Hey There, Comrade!

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal:

Editor:

Most American progressives today deny that their proposals have anything to do with socialism. But these denials ring hollow. As “A Banking Regulator Who Hates Banks” (Oct. 25) makes plain, the Biden administration has fully embraced genuine, no-qualifiers-necessary, honest-to-badness socialism.

Among the roles for government desired by Comptroller of the Currency nominee Saule Omarova is that which resides at the core of all socialist and communist programs: control by the state of the allocation of capital. It is the exercise of this role that Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek, in the interwar years, proved would severely impoverish the denizens of any socialist economy.

Who with even a modicum of knowledge of history doubts that such impoverishment was indeed a universal feature of every such socialist regime? And who with even a modicum of common sense supposes that America’s fate under socialism would differ?

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030