The philosophy of socialism -- in essence, the naked claim that one should have what another has produced -- is as old as mankind. The societal implementation of this philosophy in the form of full-fledged state ownership and control of the major means of production and central planning of resource and output allocations, however, occupied only a brief historical span. Owing to its intrinsic inability to solve problems of calculation, knowledge, and motivation, socialism in practice consumed previously accumulated capital and impoverished billions of people caught up in the experiment, killing hundreds of millions in the process, and by now it has been abandoned almost everywhere it was tried. The underlying philosophy, however, has weakened not a whit. Now, in practically every country of any consequence, a system of economic fascism -- a system with severely compromised private property rights, but some room for entrepreneurial maneuver -- serves as a more viable replacement and as the context in which the age-old sin of envy drives politico-economic action as strongly as it ever did in the USSR and Maoist China. —Robert Higgs
Posted on: Tue, 14 Jan 2014 02:00:01 +0000
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