By Gary North
What is the longest-running socialist
experiment? What has its success been?
If someone asked you to defend the idea
that socialism has failed, what would you offer as your example?
Where did modern socialism begin?
In America.
That's right: in the land of the free
and the home of the braves. On Indian reservations.
They were invented to control adult
warriors. They had as a goal to keep the native population in poverty and
impotent.
Did the system work? You bet it did.
Has the experiment been a failure? On
the contrary, it has been a success.
When was the last time you heard of a
successful Indian uprising?
Are the people poor? The poorest in
America.
Are they on the dole? Of course.
Last year, the US Department of
Agriculture allocated $21 million to provide subsidized electricity to
residents on the reservations whose homes are the most distant from jobs and
opportunities. You can read about this here. This will keep them poor. Tribal
power means tribal impotence.
The tribes are dependent. They will stay
dependent. That was what the program was designed to achieve.
For some reason, textbooks do not offer
a page or two on the corruption, the bureaucratization, and the multigenerational
poverty created by tribal-run socialism. Here we have a series of
government-run social laboratories. How successful have they been? Where are
reservations that have systematically brought people out of poverty?
The next one will be the first.
Workers' Paradises
The Soviet Union lasted as a socialist
workers' paradise from 1917 until 1991. As a direct result of that experiment,
at least 30 million Russians died. It may have been twice that. China's
experiment was shorter: 1949 to 1978. Perhaps 60 million Chinese died.
The system failed to deliver the
promised goods. I can think of no topic more suitable for a class in economics
than a discussion of the failure of socialism. The same is true of a course in
modern world history. A course in political science should cover this failure
in detail.
They don't, of course. They do not begin
with the fundamental challenge to… (Read on)
Source: Mises.org
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