Hey kids: Don't be a sucker for socialism

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People still read Ayn Rand. I read The Fountainhead and concluded that she was off her head. Drugs'll do that to you. The thing is, although I am sure a lot of people who claim to have read her haven't, some actually do, and those are the people who want to grow up to be politicians.

Yeah, it's like any proclaimed classic novel you are supposed to read in high school, my school experience wasn't typical but you wouldn't of read either of her novels unless you specifically wanted to. When it came to choosing what classic book to read for class I'd usually go for the shortest because I'm lazy like that and hell no I aint reading something that long. I went for Old Man and The Sea instead which is like 100 or so pages lol, my education was not that rigid fwiw.

Rand's novels came before she developed Objectionism, she basically became famous and let her fan club go to her head and developed a whole philosophical belief system for them to follow.

Are Rand's novels considered classics? They wouldn't be where I am living. I guess from a political perspective they are, but not from a literary one.

They did take place in wars but nonetheless, they managed to exist for a periods of time and we can learn from these examples.

If people understand the historic roots of Socialism, they will understand why it is problematic to categorize these economies as "mixed".

Are you suggesting that Communism at a large scale, isn't a collection of small scale communities?

I would say the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China, and Cuba were/are high centralized so yes I would say at large scale it is not a collection small scale autonomous communities. Without the strict control by the central government, the Soviets pretty much completely collapsed into ethnic nationalism.

People in the west routinely underestimate the size of the private economy in socialist states. If I remember correctly, about 40 per cent of food production was done privately by the time the Soviet Union collapsed.

The only economic system that exists when governments keep their mitts off is anarchy. I would love to see a bunch of US libertarians go to Somalia to learn how to put their principles into practice.

Somalia is a lot better off now than they were under communist dictatorship fwiw, it use to have a very strong state and the largest army in Africa. Somalia's economy preforms favorably compared to their immediate neighbors Kenya, Eritrea, Ethiopia. People have this idea that Somalia is complete anarchy but that's not true, Somaliland and Puntland are stable and basically a state with in state with their own leaders and military. It is only really the south of the country where Mogadishu is that has been ungovernable but even that is not really true, it's just that pretty hardcore Islamists had gained almost complete control of the territory under the Islamic Courts Union which was eventually driven out of power by Ethiopia and others with the most hardline Islamists leaving the ICU and forming al-Shabaab. Somalia is a really interesting place with a fascinating culture and has beautiful beaches, it's a shame that it is not safe place to visit.

And wouldn't the growth of the private economy in these communist states suggest the failure of the Marxist economy? It was done out necessity because they'd starve otherwise waiting in bread lines.

Wow, no offense, but you sound like an American college student.

tl;dr alert ahead

As for the rest, the fact is, Ludwig von Mises disproved Socialism (which, by text book definition is the same thing as Communism, not the socialistic states in Europe, which won't work either) before Russia implemented it fully. He proposed a concept called the Economic Calculation Problem. It states that in a centrally planned socialist economy, it is impossible to accurately allocate resources.

In Capitalism, we have the price mechanism, where the issue of scarcity and who gets what is determined by the price of the good, which can tell us:
1. How abundant the good is
2. How high the demand for a good is
3. How difficult the good is to manufacture/harvest/transport

In a centrally-planned, socialist economy, all the factors of production are owned by the government. What that means is, all resources, which get made into goods and later given to the people, all have no price, and therefore, there is no indicator for what goods the people need, seeing as all goods and services are technically moving through one big system, not changing hands between different parties. What happens then is there are either a surplus of goods (which rarely happened since there were so many things people needed), and more commonly a shortage, like Russia's breadlines can testify to.

That is the fatal flaw in Socialism, on top of tons of other things wrong with it. Even if you could get perfect little worker ants and a pure, strong leader, Socialism would never work.

OP is right guys, Socialism: Not even once.

^ Seeing a 19-year-old American cite Mises -- well, it makes me think there may be some hope for the future after all.

No kidding!

Unfortunately, I suspect that all the 19-year-olds who've read and understood Mises could travel together in the same car at the same time. And it wouldn't have to be a big car.

I got like 10% of the way through when I noticed the guy making the comment was from a communist country. Communism =/= Socialism. I'm sympathetic for him, but as a socialist, this is misinformation from the mouth of someone who still has a chip on his shoulder from how a communist regime treated him. The only people who oppose socialism are the rich, or "elites". Capitalism, in its purest form, encourages competition; our "capitalism" relies on a system that can be best described as cannibalism. In fact, capitalism and socialism in their most unrefined forms practically meet in the middle.

I misread. He was instead associating said economic theory with the worst of the worst, which is guilt by association.

It never actually said he lived in these countries.

Socialism is not Communism. It's compatible with Democracy as well as capitalism. European style socialism means that government in principle exists to serve society, not business. We can socialize (centralize) certain functions that we deem too important for profit, like warfare, health care, childcare, education, infrastructure, and more. We can leave relatively unimportant things to the blind evil of capitalism.

Don't be a sucker to capitalism, it wasn't designed with you in mind.

I can't help but notice that most arguments against it employ guilt by association. They plaster Hitler and Stalin's faces onto socialism and try to pass it off as a valid argument. What most don't know is that they have Pinochet to their name and he was a capitalist.

They do the same thing with atheism. European countries have been socialist for some time. Socialized medicine in particular should be a model for all industrialized nations. Not that it's perfect, but it beats going bankrupt.