Posted on 07/08/2021 4:24:57 AM PDT by Kaslin
If a history professor asserted that black holes don’t exist, would anyone pay any attention to him? What about an English professor who advocates Lamarckian evolutionary theory over Darwin? How about a sociologist who believes in alchemy?
What if these folks didn’t just have weird beliefs, what if they taught these ideas in their classes? What if they wrote articles and books and gave public speeches extoling them?
The answer is obvious. They would be dismissed as kooks.
And much more. On a typical university campus, the physics department would probably demand that the history professor stop spouting fake physics or be fired. The biology department would react the same way to the espousal of fake biology.
In fact, on most campuses almost every academic discipline would try to protect its turf a well as the scientific integrity of its discipline.
With one exception: economics.
Over my long experience with the academic world, I have often marveled at the fact that people who had never had a course in economics, had never read a book on the subject, who wouldn’t know what to do with a supply and a demand curve if they saw them – nonetheless feel free to speak with authority on economic topics.
If you search the economics departments of our nation’s colleges and universities you would be hard pressed to find a real socialist. That’s because economists know a lot about socialism. They have been studying it and thinking about it for over a hundred years.
Outside economics departments, things are different. It has often been humorously estimated that there are more Marxists on the faculty of American universities than there are in Russia or China today.
How is that possible? I blame the economists.
Economists have not only documented the failure of socialism in the Soviet Union and China, they know why the Cuban, North Korean, and Venezuelan economies are basket cases. It isn’t complicated. When people at the top design a plan in which everybody who is needed to carry it out has an economic self-interest in not doing so, the plan never succeeds. Good economics is often plain common sense.
Serious scholars have also documented the human costs of concentrating economic and political power. Socialist hellholes have produced imprisonment, torture, starvation and mass murder on a scale never before imagined in human history. In the 20th century, almost 170 million people were killed by their own governments. These people were not killed in wars. They were the victims of genocidal murder.
The vast majority were murdered by socialist governments. The Russian communists were the worst (62 million) followed by the Chinese communists (35 million) and then the Nazi national socialists (20 million).
Although socialists claim that workers are exploited under capitalism, no greedy capitalist has ever begun to match what socialists have done.
Josef Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez lived like kings and accumulated vast fortunes while their own people often faced starvation. Kim Jong-un and the current rulers in Cuba and Venezuela are following in their footsteps
Chinese communist leader Mao Tse-tung was the greatest mass murderer in world history, causing at least 45 million people to be worked, starved or beaten to death. When he died, he was worth an estimated $1 billion.
The world’s second greatest mass murderer, Josef Stalin, killed 20 million, many by forced starvation. Some regard him as one of the wealthiest people of all time.
Fidel Castro’s former bodyguard Juan Reinaldo Sánchez says that the communist leader “lived like a king” and “ran the country the country like a cross between medieval overlord and Louis XV.” While ordinary Cubans stood in breadlines, Castro had his own private yacht and his own private island. In Havana, he lived in an immense estate with a rooftop bowling alley, a basketball court and fully equipped medical center.
The puzzle is: Why aren’t these facts better known? The answer seems to be: In the classes where students should be learning them, the teachers aren’t doing their jobs.
While students are getting a daily dose of socialist propaganda from economic know-nothings in the other social science departments, what have the economists been saying about the subject in their classes? Nothing. Well, almost nothing.
Pick up just about any introductory economics textbook and you will find very little about socialism. And what you do find will never be front and center. It will be stuck at the back of the book in case the instructor has time to cover it at the end of the semester.
The reason for this is understandable. Most economics teachers consider socialism to be so completely dysfunctional, they see no reason to spend any time on it.
Here is what the economics departments are missing. Given the economic nonsense that is being spewed out all over the rest of the campus, the first things students need to study in introductory economics is socialism. In fact, I believe the entire first semester should be devoted to socialism.
What starts on the campuses doesn’t take long to spread. Jane Fonda, Barbra Streisand and other Hollywood celebrities don’t think they need to know anything about economics in order to have strong opinions on the subject.
When is the last time you heard Streisand quote Paul Samuelson or Milton Friedman or any economist? With increasing frequency, in a very large part of the national public policy conversation, professional economists are considered completely irrelevant.
To use a military analogy, the economists have left the battlefield, leaving the students behind to fend for themselves. The nation is paying a heavy price for that less-than-honorable retreat.
