“THE INHERENT VICE OF CAPITALISM IS THE UNEQUAL SHARING OF BLESSINGS. THE INHERENT VIRTUE OF SOCIALISM IS THE EQUAL SHARING OF MISERIES.”1
– WINSTON CHURCHILL
July 1, 1620: More than 102 men, women, and children were in the final stages of preparing for what would be the most harrowing journey of their lives, and one of the most important for the history of the world. The adventurers spent much of what wealth they had remaining in the final weeks of their time in Europe purchasing beer, dried beef, salt pork, oats, bacon, cider, butter, and wheat, among other foods, as well as canvas sheets for bedding, shoes, farming equipment, frying pans, skillets, soap, and other household items. Anticipation, excitement, and fear were in the air.
The trip couldn’t come soon enough. For years, these so-called “Puritans”—the largest contingency of the adventurers—had faced persecution in England for their commitment to Protestant reforms of the Church of England, which had, in the minds of many Puritans, maintained far too many of the traditions and ideals of the Roman Catholic Church in the years that followed the Church of England’s separation from communion with the papacy. The Puritans desperately wanted to worship God according to their own consciences, not the archbishop of Canterbury.
The persecution in England against some Puritans had grown so extreme in the early seventeenth century that many fled to Leiden, Holland, where they practiced their particular brand of Calvinism in relative peace for more than a decade. But the Puritans knew that they couldn’t stay in Leiden forever. They needed a home of their own, and as fate—or God—would have it, an opportunity to build such a home in a distant, largely unsettled land far away from the monarchs and churches of Europe had fortuitously presented itself.
Investors in the Plymouth Company, which had been established by King James I in 1606, agreed to finance a new settlement of Puritans and other “adventurers” in America in exchange for having their expenses repaid, plus a share of the profits earned by the settlers. Under the terms established by James I, the company, like the endeavor in Jamestown, Virginia, would have the power to govern itself, a provision that presented the Puritans with an excellent opportunity to establish their new, free religious community.
But just weeks before the journey, the Plymouth Company’s investors threw a wrench into the Pilgrims’ plans. They insisted on altering the terms of the agreement for the new settlement, and in a panic, the Leiden Puritans’ representative agreed to the new, more unfavorable conditions.
The final agreement would grant to everyone stock in the company, but those who agreed to provide additional provisions or funding would receive a double share, which was important because under the new terms—as recorded by William Bradford, the second governor of the Plymouth Colony—at the end of the initial seven-year period “the capital and profits, viz., the houses, lands, goods and chattels, shall be equally divided among the adventurers and planters.”2
Further, under the agreement, during the initial period “all profits and benefits go by trade, traffic, trucking, working, fishing, or any other means, by any persons or person, shall remain in the common stock until the division,” and “all such persons as are of this colony, are to have their food, drink, clothing, and all provisions, out of the common stock and goods of the said colony.”
In the Puritans’ New World, the whole society would share everything—including food, clothing, and, most importantly for many, the planters’ houses and gardens—and then at the end of the period, all that the company had produced would be equally divided, with some of the wealthier settlers with more stock receiving a double share. Although Plymouth didn’t exactly align with Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, it certainly came close.
GHOST OF
KARAL MARX
“OH, I LIKE WHERE THIS IS GOING!”
After long delays and a brutal 66-day journey on the Mayflower, the Pilgrims arrived in Massachusetts in November 1620—far north of their intended target, the Hudson River in modern-day New York—and eventually settled in Plymouth, which, quite astoundingly, shared a common name with the port from which the Mayflower initially left. Contrary to popular belief, Plymouth, Massachusetts was not named by the passengers of the Mayflower, but rather by explorer John Smith in an earlier voyage.3
The Pilgrims’ first winter was catastrophic. Without any knowledge of the land, the Pilgrims struggled to find a steady source of food in New England, and disease decimated the group. As Bradford recorded in his journal, “In two or three months’ time half of their company died, partly owing to the severity of the winter, especially during January and February, and the want of houses and other comforts; partly to scurvy and other diseases, which their long voyage and their incommodious quarters had brought upon them. Of all the hundred odd persons, scarcely fifty remained, and sometimes two or three persons died in a day.”4
Aided by local Native Americans and the arrival of the ship Fortune, the Pilgrims were able to survive the winters of 1620–1621 and 1621–1622, but their community remained in a disastrous state relative to what the settlers had originally expected. However, 1623 would bring much better fortunes—thanks in large part to capitalist principles.
In an effort to repair their poorly functioning society, Bradford noted “they began to think how they might raise as much corn as they could, and obtain a better crop than they had done, that they might not still thus languish in misery. At length, after much debate of things, the Governor (with the advice of the chiefest amongst them) gave way that they should set corn every man for his own particular, and in that regard trust to themselves; in all other things to go on in the general way as before. And so assigned to every family a parcel of land, according to the proportion of their number, for that end, only for present use (but made no division for inheritance) and ranged all boys and youth under some family.”5
Under the original terms of the Plymouth agreement, all crops would be shared equally and deposited to a common store, but this created numerous problems inherent to all socialist systems, as Bradford himself explained nearly 400 years ago:
The decision to give each family its own parcel of land and to permit the private ownership of crops completely transformed the community.
All right, Ghost Karl, stop interrupting. This chapter is going to be a horror show for your ideology, so if I were you, I’d take a long walk. Now, where was I…
GHOST OF
KARAL MARX
“PROBABLY TRANSFORMED INTO A CAPITALIST NIGHTMARE, WHERE THE LEAST ABLE ARE PREYED UPON BY THE BOURGEOISIE!”
According to Bradford, the private ownership model produced “very good success,” because private property “made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been by any means the Governor or any other could use, and saved him a great deal of trouble, and gave far better content.”
Under the previous system, many of Plymouth’s women “allege[d] weakness and inability” to avoid doing work, but after the reforms, “The women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn.”
From this point forward, the trials and tribulations of the Plymouth Colony’s first few years would never again be repeated. And for Gov. Bradford, the entire experience with collective ownership and management of property, which they had tried for more than two years, had revealed beyond any doubt “the vanity of that conceit of Plato’s and other ancients applauded by some of later times; that the taking away of property and bringing in community into a commonwealth would make them happy and flourishing; as if they were wiser than God.”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I HAVE ALSO OFTEN “ALLEGED WEAKNESS AND INABILITY” TO AVOID DOING WORK.
If socialism works, it should have worked in Plymouth. Plymouth was a small community that faced desperate times, shared a common heritage and ideals, and many of its citizens were devout believers in a religion that encourages unity and charity. And yet, many of the same inefficiencies and problems we’ve seen in dozens of socialist societies since Plymouth also plagued the Pilgrims. Why? Because regardless of the time, place, religion, or culture, socialism always fails—and often magnificently. It has arguably the worst track record of any political, social, or economic philosophy in the history of human civilization. There isn’t a single example of socialism working when adopted on a large scale anywhere in the history of the world. (But, other than that, it’s doing fine.)
So, why would you, or anyone else, for that matter, support an idea with such a remarkably bad track record?
Okay, before we go any further, let’s agree to disagree for now about what you’re calling “Scandinavian socialism.” The evidence shows overwhelmingly that Sweden, Norway, and Denmark are not socialist nations—they’re market economies with a few big socialist programs, very similar to what’s happening in the United States now. Further, the data show Scandinavians are not better off than Americans, so the idea that we should adopt their model makes no sense on its face. But for now, let’s hold off on dealing with the whole Scandinavian socialism myth until the next chapter. (See Chapter 5.)
What other examples do you have?
Ah, yes. I forgot about the Commune of Paris—a success story so famous almost no one has ever heard of it. I mean, how many people walking down the street not named “Bernie Sanders” would know what the heck the Paris Commune was? Oh, and how long did that “successful” commune last, again?
A whole 72 days, really? I’ve waited in lines at the DMV for longer than that. (Okay, not really, but you get the point.) The socialist government that ruled Paris in 1871 following the collapse of France’s Second Empire was accompanied by bloodshed and a time of tremendous political and social upheaval. Not long after the commune was established, there was a war between the socialist revolutionaries in Paris and the French government, resulting in the deaths of 20,000 socialist revolutionaries (compared to only 750 government soldiers).7 This is hardly a success story worth bragging about.
The fact that you’re turning to the 72-day-long failed Paris Commune as a prime example of socialism working is proof that socialism doesn’t work. If that’s the best you’ve got, then, wow, socialism’s track record must be just as bad as I think it is.
I am sure you could point to a dozen or so really small communities that adopted socialism for a while without experiencing the usual death squads and famines, but when has it ever worked for a sustained period involving a group of people larger than one that can fit inside a movie theater? I’ll save us both the time and answer for you: It hasn’t. It has never worked on a large scale, and whenever it has been tried, it has ended with blood in the streets.
COMMUNE OF PARIS
In March of 1871, shortly after France’s defeat in the Franco-German war, a collection of communists, workers, and anarchists seized Paris and began constructing a commune. Within weeks, members elected a “Communal Council.”
The commune worked on encouraging trade unions and worker’s cooperatives. People constructed bakeries, nurseries, and other services needed by the people.
Seventy-two days into the experiment, the commune came to a violent end. In its haste to create a working society, the Council failed to adequately plan for outside threats. The German army, with help from the French army, marched in and destroyed the fledgling commune.a
Socialist revolutions nearly always follow the same pattern, regardless of culture, race, religion, or history, and I’ll prove it shortly with a list of examples of socialism’s failures. But before we get to socialism’s incredible history of failure, here’s a brief and totally scientific outline of how socialist revolutions work:
PHASE ONE: At least one group of people, usually those in society with relatively little wealth, are convinced by a handful of charismatic leaders that life would be oh so much better if they were in charge, rather than whoever has most of the political power at that time.
PHASE TWO: Those disenfranchised people seize power, often by winning democratically held elections, and then they appoint their charismatic leaders to the highest positions of power.
PHASE THREE: The shiny new socialist government steals wealth and property away from everyone who has it. “Pay your fair share, Grandma!”
PHASE FOUR: Those who have had their property and wealth taken from them get very angry, because, you know, they’ve been totally screwed in the name of “fairness.”
PHASE FIVE: Opposition against the new socialist regime grows.
PHASE SIX: Socialist regime decides to silence its critics, often labeling them “saboteurs” and scapegoating them for all of the country’s problems. The regime typically deals with these troublemakers by expelling them from their country or throwing them in jail. The socialist regime also eliminates all gun rights.
PHASE SEVEN: In resistance to the growing wave of tyranny and violence on the part of the new socialist regime, people take to the streets and protest. Many people who once supported the socialist regime realize that yeah, they probably made a big mistake.
PHASE EIGHT: Socialist regime grows fearful of revolution, so it starts to imprison and kill even more people.
PHASE NINE: Lots of people are murdered, imprisoned, exiled, beaten, tortured—and that’s just the fate of those who stand in opposition to the regime in power. Just about everyone else is subjected to abject poverty, bread lines, endless bureaucracy, and economic chaos.
PHASE TEN: Tyranny lasts for years or even decades, until another revolution finally overthrows the socialist regime (think fall of the Berlin Wall).
Really? Just a “few,” huh? Let’s go over some of the many examples of the failure and violence that stems from socialist revolutions. When we’re finished, I have a feeling you’re going to regret saying socialism has only failed on “a few occasions.”
In 1977, the socialist Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) reportedly murdered “tens of thousands” of people when it seized power. Left-wing writer Lara Pawson, who was in Angola at the time of these killings, provides some disturbing details:
Some socialists have denied that the MPLA was a truly Marxist organization, but the historical record shows it undoubtedly was. In fact, in the same year of the MPLA atrocities mentioned above, it went out of its way to brand itself as a Marxist-Leninist organization at a meeting of its national congress.9
MPLA literature featured a great example of Phase Six of the aforementioned socialism cycle. On the back of an MPLA pamphlet read the following message: “We will apply the Democratic Revolutionary Dictatorship to finally finish with saboteurs, with parasites, and with opportunists.”
THE FAILURE OF A SOcIALIST SYSTEM MUST ALWAYS BE BLAMED ON SOMEONE ELSE.
In 1975, the Communist Party of Kampuchea, often called the Khmer Rouge, emerged as the victor of the seven-year-long Cambodian Civil War. The Khmer Rouge was composed of avid Marxists who attempted to impose their radical ideas using brutal force.
Under the Khmer Rouge’s ruthless leader Pol Pot, all previous loyalties were abolished and strictly forbidden. Cambodians were banned from keeping their religious and family ties. All civil liberties were taken away. Every Cambodian was instead required to make the good of the collective his or her primary focus. To indoctrinate all children with a Marxist ideology, every child aged eight or older was separated from their parents in 1977 and required to join labor camps, where they were trained to treat the state as their parent.10
As the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust notes, the “Khmer Rouge ideology stated that the only acceptable lifestyle was that of poor agricultural workers,” so they forced millions of people from their homes in the city to work as farmers. “Factories, hospitals, schools and universities were shut down. Lawyers, doctors, teachers, engineers and qualified professionals in all fields were thought to be a threat to the new regime…. Money was abolished and all aspects of life were subject to regulation. People were not allowed to choose their own marriage partners. They could not leave their given place of work or even select the clothes that they would wear.”11
Millions of people across Cambodia were effectively forced into slavery—all in the name of building Marx’s utopian society. Anyone daring to speak out against the regime was imprisoned or murdered. Hundreds of thousands of others died from starvation or disease. During the Khmer Rouge’s four-year reign, an estimated 2 million people perished as a direct result of the Communist Party’s policies.12
FOR THE GREATER GOOD
In 2008, two surviving senior leaders of the regime, Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan, were found guilty of genocide for their participation in the actions in Cambodia by a United Nations–backed tribunal.
Nuon Chea, a Khmer Rouge leader and brother-in-law of Pol Pot, gave insight into the justification of the actions during the trial. “The CPK’s policy and plan were solely designed to one purpose only,” said Chea, “to liberate the country from the colonization, imperialism, exploitation, extreme poverty and invasion from neighboring countries.”
