The Case Against Socialism Read online

  Dedication

  For Kelley

  In the dream you are gone

  Every time

  Not left

  but mostly just erased

  Your face flutters

  Dances blurs

  Approaches and recedes

  I struggle

  but can’t bring you into focus

  For whatever reason

  I let you get away

  one phone call

  One bloody phone call

  Why didn’t I make that call?

  you slip away

  gravity pulls me under

  Into an alternate universe

  Where neither light nor love escape

  A terrible what if

  Consumes me

  Till I wake beside you

  And realize

  I must have made that call

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Part I: Because Eating Your Pets Is Overrated—Socialism Creates Poverty Chapter 1: Socialism Destroyed Venezuela’s Once-Vibrant Economy

  Chapter 2: Socialism Rewards Corruption

  Chapter 3: Interfering with Free Markets Causes Shortages

  Chapter 4: Capitalism Is the More Moral System

  Chapter 5: Capitalism Benefits the Middle Class

  Chapter 6: Income Inequality Does Not Ruin the Economy or Corrupt Government

  Chapter 7: Under Capitalism, the 1 Percent Is Always Changing

  Chapter 8: The Poor Are Better Off Under Capitalism

  Part II: Capitalism Makes Scandinavia Great Chapter 9: Bernie’s Socialism Also Includes Praise for Dictators

  Chapter 10: Today’s American Socialists Don’t Know What Socialism Means

  Chapter 11: Bernie Sanders Is Too Liberal to Get Elected in Denmark

  Chapter 12: No, Bernie, Scandinavia Is Not Socialist

  Chapter 13: Sweden’s Riches Actually Came from Capitalism

  Chapter 14: The Nordic Model Is Welfarism, Not Socialism

  Chapter 15: Sweden Is Shrinking Taxes and Welfare

  Chapter 16: Welfarism Requires High Middle-Class Taxes

  Chapter 17: American Scandinavians Have It Better Here Than in Scandinavia

  Chapter 18: Swedish College Is Free, but It’s Not Cheap or Universal

  Part III: A Boot Stamping on the Human Face Forever—Socialism and Authoritarianism Chapter 19: Socialism Becomes Authoritarianism

  Chapter 20: Hitler Was a Socialist

  Chapter 21: The Nazis Hated Capitalism

  Chapter 22: The Nazis Didn’t Believe in Private Property

  Chapter 23: Socialism Encourages Eugenics

  Chapter 24: Your Degree of Enthusiasm for Socialism May Decide Whether You Live or Die

  Part IV: Socialism Doesn’t Create Equality Chapter 25: Socialism Promises Equality and Leads to Tyranny

  Chapter 26: All Aspects of Culture Eventually Become Targets for the Planners

  Chapter 27: If No One Has to Work, No One Will

  Chapter 28: The Cure for Failed Socialism Is Always More Socialism

  Chapter 29: Poetry Can Be Dangerous Under Socialism

  Chapter 30: It’s Not Socialism Without Purges

  Part V: Where Are These Angels? The Philosophy of Socialism Chapter 31: Socialism Expects Selfless Rulers and Citizens

  Chapter 32: Progress Comes from Rebels and Dreamers

  Chapter 33: Freedom Is Not the Inevitable Outcome of History and Must Be Protected

  Part VI: Never Let a Crisis Go to Waste: Socialism and Alarmism Chapter 34: Socialism Leads to Cronyism

  Chapter 35: If Socialists Can’t Find a Crisis, They Will Create One

  Chapter 36: Socialism and Climate Change Alarmism Go Together

  Chapter 37: Socialist Green New Deal Allows for No Dissent

  Chapter 38: Fake News and Propaganda on the Rise in America

  Chapter 39: Welcome to the Panopticon: FaceCrime, PreCrime, and the Surveillance State

  Afterword: Finding Common Ground

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  About the Authors

  Also by Rand Paul

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  It was one of those long-winded speeches in front of thousands of goose-stepping soldiers that seem to be a signature performance in authoritarian regimes. The parade stands along Caracas’s Avenida Bolivar are filled with posturing Venezuelan government officials and generals.

  As President Nicolas Maduro steps to the podium, unbeknownst to him, two DJI M600 drones speed toward him. These drones are typically used by professional photographers and can carry about thirteen pounds but have a battery life of only sixteen minutes.1

  The two drones speeding toward the dais each carry a payload of 2.2 pounds of plastic explosives. While they are not military drones, their intent is the same—assassination.2

  As Maduro’s speech plods on, his wife is the first to react. She glances quickly upward and her face registers horror at the six-rotor beast hovering above them in the sky before the first explosion occurs. It takes a second or two for Maduro to digest that the fire blast was meant for him.

  All hell breaks loose. Seconds later, a second drone detonates down the street into the Don Eduardo apartment block. The parading soldiers break ranks and run helter-skelter. Maduro’s security team screens him from the direction of the explosions with large cloth-covered shields.3

  Though seven soldiers are injured, the socialist dictator of Venezuela is unharmed. Maduro later told reporters: “That drone was coming for me but there was a shield of love. I am sure I will live for many more years.”4

  Who would want to kill President Maduro, the leader of a socialist paradise that Hollywood star Sean Penn once claimed had alleviated 80 percent of the poverty in Venezuela?

