Socialism is a joke. It doesn’t work. And it is so often a gateway to totalitarianism.
But that doesn’t mean it won’t happen. In this interview, I express my concern that the United States has passed a tipping point.
In the discussion, I included my usual caveat about the meaning of socialism.
I prefer the technical definition, which involves government ownership of the means of production, central planning, and government-dictated prices. But most people assume it simply means big government, in which case it’s hard to find nations that don’t qualify.
Regardless of the best definition, the reason for my pessimism is simple. It’s a combination of changing demographics and poorly designed entitlement programs.
For all intents and purposes, we’re on a trajectory (the “most predictable crisis in history“) to become another Greece.
The good news is that we probably have a couple of decades before the crisis occurs. The bad news is that our political class seems to have no interest in the reforms that would be necessary to avert the crisis.
Though maybe the crisis will occur sooner than we think. I wrote back in 2015 that the debate between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders was merely a discussion over how fast we should drive in the wrong direction.
Well, Crazy Bernie didn’t get the nomination, but he seems to have won the war for the soul of the party. As I point out in this second clip, the radicals are now in the ascendancy on the left.
By the way, here’s the interview with Thomas Sowell that was used as a lead-in to my interview. He may be even more pessimistic than I am.
Though you’ll notice that Professor Sowell included a caveat, speculating that maybe there will be some unforeseeable development that saves the western world (or perhaps just the United States) from gradual decay.
Let’s close this column with some optimism on that point.
I’m old enough to remember the malaise of the 1970s, which wasn’t just based on the economic mess caused by Nixon-style and Carter-style statism. Many people also thought capitalism was no better than communism and that we needed to find some sort of middle ground (and some economists were horribly guilty of this sin).
Thankfully, Reagan had a different approach (including mockery rather than moral equivalence) and the western world won the Cold War.
