Socialism: Done Many Times and Always Failed

With Obama's "$700 billion in New-Deal-style "public works" boondoggles" and his wanting to appoint a Car Commissar and inject more billions into our failed auto industry it appears that what we voted for in November is pure Socialism.

America! We the people are NOT socialists. We are individualists. When will we learn the lesson that Socialism is a failed system and that all it brings is poverty and chaos? How many times will we have to "try" it in order to understand that the government is not good at directing the economy. Government is force and needed to maintain order. It cannot plan the economy - individuals planning their own businesses and work make an economy work. We don't need to reinvent this wheel all we need to do is study history. For goodness sake, Mr. Obama, don't lead us down the old road of central planning. Will you ruin this country before we have time to rediscover the fact that Capitalism works because it is the individual making thousands of decisions based on what is beneficial for his life that works. Robert Tracinski explains this in his article "Car Commissar" at The Intellectual Activist.

...The real story of the bailout of the Detroit auto industry is not simply the waste of taxpayers' money on failing enterprises. Rather, the real news is Congress's apparent confidence that the way to revive Detroit is to impose central planning on the auto industry. This would be done by appointing a "car czar" empowered to "act as a kind of trustee with authority to bring together labor, management, creditors and parts suppliers to negotiate a restructuring plan. He or she also would be able to review any transaction or contract valued at more than $25 million."

The term "car czar" is not quite right. As a metaphorical description of the bailout, it evokes the right location—Russia—but the wrong era. "Car commissar" would be much more exact. Perhaps he will begin his work by issuing a five-year plan for the revival of the Big Three.

The Christian Science Monitor describes this as a comeback for "industrial policy." "The notion that government would pick economic winners and losers gained support among Democrats in the early 1980s, when it appeared that Japan, with its well-developed industrial policy, was America's No. 1 economic rival. The approach later lost its luster as the Japanese economy settled into a deep slump." And yet, here we are trying it again.

"Industrial policy" was always just an evasive euphemism used to describe the latest variation on the old theory of central planning. But central planning and nationalization of industries was a dead end when the old Soviet Russians tried it—and it is still a dead end now that Russia is trying it again.

The 20th century experimented with every possible variant of socialism. We had democratic socialism in Western Europe, totalitarian socialism in Eastern Europe, and fascist socialism in South America. We had atheistic socialism and we had "liberation theology." We had the "scientific socialism" of the Soviet central planners and the chaotic jungle socialism of the Khmer Rouge, who executed anyone with an education. We had "socialism with Chinese characteristics" and socialism with African characteristics and socialism with Hindu characteristics.

We tried it all, and every time it led to poverty and oppression. Those results have been proven with scientific thoroughness. There is no excuse for trying it all again.