Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

It never ceases to amaze me how anyone can support a system that has failed time and time again. This is something that Einstein would have called insanity, though I am not sure what to call it. I would call it stupidity, but there are seemingly intelligent people who proudly call themselves socialists or even communists. The sad part is that you wouldn’t just find these people on the fringe, like you would the KKK and their Neo-Nazi buddies. You have mainstream Democrats such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez who call themselves Democratic Socialists, but they pretty much stand for the same ideas that have consistently failed us. Not that I consider either of these two intellectual heavyweights. Sanders once said that the long lines that the Russian people had to wait in just to get a loaf of bread was actually a sign of a healthy economy. Yet, the man seems like a Rhodes Scholar next to Cortez. Every time this woman speaks, you can clearly see that her mind is as empty as her promises of free healthcare and free college. This woman can’ t name the three branches of government and compares anyone who challenges her to a debate a catcaller. I am not even sure that Cortez is worthy of being called an intellectual featherweight.

One could call it absurd to support socialism during a time when we can clearly see what it has done to Venezuela. I think comedienne and commentator, Jimmy Fallon said it best about the leftists who insist on advocating for socialism, when you can clearly see what it’s doing to Venezuela is like a travel agent trying to sell beach packets after the release of Jaws.

Then of course there is communism, socialism’s more extreme cousin. Now this is an ideology that truly has an abysmal track record. It’s an ideology that has not only failed as an economic system, but it is one that has helped bring about the death of a hundred million people worldwide, which is actually a conservative estimate. You would think that the defenders of this system would be far in between. Sadly, there are some who have romantic delusions about how things were in the former Soviet Union. I remember reading an issue of Newsweek where people fondly looked back on the days when the Soviet system provided jobs for the poor and equality for women. Aside from the obvious problem that you wouldn’t see any mainstream publication make the same claims about Nazi Germany, most of these notions are complete hogwash. Apparently, they never heard the old saying in Russia that women can remain equal to men, just as long as they can come home and cook dinner. I am pretty sure if you asked any woman being worked to death in a Gulag, they probably would have preferred life as a fifty’s housewife in America, then to live under The Soviet Union’s perverse view of equality. Besides I think George Orwell said it best in Animal Farm, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

As for the part about being guaranteed a job, it was great just as long you were okay with spending the rest of your life in that very job. That was how the Soviets ended up with a high number of factory employees who spent more time drinking vodka and smoking cigarettes, than doing actual work. That it is also how they ended up with an alarmingly high number of military tanks that either fell apart or exploded when people tried to use them.

Yet for some reason people still have this romantic notion about how the Soviet Union was a worker’s paradise. I remember reading this book titled While Europe Slept where the author Bruce Bawer, wrote about a shop in Eastern Germany that was selling merchandise with slogans that spoke fondly of the era when they were controlled by the Soviet Union. Bawer wrote that people born after the fall of The Berlin Wall had no understanding of how people were willing to risk their lives to get to Western Germany. It reminds of these same clueless leftists who try to tell us how wonderful Cuba is, but can never explain why its officials have to prevent their people from leaving. The same logic applies to Eastern Germany during the Cold War. If the ideas of the Soviet Union were so superior, why did they have to put up a wall to keep Western ideas out? For that matter why did they have to stop people from leaving if it was so wonderful? In America nobody has to paddle through shark infested waters if they want to leave the country. Just like Western Germany where the people were free to leave without having to scale a wall or outrun a bullet.

What is interesting is that you only have a fringe element that looks fondly on the days of the Third Reich. A fringe element that is heavily vilified by mainstream society, unlike communists who are actually responsible for killing more people than the Nazis ever did. So why isn’t Communism regarded in the same revulsion as National Socialism? According to Paul Kengor, the author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Communism , this is largely do to our education system whitewashing the atrocities committed by communist regimes around the world and feeding children nonsense about how great it was for the marginalized.

Though I think one of the ways that socialists and communists try to weasel their way past the failures of their beloved economic systems is by using the whole “No True Scotsman” fallacy where they try to say that Venezuela isn’t an example of true socialism. Though as libertarian Youtuber Shane Killian once pointed out, the left didn’t have a problem with using Venezuela as an example of socialism’s success when the world thought the country was thriving. The same actually goes for The Soviet Union, which left-wing economists thought was a success story for communism during the eighties, when the empire was actually on the verge of collapse. If you mention The Soviet Union now, you will have communist sympathizers scream about how it didn’t represent true communism.

The problem is that people who support socialism and communism don’t seem to really care if their economic theories actually work in reality. They believe that these economic systems are morally just, despite their failures and that it is why they will never stop trying to push them. As Justin Haskins pointed out in his book Socialism is Evil, we should really alter our arguments about how immoral socialism and communism really are, instead of pointing out how ineffective these systems are in practice. Those quotes by Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Thomas Sowell that were recently featured on The Libertarian Enterprise, reinforced this point. While Haskins certainly has a point, I don’t think the moral arguments will work against die hard communists who don’t even blink an eye when you point out how many people were killed by communist regimes. They just shrug and make the claim that capitalism has killed even more people, yet they can never provide a single example.