Silliest Argument Ever: We Don’t Know Socialism Doesn’t Work Because It Has Never Been Tried Before
ByIt seems to be a pervasive thought among proponents of socialism. This blog post attempts to claim just that.
I stumbled across that post because it shares a Google search results page for the term “why socialism doesn’t work” with this Web site. Here are some excerpts:
I am sick and tired of reading ignorant people who’ve never read anything Marx or Engels wrote (except possibly the Communist Manifesto) baselessly claim that ’socialism doesn’t work’.
My simple response to people who spout this empty rhetoric is to ask: how do you know?
… and…
So, to those of you on the right wing: okay, fine, keep hating socialism, that’s alright. But if you’re going to be honest and actually read what Marx wrote and then read any history of the Soviet Union, you should all realize that we cannot know that socialism doesn’t work since it’s never been tried in the industrialized world.
Yes, I do have a strong basis for the claim that socialism doesn’t work!
Saying that socialism has never been tried before is like saying that jumping off a 300 foot cliff in the morning, whilst flapping your arms for a soft landing, getting up and heading over for breakfast, has never been tried before.
It’ll be the best breakfast you can ever have. A sublime experience! You should try it! Oh, it’s impossible, it doesn’t work you say? Well, how do you know? Have you ever tried having breakfast after jumping off a 300 foot cliff, whilst flapping your arms for a soft landing?
Similarly, the socialists’ desired notion of a great society based on socialist principles cannot be tried, because it cannot be implemented. Just like death is an outcome of the cliff/breakfast stunt, a brutal regime with a failed economy is the outcome of the attempt of socialism in the Soviet Union.
Any attempt to implement socialism, especially on a grand scale, will run into basic facts of human nature that will prevent it from working out as planned. And then the socialist would say things such as, “it would have totally worked if only people behaved like we told them to.” But people just do not behave like the socialists want them to! They cannot. People work in favor of their own self interest. Even the socialists do! And that’s why, given the power, socialist governments become merely corrupt in some cases and also brutal murderous regimes in others.
To those who say that socialism has never been tried, the notion of socialism that has been “tried” is socialism whose goals have been achieved. And in this respect, they are right. Socialism has never been “tried”. And that’s because socialism is a dead end well before its goals are achieved.
10 Comments
August 13th, 2009 at 11:08 pm
Couple reading assignments that might help the ignorant socialism true-believers to understand the problems with that system:
Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth – by Ludwig Von Mises
written in 1920, this book demolishes the idea that Central Planning can *ever* work. You might say that, in this work, Von Mises predicts the downfall of the Soviet Union. It didn’t need Reagan to fall on its face. The seeds of its destruction are in its design.
Socialism – by Ludwig Von Mises
“…much more than a refutation of the economics of socialism (although on that front, nothing else compares). It is also a critique of the implicit religious doctrines behind Western socialist thinking, a cultural critique of socialist teaching on sex and marriage, an examination of the implications of radical human inequality, an attack on war, socialism, and refutation of collectivist methodology. In short, Mises set out to refute socialism, and instead yanked out the collectivist mentality from its very roots”
both available here:
http://mises.org/store/Mises-Collection-C17.aspx?s=Name%20ASC&p=1
August 15th, 2009 at 3:31 am
socialism was tried here in the United States before and worked.
it was called the “New Deal” and it worked superbly on destroying America.
many years later America was blessed with a Savior named Mr. Ronald Reagan. Those were some of the best golden years America ever lived.
Mr. Ronald Reagan brought us a system that also worked, but for the POSITIVE interest of America for real Americans!
…and that fat **** michael moore doesn’t count as an American even if he was born here.
August 20th, 2009 at 1:05 am
Well written.. Thank you. So what do these Elite plan on doing with the majority who refuse to be mind numb robots who behave and act the way they dictate!
February 12th, 2010 at 12:55 pm
The New Deal was not socialism. The New Deal was thought up by a group of capitalists/politicians to serve their own interests at the expense of the people. Similar things was also going on in Europe before the emergence of socialist ideas and was actually part of the problem that socialism was supposed to solve.
I am not for the dictatorship of the proletariat or anything of the sort though, I am just saying that state capitalism does not equal socialism.
And Reagan was no less of an “elite” than FDR, Clinton or Obama. In fact I believe he was the retard who started the “War on Drugs”, which wasted billions of taxpayers money. However, If by America for real Americans you mean the stock holders of a select few big companies then you might be right that his system worked for positive interests.
February 12th, 2010 at 1:18 pm
And by the same token, the Soviet system was not socialist. It was thought up by a bunch of dictators and oligarchs to serve their own interests while the rest of the populace starved. You see, this illustrates the main point of this post. If you’re going to define socialism as a system that promotes equality, fairness, and the welfare of the “people”, then socialism doesn’t exist, because socialism doesn’t do that. If we want a large controlling government that takes from one group of people and gives to another, we’re also going to get corruption, manipulation by self interest, and huge amounts of waste. One comes with the other.
What is “state capitalism” anyway? A system in which industry is owned or tightly controlled by the state is socialism.
Oh, yeah, “retard”. Are you taking lessons from Rahm Emanuel?
Indeed, only stock holders of a few select big companies have ever benefited from the American system during the Reagan era. The rest were starving on the streets working for slave wages. No small business owner has earned more than pittance to barely feed his family. None of the 50% of middle class households who own stocks has made any money off of them. And the big companies such as Apple didn’t make anything useful that anyone enjoys. They only stole money from the people, never providing anything in return.
February 12th, 2010 at 2:07 pm
Okay I’m sorry about the retard-thing. I don’t think Reagan was retarded, I was just irritated by people seeing him as some kind of liberator even though he approved spending extreme amounts of money on the War on Drugs and funding the Islamic extremists in Afghanistan.
Also his bad attitudes toward labor unions had negative consequences on the economies of working class people.
February 12th, 2010 at 2:21 pm
Also I agree that socialism doesn’t really exist as any functioning society, but the Soviet Union was at least supposed to be socialist and tried from the start to implement the ideas of Marx. This was not the case with the American New Deal.I don’t agree that “[a] system in which industry is owned or tightly controlled by the state is socialism”, because this would mean that The British, Spanish, Dutch, French and other European Empires during the 1600s were socialist. That is obviously not the case since socialism was not yet invented at the time.
February 12th, 2010 at 3:45 pm
The New Deal did not attempt to implement the complete ideas of Marx. But it did implement many socialist ideas. It was not just “thought up by a group of capitalists/politicians to serve their own interests at the expense of the people.” That was not the purpose of Social Security, the SEC, etc. If it were, why don’t we get all the liberal politicians to agree to get rid of it all at once?
It is true however, that often when the government (i.e. politicians) gets its hands on other people’s money, the outcome benefits special interests with political ties more than the “people”. It happened in the Soviet Union, which was socialist, just did not achieve the socialists’ supposed goals, and it happens in the U.S.
April 22nd, 2010 at 12:50 am
I can’t even see how we can compare Karl Marx to socialism. In communism everybody is suppose to work, whereas in socialism the rich, motivated citizens are punished, and lazyness is rewarded. Sure, communism is a very utopic idea, but even the great Marx himself never said how it is correctly achieved without becoming completly corrupt. And a lot of the socialist rules placed on society just backfire, take minimum wage for example; sure it garantees that workers will be paid more money, but then the company will just hire less people. The only way an economie can stay afloat is through competition of supply and demand, which would be a laissez-faire capitalist economie.
July 19th, 2011 at 1:42 pm
Why is it that both sides of the debate stubbornly reject the fact that the word “socialism” has more than one use, and that they are essentially unrelated? No sensible or meaningful conclusion can be reached if we are not prepared to agree upon the definition of terms.
Clearly the use of “socialism” in the title of this site refers to state intervention in the economy, public services, higher taxes, etc. Putting aside any disagreement about which is the “right” definition of the word (although the one used here is by far the more common), doesn’t it seem ridiculous that pro-”socialists” are coming on here and arguing in favour of Marxist “socialism”, when either: they’re talking about Marxist Socialism, in which case their comments are irrelevant because that’s not what the site is about; or: they themselves are so confused about their ideas that they don’t recognise the distinction between “higher taxes etc” and “the abolition of the wages system, and the establishment of a society in which the means of production are commonly owned and labour is voluntary”.