Lessons of Failed Socialism

Norman Thomas spent his life promoting leftist agenda in the United States. He wrote, "The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism, but under the name of liberalism they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program until one day America will be a socialist nation without ever knowing how it happened."

Psychiatrist Lyle Rossiter says that growth of the liberal agenda in western societies has resulted from the idea that government is the appropriate agency to satisfy the longings in people for parental care. But, he says, government as a custodian, manager, provider, and caretaker is detrimental because the people become dependents.

But the pushers of socialism think of themselves not as dependents but as managers. These elites are often millionaires like Michael Moore and George Soros. Others are tenured college professors or Hollywood stars. The most powerful group of elites are members of Congress. These exempt themselves from their onerous creations like Social Security and ObamaCare.

We should learn from the examples of failed socialist states. The first American failure of socialism was in the Plymouth Colony in 1623. For three years the Colonists lived as a socialist community, putting the fruits of their common toil into a common storehouse; and each year they suffered famine. Finally, Governor William Bradford gave separate parcels of land to families to work as their own. Thereafter, the colonists had plenty of food, and those who produced more than they could consume themselves sold it to others.

Today all informed people know of the failure of socialism in North Korea and Cuba. Everyone should be aware that the most spectacular failure of a socialist government was the Soviet Union. It broke apart in 1989 after causing seventy years of misery for its people. In the 1950s Khrushchev revealed the full extent of Stalin’s crimes against his people, including the murder of 20 million people. The predictable outcome of full- blown socialism is tyranny, because the government assumes absolute control of all facets of society. The founding fathers knew that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. But the political left deny that reality.

David Horowitz has written extensively about his experiences as a communist living and working among his American comrades. His writing is instructive about leftist thinking in America. Even though American leftists knew of Stalin’s crimes, they continued to support the Soviet Union: "We were confident that the socialized foundations of Soviet society would eventually assert themselves, producing a self-reform of the Soviet tyranny." He says it is a characteristic faith of the left that, despite all evidence to the contrary, a socialist eutopia awaits the world sometime in the future.

In the Soviet Union in 1989:

Income per worker was one seventh that of workers in the U.S.

Red meat and sugar were rationed;

Intake of red meat per person was half what it had been under the Czars in 1913;

Fruits, vegetables, and household goods were unavailable;

Siberian miners had been on strike because they could not get bars of soap;

In a land of virgin forests, there was a toilet paper shortage;

Two-thirds of households had no hot water; a third had no running water at all;

A family of four was forced to live in an 8ft-by-8ft room.

Given these facts, you have to wonder, "Why is America becoming a socialist society?"

---Kearney Smith, Ph.D.