Socialism in a nutshell.

Consider the commonly encountered idea that

Socialism is a great idea, but human nature is so perverse, selfish, and horrible, that nobody has figured out how to do it right yet.

Andy Duncan did and makes these observations about socialism:^[1]

• it makes economic calculation impossible,
• it attempts to substitute social engineering where human have for eons been able to organize themselves for survival without it,
  
• it can't be made to work by just one more attempt to get it right with a new, honed, spreadsheeted approach,
  
• its core rests on “hideously destructive” envy, and
  
• it inevitably entails truncheon, minefields and barbed wire.

On the latter point, socialists never level with us on the question, “Who will command the state’s (greatly augmented) coercive apparatus?” The answer is inherent in the consideration of why socialist regimes fail:

1. worthy idealists are corrupted by power (Lord Acton),
   
2. worthy idealists lose power to conniving thugs (Friedrich Hayek), and
3. the people who are drawn to socialism are thugs plain and simple who hide their intent to found murderous regimes based on envy and parasitism.

Duncan writes of the prescience of a Eugen Richter, a 19th-century German parliamentarian. Richter subscribed to the “thugs ab initio” view of socialists and in a novel (Pictures of the Socialistic Future) published in 1891 predicted many of the ghastly features of the socialist scams of the next century:

Richter gets virtually all of his major predictions right: the mass exodus after socialism is introduced, the subsequent emigration ban coupled with a death penalty for transgression, rationing and the increase of police state powers, the breakup of the family through welfare imposition, larger standing armies, allocated compulsory work duties, internal passports, and all of the other usual miserable flotsam and jetsam of a typical full-blooded socialist regime, with all of the initial ideals forgotten and certainly never achieved, as the worst elements of society scramble to be King of the Prison Steps to control everyone else from the top.

So much then for a Workers' Paradise on Earth.^[2]

On the issue of the character of socialists, when one contemplates the mad flight from free markets into the thicket of suffocating, demeaning, enslaving regulation, the assault on freedom of speech, and the contempt for the Constitution and our tradition of liberty -- all leftist phenomena -- is it not Richter who got it right? To fight now for socialism in the light of the last century’s horrific and well known experience with socialism is to identify oneself as a dishonest partisan of a system that entails inevitable economic failure and enormous risk of totalitarian political excess, even if you believe only men of good will are champions of socialism.

Nice people are not guarantors of liberty, no matter how majestic the "idea a la mode." Only the rule of law and our free institutions come close to that but, as we know, these are never, ever considerations when socialists are in full cry after some "noble" goal. Does this ten millionth lurch into the political or economic thicket infringe liberty in any way? What kind of a question is that? Or as Nancy Pelosi would ask, "Are you serious?!"

At this late date, masking one’s true character and exerting huge effort to hide the true nature of socialism are essential to any socialist worthy of the name.

Enter Barack Hussein Obama, 44th U.S. president:

Mentor: Frank Marshall Davis, undercover communist operative.

Trusted colleague, political crony, and ghost writer: William Ayers, communist terrorist.

What could go wrong?

Notes
^[1] "The Writing on the Berlin Wall: Pictures of the Socialistic Future." By Andy Duncan, Mises Daily, 7/20/10.
^[2] Id.