“The CPK’s policy was clear and specific: it wanted to create an equal society where people were the master of the country… The CPK’s movement was not designed to kill people or destroy the country,” said Chea.b
It’s impossible to briefly and accurately capture the horrors caused by the socialist policies imposed by China throughout much of the twentieth century. The amount of death, destruction, and misery experienced in China is on a scale never before seen in the history of the world.
Although estimates vary, the Black Book of Communism, widely considered to be the leading authority on socialism- and communism-related deaths, estimates 65 million Chinese died because of the reforms imposed by Mao Zedong’s reforms, a figure that is supported by academics like Lee Edwards, Ph.D., the Heritage Foundation’s distinguished fellow in conservative thought.13,14
Many of those who died under the leadership of communist Mao Zedong starved because of the government’s complete mismanagement of the country’s agricultural system. Edwards noted, “Deaths from hunger reached more than 50 percent in some Chinese villages. The total number of dead from 1959 to 1961 was between 30 million and 40 million—the population of California.”15
Vaclav Smil, the Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Manitoba and a fellow at the Royal Society of Canada, says the famine was largely the result of Mao’s “Great Leap Forward”:
STORIES FROM THE VICTIMS OF SOCIALISM
[During the famine] “People died in the family and they didn’t bury the person because they could still collect their food rations; they kept the bodies in bed and covered them up and the corpses were eaten by mice. People ate corpses and fought for the bodies. In Gansu they killed outsiders; people told me strangers passed through and they killed and ate them. And they ate their own children. Terrible. Too terrible.”c Yang Jisheng
When Chinese weren’t being murdered, removed from their homes, or starving to death, they were being forced into more than 1,000 government-run labor camps. Edwards, citing work by Harry Wu, who once spent 19 years in Chinese labor camps, estimates 50 million Chinese were imprisoned in these labor camps over a three-decade period running from the 1950s to 1980s. Twenty million didn’t survive.17
All told, the total number of Chinese believed to have been killed, exiled, imprisoned, or starved at the hands of the country’s Communist Party in the twentieth century is nearly 100 million—a little less than one-third of the entire current U.S. population.
For nearly three years, from 1956 to 1959, Cuba’s 26th of July Movement—led by socialist Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz, whose father was a wealthy sugarcane farmer—promised the people of Cuba that when this communist revolution was complete, Cuba would enter a new era of unprecedented equality and prosperity for all people. However, as has been the case with so many other socialist movements, once Castro gained power, he used his position to suppress individual freedom and control the island nation’s economy with an iron fist, all to his own benefit.18
After defeating military forces loyal to former Cuban president Fulgencio Batista in 1959, Castro became Cuba’s dictator, a position he would hold for 57 years. Castro’s regime—which quickly found a strong ally in the Soviet Union—provided Cubans with “free” health care, education, and government-guaranteed jobs, but his harsh reforms effectively ended many private industries and abolished civil liberties like free speech and political liberty. Cubans were no longer permitted to protest or speak out against the Castro administration without risking imprisonment or potentially even death.
According to various estimates, Castro’s regime was responsible for killing more than 140,000 people.19 Hundreds of thousands more fled Cuba, often for the United States. During a five-month period in 1980 alone, more than 125,000 Cubans defected from their homeland to become Americans. In 1994, tens of thousands attempted to sail from Cuba to the United States on makeshift rafts. About 35,000 ended up settling in Dade County, Florida.20 In many cases, the Cubans swimming, flying, and boating away from Cuba did so to escape truly horrifying living conditions. Things got so bad in the 1990s that some even resorted to eating cats and dogs.21
Cuba’s history of failure hasn’t seemed to affect many progressives and socialists in America, though. When Castro died in 2016, some hailed him as a hero of Cuba. ABC’s Jim Avila even called him the “George Washington of his country.”22
APPALLING POLITICAL VIOLENCE STILL COMMON-PLACE IN CUBA
Sirley Ávila León was elected as a delegate to the Municipal Assembly in Cuba in June 2005.
Her desire to alleviate the hardships suffered by her constituents and her continued advocation for family and community rights put her on the regime’s radar.
In 2015, an attempt on her life was made by a machete-wielding attacker. Ávila survived the assassination attempt, but suffered major injuries. She spent several months recovering in a hospital in the United States.
After recovering, Avila boarded a plane to return home to Cuba. She was never seen again.e
The Nazis are the twentieth century’s most infamous murderers—and justifiably so. According to a study published in 2013 by the Holocaust Memorial Museum, 15–20 million people were killed in 42,400 Nazi camps and ghettos in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s.23
However, despite these tragic figures, dozens of Hollywood movies, and the hundreds of books written about the Nazis, most Americans don’t know that the Nazis were, indeed, national socialists. In fact, the term “Nazi” is simply an abbreviation for the party’s full name: the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.
