Somehow replacing all the people who create wealth with inexperienced bureaucrats manages to dampen an economy. Thus rendered unproductive, a socialist government must hound down more wealth in the only place it can find any: you. Your money may not be confiscated outright, but rising taxes will do the job well enough. Your property taxes may increase to a point where renting a room in a state-owned housing complex becomes more affordable. Or your land may just become government property. What right have you really got to own it anyway? Aren’t you aware that others are worse off than you?

And whatever you do, do not criticize this new state of affairs. There won’t be a crumb in store for anyone who opposes the march to utopia.

One day you might wonder how this all came to be. The government promised to make everyone equally rich, but it wound up taking control of everything to make everyone equally poor – with the aforementioned exception of the people pulling the strings. But at least the bulletproof limousine glass industry is thriving.

The inevitable descent into communism aside, if you’ve ever wondered why socialism doesn’t work, quotes like these will put you on the right track.

“Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy.” – Winston Churchill

“The American Constitution declares ‘All men are born equal.’ The British Socialist Party add: ‘All men must be kept equal.'” – Winston Churchill

“The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of Socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.” – Winston Churchill

“The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.” – Thomas Jefferson

“The trouble with Socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.” – Margaret Thatcher

“Socialists cry “Power to the people,’ and raise the clenched fist as they say it. We all know what they really mean – power over people, power to the State.” – Margaret Thatcher

“In practice, socialism didn’t work. But socialism could never have worked because it is based on false premises about human psychology and society, and gross ignorance of human economy.” – David Horowitz

“If socialists understood economics, they wouldn’t be socialists.” – Friedrich A. Hayek

“There is no difference between communism and socialism, except in the means of achieving the same ultimate end: communism proposes to enslave men by force, socialism – by vote. It is merely the difference between murder and suicide.” – Ayn Rand

“Socialism is the doctrine that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that his life and his work do not belong to him, but belong to society, that the only justification of his existence is his service to society, and that society may dispose of him in any way it pleases for the sake of whatever it deems to be its own tribal, collective good.” – Ayn Rand

“We are now moving towards complete collectivism or socialism, a system under which everybody is enslaved to everybody.” – Ayn Rand

“Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.” – Thomas Sowell

“‘Socialism is a wonderful idea.’ It is only as a reality that it has been disastrous. Among people of every race, color, and creed, all around the world, socialism has led to hunger in countries that used to have surplus food to export.” – Thomas Sowell

“Inflation makes the extension of socialism possible by providing the financial chaos in which it flourishes. The fact is that socialism and inflation are cause and effect, they feed on each other!” – Henry Hazlitt

“Government-to-government foreign aid promotes statism, centralized planning, socialism, dependence, pauperization, inefficiency, and waste. It prolongs the poverty it is designed to cure. Voluntary private investment in private enterprise, on the other hand, promotes capitalism, production, independence, and self-reliance.” – Henry Hazlitt

“The essential notion of a socialist society is fundamentally force. If the government is the master, you ultimately have to order people what to do. Whenever you try to do good with somebody else’s money, you are committed to using force.” – Milton Friedman

“If we buy into the notion that somehow property rights are less important, or are in conflict with, human or civil rights, we give the socialists a freer hand to attack our property.” – Walter E. Williams

“The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism. But, under the name of ‘liberalism,’ they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program, until one day America will be a socialist nation, without knowing how it happened.” – Norman Thomas

“The Socialist Party will no longer be running a candidate for president. The Democratic Party is leading this country to Socialism much faster than we could ever hope to.” – Norman Thomas

“Now, back in 1927 an American socialist, Norman Thomas, six times candidate for President on the Socialist Party ticket, said the American people would never vote for socialism. But, he said under the name of liberalism the American people will adopt every fragment of the socialist program.” – Ronald Reagan

“Socialism is workable only in Heaven where it isn’t needed, and in Hell where they’ve got it.” – Cecil Palmer

“We are socialists, we are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are determined to destroy this system under all conditions.” – Adolph Hitler

“Socialism has no moral justification whatsoever; poor people are not morally superior to rich people, nor are they owed anything by rich people simply because of their lack of success.” – Ben Shapiro

“When people are desperate or wealthy, they turn to socialism; only when they have no other alternative do they embrace the free market. After all, lies about guaranteed security are far more seductive than lectures about personal responsibility.” – Ben Shapiro

“Socialism violates at least three of the Ten Commandments: It turns government into God, it legalizes thievery and it elevates covetousness. Discussions of income inequality, after all, aren’t about prosperity but about petty spite. Why should you care how much money I make, so long as you are happy?” – Ben Shapiro

“The champions of socialism call themselves progressives, but they recommend a system which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and by a resistance to every kind of improvement. They call themselves liberals, but they are intent upon abolishing liberty. They call themselves democrats, but they yearn for dictatorship. They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent. They promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office. Every man but one a subordinate clerk in a bureau.” – Ludwig von Mises

“Socialism is not in the least what it pretends to be. It is not the pioneer of a better and finer world, but the spoiler of what thousands of years of civilization have created. It does not build, it destroys. For destruction is the essence of it. It produces nothing, it only consumes what the social order based on private ownership in the means of production has created.” – Ludwig von Mises

“A society that chooses between capitalism and socialism does not choose between two social systems; it chooses between social cooperation and the disintegration of society. Socialism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is an alternative to any system under which men can live as human beings.” – Ludwig von Mises

