The Problem With Socialism (interview w/ Thomas DiLorenzo)

[jct74]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHOvKUom01Y

Are we all socialists now? Economist Thomas DiLorenzo joins the Liberty Report to discuss his powerful new book on socialism and its sudden re-emergence on the political stage.

[Suzanimal]

Bump!
Great interview.

I just listened to this one. I think I'm going to buy this book for my kids but even if you don't read the book, give it a listen.

You can listen at link.

Tom DiLorenzo: What Socialism Really Is

Dr. Tom DiLorenzo has a fantastic new book out entitled The Problem with Socialism, and his talk summarizing it was a great hit recently at Mises University. This is Tom at his best: witty and provocative, but always bravely revisionist when it comes to skewering sacred cows like welfare, minimum wage, and progressive income taxes. His book—and this talk—are a must for anyone who wants a concise and easy refutation of the enduring myths surrounding socialism.

https://mises.org/library/tom-dilore...cialism-really

[Suzanimal]

http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthr...37#post6291137

[Suzanimal]

Socialism: The World's Greatest Generator of Poverty

08/19/2016
Allen Mendenhall

If you’re looking for a short introduction to socialism that rewards rereading, Thomas DiLorenzo’s The Problem With Socialism is it.

Perhaps your son or daughter has returned from college talking about collective control of the means of production and sporting Bernie Sanders t-shirts. Perhaps you’re a political novice looking for informed guidance.

Perhaps you’re frustrated with America’s economic decline and deplorable unemployment rates. Perhaps you listened with bewilderment as some pundit this election season distinguished democratic socialism from pure socialism in an attempt to justify the former.

Whoever you are, and whatever your occasion for curiosity, you’re likely to find insight and answers from DiLorenzo.

A professor of economics at Loyola University Maryland, DiLorenzo opens his book with troubling statistics: 43% of millennials, or at least those between ages 18 and 29, view socialism more favorably than capitalism, and 69% of voters under 30 would vote for a socialist presidential candidate. Socialism—depending on how it’s defined in relation to communism—may have killed over 100 million people and impoverished countless others over the course of the 20th Century.

So why have the youth (full disclaimer: by certain measures, at 33, I’m considered a millennial myself) welcomed this ideology that’s responsible for mass killings, organized theft, war crimes, forced labor, concentration camps, executions, show trials, ethnic cleansing, disease, totalitarianism, censorship, starvation, hyperinflation, poverty, and terror?

Why have death, destruction, and abject destitution become so hip and cool? Because of effective propaganda and utopian promises of “free” everything.

The problem is, as anyone who’s ever studied economics knows, there’s no such thing as free stuff. Somebody pays at some point.

“What socialists like Senator Sanders should say if they want to be truthful and straightforward,” DiLorenzo thus avers, “is not that government can offer citizens anything for free, but that they want healthcare (and much else) to become a government-run monopoly financed entirely with taxes. Taxes hide, but do not eliminate, the cost of individual government programs.”

And these programs are far more expensive to society than they would be on the free market.

The predicable rejoinder to such a claim — repeated ad nauseam by television personalities—is that socialism works, nay thrives, in, say, Sweden. DiLorenzo corrects the record: “Socialism nearly wrecked Sweden, and free market reforms are finally bringing its economy back from the brink of disaster.”

Strong language, but DiLorenzo maps the history and supplies the data to back it up. “The real source of Sweden’s relatively high standard of living,” he explains, has “everything to do with Sweden avoiding both world wars and jumping into the industrial revolution when its economy was one of the freest, least regulated, and least taxed in Europe.”

...

https://mises.org/blog/socialism-wor...erator-poverty

[oyarde]

There are many problems in the world . Socialism and communism are unique in that while most problems may have some positives , they have zero positives , they are completely negative .

[osan]

"Socialism" is progressive codespeak for "suicide".