Now, if you do a simple Google search, you’ll find all sorts of people claiming the Nazis weren’t really socialists. They’ll say the Nazis just stole the name “socialist” for political reasons, and as proof, they’ll offer historical evidence showing the Nazis did leave many businesses in the hands of private citizens. They didn’t officially nationalize all industries, which, according to these folks, means Nazis couldn’t possibly be considered socialists.
In a 2005 article for the Mises Institute, George Reisman, Ph.D., a professor emeritus at Pepperdine University, does a nice job—drawing on the work of Ludwig von Mises—explaining why the Nazis should unquestionably be considered “socialists.”
“The basis of the claim that Nazi Germany was capitalist was the fact that most industries in Nazi Germany appeared to be left in private hands,” Reisman wrote.24
“What Mises identified was that private ownership of the means of production existed in name only under the Nazis and that the actual substance of ownership of the means of production resided in the German government,” Reisman explained further. “For it was the German government and not the nominal private owners that exercised all of the substantive powers of ownership: it, not the nominal private owners, decided what was to be produced, in what quantity, by what methods, and to whom it was to be distributed, as well as what prices would be charged and what wages would be paid, and what dividends or other income the nominal private owners would be permitted to receive.”
As Reisman masterfully explained, the Nazis didn’t have to officially “own” the nation’s property to be socialists. By having total control over every aspect of property, individuals owned property in name only. The property might have belonged to a well-connected German on paper, but in practice, the property belonged to the Nazis.
Reisman added, “De facto government ownership of the means of production, as Mises termed it, was logically implied by such fundamental collectivist principles embraced by the Nazis as that the common good comes before the private good and the individual exists as a means to the ends of the State. If the individual is a means to the ends of the State, so too, of course, is his property. Just as he is owned by the State, his property is also owned by the State.”25
Adolf Hitler and other leading Nazis did oppose the universal, globalist nature of many Marxist movements. Hitler and the Nazis weren’t concerned about creating a global workers’ paradise, but rather a fascist-socialist empire. But as George Watson noted for the Independent (U.K.), “His [Hitler’s] differences with the communists, he [Hitler] explained, were less ideological than tactical. German communists he had known before he took power, he told [Hermann] Rauschning, thought politics meant talking and writing. They were mere pamphleteers, whereas ‘I have put into practice what these peddlers and pen pushers have timidly begun,’ adding revealingly that ‘the whole of National Socialism’ was based on Marx.”26
From these sources (and many more, too), it’s clear the Nazis were exactly what they said they were: socialists. Anyone who tells you otherwise is deliberately misleading you or hasn’t spent much time reading the history of Nazism.
No one knows how many people have been killed, tortured, or imprisoned in North Korea at the hands of that country’s communist dictatorship. However, estimates suggest the figure could be 3.5 million or more.27
The Committee for Human Rights in North Korea estimates there are about 120,000 people currently serving in various North Korean prison camps.28 And life for many North Koreans outside of the country’s prisons is far from ideal. Every economic and societal decision is made by the ruling government to ensure all resources are property managed and “fairly” distributed, as Human Rights Watch noted in a 2018 report: “The government uses forced labor from ordinary citizens, including children, to control its people and sustain its economy. A significant majority of North Koreans must perform unpaid labor at some point in their lives.”
“Ji Seong-ho is a North Korean defector who grew up during the country’s grueling famine in the 1990s. In order to survive, Ji would exchange stolen coal for food on the black market. While taking coal from a train car in 1996, a malnourished Ji lost consciousness and fell onto the tracks, losing his left hand and foot when a train ran over him. After a grueling amputation surgery, Ji was left to fend for himself. In 2006, he escaped to South Korea, where he is now a law student at Dongguk University. Ji is also the president of Now Action and Unity for Human Rights, where he helps broadcast information into North Korea and facilitates the resettlement of defectors in South Korea.”g
In order to keep strict control over the populace, North Korea’s government has severely restricted travel and basic civil liberties. The only way for most North Koreans to have access to news and information is through state-run media and news outlets, which regularly broadcast socialist propaganda and perpetuate mythologies meant to reinforce the power of dictator Kim Jong-un and his military leaders.
In 2012, North Korea’s state news agency, unimaginatively called “Central News Agency,” reported that “archaeologists”—and I use that word in the loosest way possible—from the Academy of Social Sciences at North Korea’s History Institute had discovered a “unicorn lair.” Yes, that’s right—a unicorn lair. The Guardian (U.K.) reported in 2012 that the Central News Agency said “that they [the fake archaeologists] have ‘recently reconfirmed’ the lair of one of the unicorns ridden by the ancient Korean King Tongmyong, founder of a kingdom which ruled parts of China and the Korean peninsula from the the 3rd century BC to 7th century AD. The KCNA goes on to state that the location happens to be 200 metres from a temple in the North Korean capital, adding: ‘A rectangular rock carved with words ‘Unicorn Lair’ stands in front of the lair.’ ”30
Many of those who have spoken out against the government in North Korea have ended up being tortured or killed, often in incredibly gruesome ways. The Transitional Justice Working Group, a South Korean non-government organization, reports there are more than 300 “execution sites” across North Korea. In some cases, people have been executed publicly for “crimes” as small as viewing media from South Korea.31 It’s no wonder then that no one is willing to question the authenticity of those magical “unicorn lairs.”