  Perhaps it was the sixteen-year-old girl who leads a gang that fights rival gangs for control of an operation that sifts through garbage for edible food. Or perhaps it is one of the young men from Chacao who hunt dogs and cats in the street and pigeons in the plaza to eat.

  I’d like to know what Sean Penn would say to Lis Torrealba, nineteen, a Venezuelan refugee who fled to Colombia with her one-year-old daughter in a desperate attempt to escape starvation in Venezuela. She is one of more than a million Venezuelans who have done the same. Megan Janetsky, in an article for USA Today, wrote of the effects of lack of food and medicine, and of hyperinflation. She quoted Torrealba, “The money in our country, I couldn’t even buy candy if I wanted to. . . . I can’t buy anything, if there’s something you need. You would need a stack of money to even pay for a tomato. You would need a big stack of money.”5

  Or maybe the attackers are related to one of the hundreds of political dissidents held without trial in Venezuelan jails. The attackers could be related to the thousands dying of curable infectious diseases in a country whose hospitals are filthy and crumbling. Nicholas Casey reported in the New York Times:

  Hospital wards have become crucibles where the forces tearing Venezuela apart have converged. Gloves and soap have vanished from some hospitals. Often, cancer medicines are found only on the black market. There is so little electricity that the government works only two days a week to save what energy is left.

  At the University of the Andes Hospital in the mountain city of Mérida, there was not enough water to wash blood from the operating table. Doctors preparing for surgery cleaned their hands with bottles of seltzer water.

  “It is like something from the 19th century,” said Dr. Christian Pino, a surgeon at the hospital.6

  The attackers really could
be any one of Venezuela’s citizenry who have lost on average almost twenty pounds from lack of food.

  But this is not the story of who tried to kill Maduro with a homemade explosive drone. Rather, this is the story of an evil that inevitably and inexorably leads to poverty, starvation, and ultimately violence. This is a story of the continued false allure and sophistry of an evil that has killed millions of people and even today threatens a new generation of the naive.

  This is the story of an evil well documented and yet still somehow enticing, even in America. This is the story of socialism in all its drab and dreary machinelike destruction of individual thought, creativity, and ambition. This is the story of socialism in all of its violence, bloodshed, and tyranny. It is a cautionary tale of how America has so far eluded the siren call of something for nothing, of an equality determined and enforced by the government—but also of how close we still are to succumbing to socialism.

  President Trump in his January 2019 State of the Union address made it clear to the growing faction of socialists in Congress that “America will never become a socialist country!”

  Republican members of Congress jumped to their feet with cheers of “USA. USA.”

  As the cameras panned in on the socialist senator from Vermont, though, he did not look pleased.

  Trump explained that Maduro had taken the richest country in South America and inflicted socialist policies that brought “abject poverty and despair” to Venezuela.

  The president explained to congressional socialists: “America was founded on liberty and independence and not government coercion, domination, and control. We are born free and we will stay free.”

  The most famous socialist in America, Bernie Sanders, pursed his lips and glowered at the president.

  Later that night Sanders responded: “Trump says ‘We are born free, and we will stay free.’ I say to Trump: People are not truly free when they can’t afford health care, prescription drugs, or a place to live. People are not free when they cannot retire with dignity or feed their families.”

  I guess Senator Sanders hasn’t noticed that food and medicine are completely unaffordable and nearly unavailable in Venezuela. Sanders continues to assert that the democratic socialism he advocates for is somehow different, that his version of socialism will “reform a political system in America today which is not only grossly unfair but, in many respects, corrupt.”

  Sanders’s socialism will make the world “fair.” Yet, nowhere is the explanation of who gets to define “fair” and what weapons the “fairness police” will wield when they come.

  President Trump is right to be concerned about socialism coming to America. A recent Gallup poll indicates that 57 percent of Democrats have a favorable view of socialism.7

  What is it about socialism that casts such a spell that people refuse to acknowledge history? Time and time again socialism leads to the impoverishment of nations. Perhaps it is the allure of equality or fairness. Surveys in America alarmingly show about half of today’s youth have a favorable opinion of socialism.8 A Gallup poll found that 45 percent of young American adults (age 18–29) have a positive view of capitalism, while 51 percent of this same group see socialism positively.9 These surveys link approval of socialism to a corresponding desire among young Americans to live in a “fair” world. Blasi and Kruse of Rutgers University write that “today’s youth reject capitalism; what they really want is fairness.”

  They cite a “2016 Harvard University survey that found that 51 percent of American youth age 18 to 29 no longer support capitalism,” and another 2015 poll by “conservative-leaning Reason-Rupe, [which] found that young adults age 18 to 24 have a slightly more favorable view of socialism than capitalism.”

  When asked to explain their answers in the Harvard Study, participants in a focus group reported feeling that “capitalism was unfair and left people out despite their hard work.”10 The mantra of fairness is one that is inculcated from a young age. The assumption is that in order for one person to become rich someone else must suffer. Leftists preach that the economy is a zero-sum game where the rich enrich themselves on the backs of the poor, a claim that is revealed to be false when you examine the facts.

