STILL WAITING FOR THE PERFECT SOCIALIST LEADER

One of the biggest problems with a centralized government is that for it to avoid many of the problems normally associated with socialism—like gulags and blood in the streets—it needs perfect leadership. Whenever socialism fails, socialists say it’s because the leadership didn’t implement the right policies or because it became too self-serving. But who are these perfect people who can flawlessly run entire socialist nations? Answer: That person doesn’t exist.

In fact, the only perfect person who has ever lived is Jesus, and most socialists deny his authority and perfection too!

The truth is, as hard as it might be for you to admit it, socialism has been tried repeatedly over the past century, and every single time a new socialist movement featuring new socialist leaders emerges, they promise that “this time we’ll get it right.” As University of Massachusetts economist and socialist apologist Richard D. Wolff said in a 2019 debate hosted by the Soho Forum, twenty-first century socialism is “a new and a different socialism” that “has learned from its own earlier experiences and experiments.”⁵³

“And just like with capitalism,” Wolff added, socialists “learn from [their] experiments how to make it better next time, how to correct the mistakes [they have] made, in the project that has animated socialists from the beginning: We can do better than capitalism.”

But here’s the truth: Socialists never do better “next time,” because it doesn’t matter who is in charge of the next great “glorious” socialist revolution. The problem runs much deeper than that. But you don’t need to take my word for it. History is full of examples of socialism’s failures—catastrophic, terrifying, bloody failures…