: 11pt”>It is the attempts to replace a capitalist economy altogether that have, without exception, ended in murderous disaster.
In his book Socialism: The Failed Idea That Never Dies Kristian Niemetz puts to the sword the excuse that socialism hasn’t really been tried. Of course it has.
As Niemitz notes: “Over the past 100 years there have been more than two dozen attempts to build a socialist society. It has been tried in the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Albania, Poland, Vietnam, Bulgaria, Romania, Czechoslovakia, North Korea, Hungary, China, East Germany, Cuba, Tanzania, Benin, Laos, Algeria, South Yemen, Somalia, the Congo, Ethiopia, Cambodia, Mozambique, Angola, Nicaragua and Venezuela.”
Each of these disasters has gone through three stages. First there is a honeymoon period in which the latest socialist model is proclaimed to have avoided the pitfalls that doomed its predecessors. Not for Venezuela, for instance, the errors of Stalin.
Then there is the excuses stage when obvious calamity is blamed by advocates on western imperialist intrigue or sanctions.
And then, finally, when the whole sorry dictatorial, poverty-creating mess can no longer be denied nor the blame diverted, the model and its leaders are disavowed. It wasn’t “real socialism” after all, we are told.
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