We’ve already spent some time talking about the Soviet Union, and we’re going to spend a lot more time discussing it throughout the remaining chapters of this book, but it’s important to mention here that although sources vary, it’s likely 40–70 million people were killed, imprisoned, or exiled by the Communist Party in the Soviet Union in the twentieth century. In fact, some of the worst human rights violations in human history occurred as part of the Russian communists’ efforts to create a socialist utopia. For example, about 1 million people were executed by Communists during the “Great Terror” in 1937–38.32
In one of the most tragic episodes of Soviet history—which is really saying something, by the way, because this is a country absolutely overflowing with horror stories—as many as 5 million people were killed by a government-created famine in 1932–1933, with much of the death occurring in Ukraine, Siberia, and Kazakhstan. The famine was a direct result of policies implemented by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, who sought to punish peasants throughout the Soviet Union who refused to go along with the Soviet’s plan to collectivize farmland.33
Stalin dispatched special agents throughout Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and elsewhere to raid homes and businesses suspected of not turning over their food to government officials. Whole villages were effectively banned from having access to enough food to survive, and anyone caught secretly hiding food was killed. Peasants who resorted to stealing wheat from state-controlled storehouses were sent before firing squads. Even as the Soviet Union was exporting a million tons of grain in 1933, it continued to starve the people of Ukraine and Kazakhstan.
Petro Matulla grew up in a village 75 miles from Kiev, Ukraine. In a 2009 report by NPR, a reporter asked Matulla if he remembered anything about the tragedies of the 1932–1933 famine. Although Matulla was only four years old at the time, he recalled Soviet agents coming to his home and taking whatever food they could find, and he remembered vividly the reason for the raids: “So you wouldn’t eat. So you’d die.”34
Matulla also recalled seeing a “dead mother was laying on the street, and the baby was sucking on her breast.” Matulla’s family was only able to survive because his grandfather had secretly hid a sack of grain beneath the family’s barn. Others in the village weren’t so lucky. Many of them starved to death.35
The Soviets didn’t merely stop Ukrainians and others from eating food, either. They also prevented people from fleeing the country as well. Soviet soldiers blockaded villages, and those who did manage to escape were forced to return home to starve.36
It’s hard to put these incredible tragedies in context, especially because the death tolls involved are so large, but to give you some sense of the scale of the death and destruction caused by the Soviet Union, if a government were to kill, exile, imprison, or starve someone every minute of every single day, it would take more than 75 years before matching the horror of the low end of the 40–70 million estimate previously discussed.
Americans have never experienced anything like what occurred in the Soviet Union in much of the twentieth century, and God willing, they never will.
In the wake of World War II, the Soviet Union seized control of many Eastern European countries, including Romania. Although the communists in Romania were relatively unpopular at the end of the war, Soviet officials and agents suppressed all resistance to their efforts to create a socialist state. In 1946, a Soviet sympathizer was “democratically elected” in Romania, winning 80 percent of the vote.37
Over the following three decades, Romanian central planners botched one public project after another, creating significant economic turmoil. The nation’s debt became so extreme by 1982 that the socialist government resorted to demanding exports of most of the country’s production, including in industry and agriculture, creating deadly shortages of essential products like food and medicine.
AN ARTICLE PUBLISHED IN THE L.A. TIMES IN MARCH 1990 CHRONICLES STORIES FROM ROMANIANS
“Not even if we had a war would it look like this,” said Gheorghe Cristea, who described roads lined with skeletons.
Constantin Surescu, a farmer, told how police and town officials showed up at his door: “They ordered us to destroy our own houses. Many people said, ‘don’t want to do this.’ If you said ‘No,’ they came in the night and got you and beat you up.”
After his house was destroyed, Surescu was moved to a government-provided shelter. “They gave me an apartment but I didn’t want to stay,” said Surescu. “I felt like I was in a hospital. It was cold. There was water on the walls. It was like being in a grave.”i
Government officials frantically tried to enact one socialist reform after another to stabilize the country, but none were successful. One particularly remarkable—in the worst possible way—example of central planning gone wrong involved Romanian officials bulldozing thousands of towns and villages across the country. Residents were then forced to move to “agrotechnical centers,” where they worked in government-approved jobs.
