With yet another election cycle quickly approaching, new policies are spilling forth in order to draw in quick support. While emotions are usually heightened during these times, it is crucial to make sure we do not set down a path we cannot come back from. This path being socialism which, in turn, can quickly turn to tyranny. Like any hot-button issue, this one is not black and white and there are many arguments for and against it. However, the most compelling arguments seem stacked against it, and are threefold: It is immoral, has no historical proof of success, and that other systems work better.
One may ask, how can a system that claims to provide for everyone be immoral? What this most concisely boils down to is freedom. Freedom to spend your money how you see fit, to choose what brands to buy, or where to buy them. These freedoms vanish under socialistic rule, as everything is controlled and distributed by the government. This includes salaries, meaning no matter how skilled you are or what you value your work as, the price is arbitrarily set by the governing body, which almost always results in catastrophic economic consequences. This can be evidenced by history.
While there are social programs that exist currently, the siren's call of socialism has repeatedly caused the collapse of governments and a tremendous amount of deaths since the start of the 20th century. Cuba, the USSR (now Russia), The People's Republic of China, East Germany, and many more are prime examples of socialist structures failing its people and Mao Zedong's Republic of China caused a famine that lead to 45 million deaths alone. To see these consequences take hold today we need not look further than Venezuela, a previously wildly successful nation is now in near civil war, people are starving in the streets, and children have formed gangs to fight over garbage to sort through for food, a true humanitarian crisis. This derives from the socialist economy created by Hugo Chaves and later abused by Nicolas Maduro. Chaves replaced the heads of all the oil companies with those loyal to him, and with oil being a vast majority of their exports, this cemented the beginning of a dictatorship. From there, Maduro continued spending money the nation just did not have as well as dictating to sellers what price they could sell products for, which lead to 720 percent inflation in 2016 alone. As a majority free market economy, these moves are extremely illegal as companies are private and cannot be replaced by government surrogates, however there is a growing movement to extinguish these rules.
Almost seemingly the polar opposite of socialism, free market economies are run by a free and consensual exchange of goods and services, and just as the ideas are opposites, their results are too. Since just 1970 global poverty has declined over 80 percent, and during this time socialism saw a great collapse around the globe, including China and the USSR. "It was globalization, free trade, the boom in international entrepreneurship," explained the president of the American Enterprise Institute in a speech from 2012. It is not to say we do not have those struggling here in our own country, those in poverty in the US are still richer than 70 percent of the rest of the world. The free market incentive drives prices down and creates massive innovation which have all contributed to making the United States the most prosperous nation the world has ever seen.
It is understandable that many can become enamored by the idea of socialism. Why wouldn't we want free healthcare, college, and a guaranteed job? As the old adage goes, "Absolute power corrupts absolutely," and we cannot afford to give the government this power. We are constantly dancing with tyranny, but perhaps now it is time for a cut-in.
