Those who pursue the false promises of socialism and other forms of utopianism always fail because they reject the core truths of mankind. Conservatives (classical liberals) understand that mankind can never achieve perfection on this earth, while contemporary liberals believe it can. The history of the last century alone has shown that when movements attempt to perfect mankind and its institutions, it always ends in catastrophe.

Strictly speaking socialism is an economic system, even though it often encompasses much more (e.g. social and environmental theories). The economist Thomas Sowell summarizes socialism’s economic failures, and explains why centralized control over major aspects of the economy is always inferior to a free market system.

Economics and politics confront the same fundamental problem: What everyone wants adds up to more than there is. Market economies deal with this problem by confronting individuals with the costs of producing what they want, and letting those individuals make their own trade-offs when presented with prices that convey those costs. That leads to self-rationing, in the light of each individual’s own circumstances and preferences.

Politics deals with the same problem by making promises that cannot be kept, or which can be kept only by creating other problems that cannot be acknowledged when the promises are made.

Price controls are a classic example. At various times and places, in countries around the world, price controls have been put on any number of goods and services - going all the way back to the days of the Roman Empire and ancient Babylon.

Price controls create lower prices for open and legal transactions - but also black markets where the prices are higher than they were before, because the risks of punishment for illegal activity has to be compensated. Price controls also lead to shortages and quality deterioration.

But politicians who take credit for lower prices blame all these bad consequences on others. Diocletian did this in the days of the Roman Empire, leaders of the French Revolution did this when their price controls on food led to hungry and angry people, and American politicians denounced the oil companies when price controls on gasoline led to long lines at filling stations in the 1970s. It is the same story, whatever the country, the times or the product or service.

The self-rationing that people do when prices are free to convey the inherent impossibility of any economy to supply as much as everybody wants is replaced, under price controls, with rationing imposed by government, which cannot possibly have the same knowledge of each individual’s circumstances and preferences - least of all when it comes to medical care, where patients differ in innumerable ways.

Socialism, fascism, Nazism, and communism are all forms of collectivism that have some things in common beyond the economic. Among these are the ideas that the troubles that plague mankind are due to corrupt institutions and ineffective leaders; that if we only remade the institutions of society with the right leadership, we can achieve a heaven on earth. Criminals and the poor are a product of broken or outdated capitalistic systems. A classless society in which all are equal in material possessions is achievable. Religion is bad and science is all that is needed to explain everything. The State should be all-powerful and essentially worshipped as it redistributes resources according to the ruling class who ‘know better’ because of their ’superior’ education.

Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao and others believed in this, although they had differing way as to how to achieve a socialist paradise. Regardless of the means taken, the end goal was always the same.

One of the main dangers of socialist policies is its tendency to become more and more oppressive and brutal over time. This happens because after their policies do not produce the results they had hoped for, they end up implementing those policies more forcefully, believing they were implemented with insufficient resolve. They do not question the underlying assumptions of their beliefs because they provide the justification for their existence. They have so much at stake in their theories that they cannot modify them, but instead try to force reality to conform to their visions.

So why does it fail? For many reasons, but here are a few: People cannot be trusted with too much power because of its corrupting influence. Science is only a tool; it cannot confer morality. People differ in their abilities and talents, and therefore you can never achieve equality of results. No amount of so-called experts can direct an entire economy because of the millions and millions of transactions that take place every day, requiring intimate knowledge of the needs and wants of the entire population. People are most productive when acting in their own self-interests, not others or for the State. Human beings are not perfect; therefore no institution or system we create will be perfect.

Socialist governments claim to redistribute wealth for the good of the people, but what they really redistribute is poverty while the party leaders keep the wealth for themselves.

Even more benign and much smaller scale experiments in socialism fail. Nearly two hundred years ago there was a socialist village in America called New Harmony, founded by the very wealthy British philanthropist Robert Owen. He arrived in America and assembled hundreds of people eager to join the new commune. On April 27, 1825, he gave a welcoming speech to the new arrivals pledging, “To change [the country] from the ignorant, selfish system, to an enlightened social system which shall gradually unite all interests into one, and remove all cause for contest between individuals.”

New Harmony was unproductive, bureaucratic in distribution, and only survived because Owen subsidized it, spending some thirty thousand dollars its first three months from his own fortune. It is estimated that there were around ten to twenty other socialist villages that were inspired by Owen, but none could make any substantial improvements. The median lifespan of these communes was two years.

The son of Robert Owen remarked on the inevitable collapse by concluding: “All cooperative schemes which provide equal remuneration to the skilled and industrious and the ignorant and idle, must work their own downfall, for by this unjust plan of remuneration they must of necessity eliminate the valuable members - who find their services reaped by the indigent - and retain only the improvident, unskilled, and vicious members.”

Socialism is not a good theory that is bad in practice. It is a bad theory precisely because it is bad in practice. So why do so many believe in these dangerous and failed theories? Where do these ideas come from?

See followup - http://thenationalscene.com/source-socialisms-influence/