Weapons of mass disinformation

The Washington Times ^ | March 21, 2005 | Richard W. Rahn

[OESY]

...Back in the 1920s, the eminent economist Ludwig von Mises showed socialism it could not work because it could not provide a functional alternative to the price system to properly allocate resources. The Nobel Prize-winning economist, F.A. Hayek, provided the definitive proof of why socialism could not work in his last book, "The Fatal Conceit." The argument in essence is that if the whole world were socialist there would be no objective way to determine prices, thus no way to allocate resources efficiently.

If people knew the real history of all the socialist experiments and its flawed theory, very few (other than the delusional or mean-spirited) would be socialists. People do not know the history of socialist disasters because the educational establishment and much of the news media have engaged in a massive cover-up. The large majority of teachers throughout the world are government employees or depend on government grants. All too many are thus understandably hostile to the idea government enterprises do not work as advertised and, hence, reluctant to both teach and allow materials in the classroom that show the socialist model neither works in practice or theory. Surveys in the U.S. and elsewhere show the overwhelming majority of professors and public school teachers are on the left side of the political spectrum, so one should not be shocked they hesitate to teach history and theory that show their self-interested ideology is a failure.

Much of the electronic media in the world are either owned or controlled by governments. In the U.S., National Public Radio (NPR) provides a steady diet of the alleged failures of those in the private sector, with scant mention of the endless failures of socialist undertakings, let alone the reasons. Many NPR stations are now airing the BBC in part to further propagandize Americans in the socialist way of thinking. (Most Americans do not realize the government-owned BBC is increasingly monopolizing the broadcast media in Britain and, particularly, news to the benefit of the left.)

The employees of these socialist media are disinclined to bite the hand that feeds them, and many do not know any better. The situation is not much improved in the print media. Most reporters have been fed a steady diet of leftist and socialist propaganda from both their schools and from government agencies, and too few are willing to do the independent study and research to discover and, in turn, report the truth.

Perhaps the Internet will be our salvation, because it enables good people of conscience to get out the facts about the human misery caused by 200 years of socialist experimentation, without first being filtered by left-leaning information controllers.