antigua Forum at the Universidad Francisco Marroquín in Guatemala. See Larisa Burakova and Robert Lawson, Georgia’s Rose Revolution: How One Country Beat the Odds, Transformed Its Economy, and Provided a Model for Reformers Everywhere (Guatemala: The Antigua Forum, 2013), https://www.amazon.com/Georgia%C2%B4s-Rose-Revolution-Transformed-Everywhere-ebook/dp/B00HUMMTVO/.
2. http://privatization.ge/?page=4458065d70bc799bc0bdabe4f84d379f&ref=y2y2x2v2z2.
3. Kevin Grier, Robert Lawson, and Sam Absher, “You Say You Want a (Rose) Revolution? The Effects of Georgia’s 2004 Market Reforms,” Economics of Transition 27 (2018): 301–323.
1. The Association of Private Enterprise Education, www.apee.org.
2. Frederick Solt, “The Standardized World Income Inequality Database,” Social Science Quarterly 97 no. 5 (2018): 1267–81. Harvard Dataverse, https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=hdl:1902.1/11992.
3. Economic Freedom of the World: 2017 Annual Report, https://www.fraserinstitute.org/studies/economic-freedom-of-the-world-2017-annual-report.
4. ISO Education Department, “Where We Stand: The politics of the International Socialist Organization,” International Socialist Organization, https://www.internationalsocialist.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Where_We_Stand.pdf, 1.
5. ISO Education Department, “Where We Stand,” 1.
6. Ibid., 1.
7. The pilgrims’ experience illustrates the incentive problems on small-scale communes. In 1620, Plymouth Plantation was founded with a system of communal property rights where food and supplies were held in common and distributed based on equality and need. As a result, there were chronic food shortages until 1623, when they created private parcels of land and made families responsible for feeding themselves. Ben wrote up a column based on William Bradford’s 1647 history that you can access here: http://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=1423.
8. Ana Gonzalez-Barrera and Jens Manuel Krogstad, “What we know about illegal immigration from Mexico,” Pew Research Center, December 3, 2018, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/12/03/what-we-know-about-illegal-immigration-from-mexico/.
9. Michael Clemens, “Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk?” Journal of Economic Perspectives 25, no. 3 (2011): 83–106.
10. Benjamin Powell, ed., Immigration: From Social Science to Public Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).
11. Christopher Coyne, After War: The Political Economy of Exporting Democracy (California: Stanford University Press, 2008).
12. Robert Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
13. Christopher Coyne and Abigail Hall, Tyranny Comes Home: The Domestic Fate of U.S. Militarism (California: Stanford University Press, 2018).
14. Roger Koppl, Expert Failure (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
15. Quotes in the following four paragraphs are from Gilad Edelman, “The Socialist Network: Are today’s young, Bernie-inspired leftist intellectuals really just New Deal liberals?” Washington Monthly July/August 2018, https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/july-august-2018/the-socialist-network/.
16. Elizabeth Bruenig, “It’s time to give socialism a try,” Washington Post, March 6, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/its-time-to-give-socialism-a-try/2018/03/06/c603a1b6-2164-11e8-86f6-54bfff693d2b_story.html?utm_term=.06ef36fc9837.
17. Elizabeth Bruenig, “Let’s Have a Good-Faith Argument about Socialism,” Washington Post, March 11, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/lets-have-a-good-faith-argument-about-socialism/2018/03/11/96d66720-23e4-11e8-86f6-54bfff693d2b_story.html?utm_term=.ca5990d6e761.