I have a simple test to determine if someone knoes BASIC economics: describe tge difference between supply and demand and quantity supplied and quantity demanded.
This cannot be googled.
The course and scope of the German economy from 1933 to some time in the period 1943-1944 is quite different from the USSR, China 1949-1991, and Venezuela.
Marx was an economist and philosopher.
Frederick Engels, economist, historian, political theorist and revolutionary socialist. He was also a businessman, journalist and political activist.
Maybe at one time they would have been but in today's upside down society it would lead to a gig with MSNBC and CNN.
The lack of consistency undermines the point.
followed by the Chinese communists (35 million)
Chinese communist leader Mao Tse-tung was the greatest mass murderer in world history, causing at least 45 million people to be worked, starved or beaten to death.
Socialism, no matter how pretty it looks in the abstract, does not seem to work out when adopted by actual people. The reasons for its repeated failure in practice actually boil down to a very few basics about human psychology.
First, human beings are basically very lazy, exerting absolutely no more effort to attain an objective than is necessary. This is fueled and assisted by ingenuity and a continuous search for shortcuts in getting to the objective. Second, along with the lazy streak, human beings are also hoarders to some extent or another, tending to hold on like a miser to gains attained earlier, for which no apparent exchange is enough to pry them loose from that possession, unless it is overwhelming.
Then there is another motivation, that of sheer avarice, to grasp for even more if it can be obtained at minimal personal cost. A simple calculus is at work here, is it worth my time and spending of existing capital to acquire this new possession?
That is why socialism only works if backed up with the force of police power and the use of fear and intimidation. People do not willingly share in the “virtue” of altruism, it is an expression of compassion that only comes in the ABSENCE of coercion, which only occurs at sporadic moments in the lifetime of most people, and usually cannot be sustained for any length of time.
If it weren’t for the people in charge, socialism would work just fine. But the “right people” have never been in charge of instituting socialism.
A web version of Upton Sinclair’s “End Poverty in California” brochure of 1934 is available at:
https://www.ssa.gov/history/epic.html
American children typically spend thirteen years in socialist K-12 schools.
And what have you learned boys & girls in your truly socialist government owned & operated school?
By voting, people can get “free” K-12 education, “free” school lunches, “free” SNAP food benefits & “free” health care. They can also get highly subsidized (such as $170/month on a $1,500/month apartment) housing & child care. And they can even get “free” money - Joe Biden wants to give my mommy at least $3,000/year for each of her children.
That cheapskate Santa Claus fellow won’t get my vote.
And there’s no “from each according to his ability” requirement with Joe Biden and his Democrats. They aren’t Marxists or Communists. Why the Chinese Communist constitution requires those adults able to work to work.
American public schools - 180+ years of socialism
-power lusters who want to control and dominate
-parasites and people who feel helpless
Marx was an economist and philosopher.
“First, human beings are basically very lazy, exerting absolutely no more effort to attain an objective than is necessary.”
Claude-Frédéric Bastiat the French economist, in his treatise “The Law” called that out as well, as well as putting forth a theory that people will do the least amount possible, including theft, which is less painful than laboring for the same amount of work. With the caveat that punishment should be more painful than the crime.
“First, human beings are basically very lazy, exerting absolutely no more effort to attain an objective than is necessary.”
Claude-Frédéric Bastiat the French economist, in his treatise “The Law” called that out as well, as well as putting forth a theory that people will do the least amount possible, including theft, which is less painful than laboring for the same amount of work. With the caveat that punishment should be more painful than the crime.
Due to feed from globalists exploiting workers impoverished by socialism, the China dragon has awoken, with renewed strength and energy. In its slumber, it was possessed by the evil spirit of 1930s Germany.
Germany attempted to take over the world with a cannon fodder of 70 million. China has 20 times that.
Economics is really the study of energy consumption, which all economic activity requires. Economics has a remarkable amount in common with electrical engineering. Electrical energy always seeks the path of least resistance. An artificial product price below the cost of energy required to produce it is a financial short circuit that results in an economic meltdown.
“What about an English professor who advocates Lamarckian evolutionary theory over Darwin?”
Really bad example. Darwin is hardly credible. Given what we know today of the incredible systemic complexity of living things, I doubt that even Darwin would believe his theory today.
And oddly enough Lamarck is making a comeback as we learn more about epigenetics.
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