Prior to being ousted in 1989, Nicolae Ceaus¸escu, Romania’s dictator and the general secretary of the Romanian Communist Party, transformed the country into a virtual “police state.” As one report by The Guardian (U.K.) notes, archival documents show the Ceaus¸escu regime even employed a vast network of children to spy on their parents, teachers, and others in their communities: “The secret police of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaus¸escu recruited thousands of children to spy on schoolfriends, parents and teachers, according to communist-era archives. They show that the Securitate blackmailed children across Romania into becoming informers in the late 1980s, as the whiff of liberalization in the Soviet bloc prompted Ceaus¸escu to tighten his grip on the country.”38
Anyone caught by the Communist Party’s spies engaging in behavior deemed to be harmful to the ruling regime or the collective was imprisoned, exiled, or killed. From 1947 to 1989, it is believed that 435,000 people died because of policies enacted by the left-wing government in the Socialist Republic of Romania.39
SIDE NOTE
If you really like massively powerful governments capable of enforcing socialism, consider what happens when you disagree with that government. Romania was every bit a communist regime as anyone else on this list, but they also had a very anti-abortion dictator. So, what happens when that combination comes to fruition? You get Decree 770.
With this decree, Nicolae Ceaus¸escu not only outlawed abortion in almost all circumstances, but he used the power of the state to force women to undergo gynecological exams at work. If they objected, he took away their health care, dental care, and vacations. He set a minimum family size and monthly birth quota, investigated the cause of miscarriages, taxed couples that didn’t reproduce, and taxed all people over 25 that were unmarried an extra 10 percent of their salaries.j
I’ve already talked in detail about Venezuela’s economic chaos, but you can’t talk about socialism’s bloody and disastrous history without at least mentioning this prime example of why collectivism never works.
As bad as things have become in Venezuela—riots, starvation, political instability, hyperinflation—it’s very likely the worst has yet to come for Venezuelans, who continue to watch helplessly as the self-described socialist leaders of that nation destroy the country’s economy and impose countless totalitarian policies. The economic destruction created by the costly socialist programs, irresponsible spending practices, and government regulations and price controls imposed by President Nicolas Maduro and former president Hugo Chavez grew so dire that even before the current political chaos, child malnutrition became widespread. The New York Times reported in late 2017 there had been 2,800 cases of child malnutrition reported during the previous 12 months. Four hundred children died as a result of poor nutrition during the same period.40 Later in December 2017, The Wall Street Journal reported nearly 8,300 people had been killed in the Venezuelan government’s “brutal crime crackdown.”41
Throughout 2019, hundreds of Venezuelans were killed, injured, or detained by government agents.42 More than 4 million people have fled the country to escape the economic devastation and turmoil created by the socialists running the country.43 And, unfortunately, it looks like things could get significantly worse in the coming years.
Determining precisely how many people were killed by the communists in Vietnam is extremely difficult because of the numerous long-lasting wars that occurred in the country throughout much of the twentieth century. However, the widely cited scholar R.J. Rummel estimated in 1994 the communist government in Vietnam had killed more than 1.6 million people in the twentieth century, including many innocent civilians who were butchered following the departure of the United States from the country toward the end of the Vietnam War.44
In addition to the many atrocities committed by the communist government in Vietnam, many of those killed died as a direct result of socialist policies and poor central planning. Food rationing was particularly problematic. From the 1960s to the 1980s, it was standard practice for non-farming Vietnamese to receive most of their food directly from the socialist government.45 It wasn’t uncommon for Vietnamese to receive just 28 pounds of food per month, mostly items like rice and dried tapioca. The rationing continued well after the Vietnam War ended because of socialist bureaucrats’ failure to manage food supplies. In an interview with German state-owned publication Deutsche Welle, Gerhard Will, an academic at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, noted, “In the 1980s, the supply of food items was even worse than during war times.”
Socialist Robert Mugabe, the former president of Zimbabwe, was responsible for the murder, torture, or imprisonment of tens of thousands of people. Some estimates say his government killed nearly 50,000 Zimbabweans.46
“From January 1983, a campaign of terror was waged against the Ndebele people in Matabeleland in western Zimbabwe,” Stuart Doran noted in a report for The Guardian (U.K.).47 “The so-called Gukurahundi massacres remain the darkest period in the country’s post-independence history, when more than 20,000 civilians were killed by Robert Mugabe’s feared Fifth Brigade.”
Doran further reported that although “[n]o one has accepted the blame for the violence… the recent release of historical documents has shed new light on those responsible. In a conversation with Cephas Msipa, one of the few remaining Zapu ministers of what had been a government of national unity, Sekeramayi reportedly said that ‘not only was Mugabe fully aware of what was going on’ but the Fifth Brigade was operating ‘under Mugabe’s explicit orders.’ ”
Even in his final years in office, despite being more than 90 years old, Mugabe remained committed to radical, racist, Marxist policies. In 2017, Mugabe announced his government would not prosecute people who had murdered innocent white farmers years earlier.48
In its report on the announcement, Newsweek’s Conor Gaffey noted, “Zimbabwe implemented a controversial land reform program in 2000 that saw squatters invade and seize hundreds of white-owned farms around the country. The violent seizures resulted in the murder of several white farmers, with many more displaced, and close associates of Mugabe given large chunks of land.”49
SIDE NOTE
Ian Kay, a farmer in Zimbabwe, and his family were routinely threatened by the Mugabe regime. Mugabe’s men raided his home, burnt down his huts, and maimed his horse.