“The reason this country continues its drift toward socialism and big nanny government is because too many people vote in the expectation of getting something for nothing, not because they have a concern for what is good for the country.” – Lyn Nofziger

“Liberalism is really piecemeal socialism, and socialism always attacks three basic social institutions: religion, the family, and private property. Religion, because it offers a rival authority to the state; the family, because it means a rival loyalty to the state; and property, because it means material independence of the state.” – Joseph Sobran

“When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work, because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is the beginning of the end of any nation.” – Adrian Rogers

“A socialist is somebody who doesn’t have anything, and is ready to divide it up equally among everybody.” – George Bernard Shaw

“The historical experience of socialist countries has sadly demonstrated that collectivism does not do away with alienation but rather increases it, adding to it a lack of basic necessities and economic inefficiency.” – Pope John Paul II

“The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.” – Norman Mailer

“We can and must write in a language which sows among the masses hate, revulsion, and scorn toward those who disagree with us.” – Vladimir Lenin

As we conclude our collection of anti-socialism quotes, there’s one Harry Truman socialism quote we’d like to close with:

Socialism is a scareword they have hurled at every advance the people have made in the last 20 years. Socialism is what they called public power. Socialism is what they called social security. Socialism is what they called farm price supports. Socialism is what they called bank deposit insurance. Socialism is what they called the growth of free and independent labor organizations. Socialism is their name for almost anything that helps all the people.

In essence, Truman tried to frame our rejection of socialism as misanthropy. We’d like to counter with one more of Hazlitt’s quotes:

Once all the consequences of any act or policy are taken into account, the opportunity costs of government action to change economic outcomes always exceed the benefits.

We agree that anything the government does to us comes at a greater overall cost than if it had just left us all well enough alone. To address each of Truman’s points, we reject the assertion that people become better off once government bureaucrats control their nation’s utilities. We are also unequivocally opposed to redistribution of wealth by force. Bank deposit insurance? Great idea, so long as the banks can’t bribe politicians to label their failure the result of “mismanagement” and thus make deposit insurance inapplicable. And labor unions, which are antithetical to freedom of association, compel inefficiency for the sake of “saving jobs,” keep criminal cops on the street, and put incompetent teachers on the dole, can all go straight to hell where socialism works.

The response:

“In the end, you shall lose everything you hold of value in this world, your wealth, your possessions, your freedoms, your friends, your family, your youth, even your life itself. But before you surrender them, make those who try to take them from you pay an extreme price for every little scrap they grasp for.” – Source not known

Back in the 70's most people who called themselves conservative would have said that Social Security and Medicare are both socialist programs that the government has no business or Constitutional responsibility to stand up and maintain.

Now that a lot of those same people are moving into retirement age what is said about Social Security and Medicare is NOT that these are both unconstitutional socialist programs, but something like "well I've paid into it, so I should get my money back" even though the money they are getting back is not the money they put in, but the money being put in now by workers who will get nothing when the programs crash and burn as all socialist enterprises eventually do.

Thank you for this great list of quotes. It’s a keeper.

Socialism is just communism with better marketing gimmicks!

bump

“The historical experience of socialist countries has sadly demonstrated that collectivism does not do away with alienation but rather increases it, adding to it a lack of basic necessities and economic inefficiency.”

Wow~! A Pope who passed economics 101. It is no wonder that even we non-Catholics loved the guy.

““We can and must write in a language which sows among the masses hate, revulsion, and scorn toward those who disagree with us.” – Vladimir Lenin”

The Rats have learned that lesson well and have done a great job implementing it.

"Socialism is just communism with better marketing gimmicks!"

Possibly. However as stated in the many quotes above there is a difference between socialism and communism. Socialism allows for private production and services, but yet redistributes the profits of said private enterprise according to laws by the government. Communism is a totalitarian state. It owns and controls every aspect of the economy.

Don't get me wrong, I often include in my posts, dem/socs/commies. That's why this article is important for countering the socialist (so-called fairness) ideology. It is truly the stepping stone to communism. I've seen communism in person at a commune in the 60's. Epic fail.

“How do you tell a communist? Well, it’s someone who reads Marx and Lenin.

And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It’s someone who understands Marx and Lenin.”

Ronald Reagan

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Thanks very much for posting these great quotes.

Socialism: the most successful failure in history.

BFL

BTTT

bttt

It's long, but I love this one:

"The fact is that Socialism, in the form in which it is now presented, appeals chiefly to unsatisfactory or even inhuman types. On the one hand you have the warm-hearted un-thinking Socialist, the typical working-class Socialist, who only wants to abolish poverty and does not always grasp what this implies. On the other hand, you have the intellectual, book-trained Socialist, who understands that it is necessary to throw our present civilization down the sink and is quite willing to do so. And this type is drawn, to begin with, entirely from the middle class, and from a rootless town-bred section of the middle class at that. Still more unfortunately, it includes - so much so that to an outsider it even appears to be composed of - the kind of people I have been discussing; the foaming denouncers of the bourgeoisie, and the more-water-in-your-beer reformers of whom Shaw is the prototype, and the astute young social-literary climbers who are Communists now, as they will be Fascists five years hence, because it is all the go, and that dreary tribe of high-minded women and sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come nocking towards the smell of 'progress' like bluebottles to a dead cat."

George Orwell, Road To Wigan Pier

Happens all the time: Make something standard, keep it that way long enough, and conservatives feel obligated to defend it as the status quo. The United States Department of Education comes to mind.

My favorite quote:

You can vote Socialism in, but you will have to shoot your way out.

~unknown