  The great industrialists of the nineteenth century are often tagged as robber barons. Yet as Andrew Carnegie’s wealth grew so did the economy. Poverty declined from over 90 percent of people living in extreme poverty worldwide in 1820 to around 75 percent of people living in extreme poverty in 1910. By the time the industrial revolution was in full swing, wages were rising and the standard of living known previously only to kings was becoming far more accessible. From the time of Carnegie’s death in 1919 until the present, the number of people living in extreme poverty declined to less than 10 percent.11 As much of the world embraced capitalism in the twentieth century, childhood mortality plummeted from nearly a third of children dying before the age of five to less than 1 percent in wealthy countries and 4.3 percent worldwide.12

  And still, American youth mistakenly are attracted to socialism. Blasi and Kruse warn us that “the share of the overall population that questions capitalism’s core precepts is around the highest in at least 80 years of polling on the topic.” Gallup, in a 2016 poll, records 55 percent of millennials as favoring socialism.13

  Yet, when millennials say they are for socialism, do they have any idea what socialism is in a historical sense? How many of them are even aware of the famines under Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot? Reason Foundation asked millennials to define socialism and discovered that only 16 percent could identify socialism as government ownership of the means of production.14

  The only good news about these surveys of young people is that they were overwhelmingly canceled out by the views of older people.

  A study published in sciencemag.org concluded that although “children start off like Karl Marx, . . . they eventually become more like a member of the International Olympic Committee. The study ‘finds that children’s views on fairness change from egalitarian to merit-based as they grow older.’”15

  The question is—will this next generation follow the path of previous generations? Will today’s youth, when they leave their parents’ basements and begin to earn a living, discover that their success depends on their merit and hard work, or will they succumb like Venezuela to the allure of something for nothing?

  Part I

  Because Eating Your Pets Is Overrated—Socialism Creates Poverty

  Chapter 1

  Socialism Destroyed Venezuela’s Once-Vibrant Economy

  Socialism’s great. Just ask Oliver Stone.

  Oliver Stone has composed not one but two biopics glorifying the socialism of Hugo Chavez. Wonder if it’ll become a trilogy with the finale showing images of Venezuelans eating their pets and burning their currency for warmth?

  Doubt it. Remorse and honest regret are not found in any great quantity in Hollywood.

  How did Oliver Stone, Michael Moore, and Sean Penn get it so wrong when observing the Venezuelan “miracle”?

  Venezuela was so rich with oil that it took some time for socialism to completely destroy its once-vibrant economy. Even to this day Venezuela still has the largest oil reserves in the world, even greater than Saudi Arabia’s. They just can’t get it out of the ground because socialism has destroyed the pricing system, and endless government spending and debt caused hyperinflation that has destroyed its currency.

  Some blame Chavez for this disaster. Some blame Maduro. But really, could any one man take a country with more oil reserves than Saudi Arabia and screw it up so badly that hundreds of thousands of citizens would flee the country? Could one man take the richest country in South America and turn it into a hellhole where citizens literally starve in the streets?

  Chavez and Maduro alone didn’t lay waste to Venezuela. Rather, it was the terrible constellation of ideas called socialism that reached its pinnacle under Chavez and Maduro that devastated Venezuela.

  Some like to point to the Castro-loving Hug
o Chavez as the beginning of socialism in Venezuela, but the roots of its government owning the means of production started decades before Chavez. State control over Venezuela’s oil industry dates back to the 1970s.

  According to José Niño, “in the 1950s, . . . Venezuela was at its peak, with a fourth-place ranking in terms of per capita GDP worldwide.”1 In the 1950s, when the Perez Jimenez government ruled, there were no extensive price controls. At that time, Venezuela was neither democratic nor a completely free market economy but rather a military regime with aspects of crony capitalism. For the most part, prices were not controlled and a limited marketplace allowed supply and demand to intersect and work their magic.

  As Niño describes it: “A combination of a relatively free economy, an immigration system that attracted and assimilated laborers from Italy, Portugal, and Spain and a system of strong property rights, allowed Venezuela to experience unprecedented levels of economic development from the 1940s up until the 1970s.”2

  Daniel Lahoud is a professor at the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello, a Catholic university, and at the Universidad Central de Venezuela (UCV). Lahoud describes Venezuela’s long path to socialism:

  “Before 1973 our government did not own any companies and Venezuela grew 6.5 percent year-on-year. In contrast, between 1974 and 1998 we experimented with democratic socialism and brought GDP growth to 1.9 percent year-on-year. Since 1999 we are experimenting with scientific socialism and the rhythm is 0.0 percent or negative.”3 (Today, Venezuela’s GDP is contracting at 10 percent.)

  In contrast, consider another South American country, Chile, which abandoned its flirtation with socialism back in 1973. At that time, Chilean income was about 36 percent of Venezuela’s. Operating under free markets and capitalism, Chilean incomes have increased by 228 percent, while Venezuelan incomes have declined by 21 percent. Capitalism has left Chileans 51 percent richer than their Venezuelan counterparts, who now starve despite the vast resources of their country.4