When threats failed to provide the desired results, Kay was beaten by a crowd wielding sticks wrapped with barbed wire and left for dead. His son was tortured and mutilated.
Kay said, “They eventually broke the door down and I went out. And they beat me further in the school ground…. they tied my arms together and took me up the road. They said they were going to take me to my house to see how many guns I had and to move into the house.”
This was not a personal attack on Kay, but rather part of a “land reform” effort to address “unequal” farmland distribution in the country.k
On the other hand, Mugabe was honored as a “leader for tourism” by the United Nations’ World Tourism Organisation in 2012. And, while it’s true that he allowed the inflation rate to reach 89,700,000,000,000,000,000,000%, he was able to hold it under 90,000,000,000,000,000,000,000%. So, it wasn’t all bad news.
We’ve already discussed how without strong protections for individuals, democracies can be just as dangerous as dictatorships and other forms of government. (See Chapter 3.) In the United States, Japanese Americans, African Americans, Mormons, Catholics, Chinese, and numerous other groups have at one point or another been the victims of democratically elected governments that ignored the constitutional protections for individual liberty promised to those groups. Democracy guarantees only one thing: If tyranny exists in a democratically elected government, it’s likely a majority of people agree with it—or at least that they did at some point in the past.
It’s also really important to keep in mind that in many of the examples of socialism’s failure mentioned above, as well as countless other historical examples unrelated to socialism, authoritarian governments were at first democratically elected. For example, in 1791, France held its first democratic election. Just two years later, in 1793, the French Revolution’s “Reign of Terror” was instituted by the revolutionary government’s ironically named Committee of Public Safety, leading to the execution of 1,400 people.50 Similarly, the Nazis rose to power after winning a huge share of parliamentary seats in Germany’s 1932 elections.51 And for many decades, socialist politicians were democratically elected in Venezuela. (Even though some of the most recent elections in Venezuela have been deemed by much of the global community to be illegitimate, many previous elections were considered fair.52)
To say democracy is a guarantee that people’s individual rights will be protected is completely contradicted by hundreds of years of historical examples of democracy devolving into tyranny. This is why it’s so important for democracy to be coupled with protections for individual liberty (in the United States, the Bill of Rights and Constitution), something that simply cannot exist in a socialist society.
To blame free markets for societal problems like hunger is just plain dumb. At its foundation, free-market capitalism is simply a system in which people have the ability to freely own property and freely exchange it. That’s it. To say capitalism is to blame for societal problems is like saying freedom is to blame. If people are suffering, I do believe it’s important for communities and neighbors to help each other. But it must be voluntary, not forced, coerced, or mandated—and that’s what socialism is.
In a free society, no matter how productive an economy is, there will always be people who are poorer than others, but there is nothing stopping people in a free society from freely helping other people. So, to say free-market capitalism is somehow morally deficient as a system just isn’t true. It’s the people in the system who have failed the poor. They’re the ones that need to change, by being more compassionate, loving, kind, and generous.
The “invisible hand” of free markets works for all of us in that it always improves efficiency and helps people achieve their goals. The question is, what do we want? What are our goals?
However, if you’re saying crony capitalism and corruption are responsible for creating unfairness, slowing economic growth, and unjustly picking “winners” and “losers,” then I couldn’t agree more. But crony capitalism, as we already discussed in Chapter 2, only exists when government has too much power. Take that power away from government—through federal and state reforms and potentially new constitutional amendments—and cronyism will disappear along with it.
Perhaps most importantly, although it’s true that there are still people suffering in America and in other countries with market-based economies, the historical record shows overwhelmingly that these nations provide people with the best possible chance at obtaining prosperity. People in market-based economies are wealthier, healthier, and happier than people in economies in which most decisions are made by a centralized power, a fact well documented in recent years by the many societies that have chosen to abandon their socialist economies or policies in exchange for more economic freedom.
India is one of the best examples of the power of capitalism. In the 1990s, India transitioned away from many of its socialist programs and opened its market to foreign investment. It also refused to enact strict regulatory schemes in emerging tech-heavy industries, a mistake the country’s socialists had made in many other industries earlier in the century. The results of India’s move toward freer markets has been nothing short of a miracle. In 1993, more than 430 million Indians were living below the international poverty line, but by 2011, the country’s tremendous economic growth had pulled more than 164 million people out of poverty.53 In 2017, Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute, estimated the number of Indians who had escaped poverty was 200 million.54 (See Chapter 9 for more.)