Socialist Experiments

In the summer of 1982, after the Cato Institute ’s week-long seminar at Dartmouth, I drove to Boston with one of the other attendees. Touring the city, we encountered a protest rally on Boston Common. I don’t remember just what the rally was about – probably the “nuclear freeze” or a general protest against nuclear weapons, which was a strong movement then. As we watched, a young woman approached and handed us flyers calling for socialism. “Like in Russia and China?” I asked her. Unwilling to defend those disastrous results, she responded “We’re more interested in the experiments currently going on in Zimbabwe and Nicaragua.” I knew very little about those “experiments” and had nothing much to say.Now, though, 36 years later, we know a great deal about those experiments in socialism. The photograph at right appears on the front page of Friday ’sWashington Post with the caption “Paramilitary members stand guard on July 17 at a dismantled barricade after police and pro-government forces stormed the Monimbo neighborhood of Masaya, Nicaragua, which had become a center of resistance.”I was reminded of something very candid that the socialist economist Robert Heilbronerwrote: that socialism depends on central planning and a collective moral commitment and thus on command and obedience to the plan. And that means that “The rights of individuals to their Millian liberties [are] directly opposed to the basic social commitment to a deliberately embraced ...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs