Socialism Sucks Quotes

“Mao received many reports of starvation and suffering, but he and the Communist Party were unmoved. In late 1958 Mao’s foreign minister, Chen Yi, acknowledged that “casualties have indeed appeared among workers, but it is not enough to stop us in our tracks. This is a price we have to pay, it’s nothing to be afraid of.”
― Robert Lawson, Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World

“In a capitalist economy, entrepreneurs create businesses to make profits, which they earn by pleasing their customers. But in a socialist system, a bureaucrat decides which businesses can open, where they can operate, and what they can sell, and he really doesn’t care what the customer thinks.”
― Robert Lawson, Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World

“The low rate of infant mortality is a product of data manipulation. At seventy-two abortions per one hundred births, Cuba has one of the highest abortion rates in the world, and Cuban doctors routinely force women to abort high-risk pregnancies so that Cuba’s bureaucrats can brag about their health statistics. If you correct the data to account for these factors, Cuba’s health statistics look a lot less impressive.5”
― Robert Lawson, Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World

“Costs, whether labor or otherwise, just tell us whether it makes sense to produce something a particular way GIVEN the value we expect people will pay for the good that is produced. Marx mistakenly thought the amount of labor ‘embodied’ in a good was what determined its value...Profits don’t represent exploitation. In a free market, profits represent created value. Capitalism has been the engine of prosperity, innovation, new industries, and rising wages, while socialist economies have stagnated or even regressed.” -pp. 87-8”
― Robert Lawson, Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World

“That’s Bernie’s cognitive dissonance: railing against the evils created by too much government power, and then pushing for more government power to solve the problem. -p. 145”
― Robert Lawson, Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World

“The massive movement of people from low-productivity rural areas to cities with private industry has spurred China’s development… When Communist China was governed by socialist ideologues it was an impoverished, totalitarian police state that killed tens of millions of its own people. Now that Communist China practices crony capitalism, it is a prosperous and much more restrained police state.”
― Robert Lawson, Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World

“When Venezuela was a freer economy, it was relatively prosperous. But as the government became more involved in regulating the economy, it became progressively less free, less efficient, and less productive. When Chavez came to power, this process was already well underway; he only doubled down on it and turned economic regression into economic disaster.” -p. 22”
― Robert Lawson, Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World

“Young adults across America prefer socialism (fairness) to capitalism (selfishness).’ Socialism doesn’t simply equal ‘fairness.’ What it really equals is the abolition of private property; in a socialist economy, the government decides what will be produced, how, and for whom.” -p. 13”
― Robert Lawson, Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World

“Economists estimate that if international immigration restrictions were removed, we’d have massive global economic gains. Economist Michael Clemens has suggested that the gains would range from 50 to 150 percent of world GDP.9 On average, that’s a doubling of global income. The largest gainers would be the immigrants themselves. Greater global migration would contribute to a massive reduction in world poverty—just as internal migration has in China today, as we saw in Beijing and Shanghai.”
― Robert Lawson, Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World

“The young, naïve socialists who dream of socialism “from below” are caught in a conundrum. Non-state socialist communes can only work (poorly) on a small scale in an otherwise capitalist world. To replace capitalism with this system necessitates centralizing power in order to plan the economy. That ultimately results in state ownership, control, and tyranny. Society-wide socialism “from below” that doesn’t entail state ownership is a contradiction in terms.”
― Robert Lawson, Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World

“As Smith put it: “Every individual . . . neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it . . . he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.”5”
― Robert Lawson, Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World

“Famine, Robert Conquest estimates that eleven million people died of starvation in 1932–33 and that seven million of those deaths were in the Ukraine.18 Most other estimates vary between seven and fourteen million lives lost. This was a predictable consequence of Stalin’s policies of agricultural collectivization and forced industrialization.”
― Robert Lawson, Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World

“In 1966, Mao and the Communist Party launched the “Cultural Revolution,” inflicting a new hell on the Chinese people.”
― Robert Lawson, Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World

“records shows that at least two and a half million people were summarily executed or tortured to death during the Great Leap Forward. Millions more starved because they were intentionally deprived of food as punishment, or because they were regarded as too old or weak to be productive, or because the people ladling out the slop in the chow line simply did not like them.”
― Robert Lawson, Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World

“Che was a bad economist and an even worse humanitarian. He sent dissidents, homosexuals, Catholics, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Afro-Cuban priests, and others he deemed undesirable to concentration camps where they were forced to do hard labor. When he ran the La Cabaña prison, he conducted sham military trials for “enemies of the revolution.” The trials lacked any semblance of due process. The only court of appeal was Che, who never overturned a conviction. Estimates vary, but it is likely that when Che ran the prison in the first six months of 1959, up to five hundred people were executed”
― Robert Lawson, Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World

“Groucho’s definition of politics is Marxism in a nutshell: “Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies.”
― Robert Lawson, Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World

“It wasn’t until the so-called “Marginal Revolution” in the 1880s when three economists, working independently, all concluded that the value of a good is based on what people subjectively think a particular (or “marginal”) unit of that good is worth, which is exactly right. The amount of time or energy it takes to make something doesn’t really matter when it comes to determining its worth. This is tough to grasp, especially for the individuals or company that produced the good and want to sell it for a price that they think is “fair” compensation for their time and labor.”
― Robert Lawson, Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World

“In 1988, the Chinese constitution was amended to officially recognize private property and private business. Before then, the Communist state had been China’s only official employer, with small exceptions. By 1998, the state employed about 60 percent of the working population, and in 2010 it employed only about 19 percent.9 China had transitioned from socialism to a form of crony capitalism.”
― Robert Lawson, Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World

“All told, in less than thirty years, through the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and other atrocities, Mao’s Communist government killed more of its own people than any other government in history—possibly as many as eighty million.6 The peasants who escaped death found themselves poorer than their ancestors. In 1978, two-thirds of Chinese peasants had incomes lower than they had in the 1950s, one-third had incomes lower than in the 1930s, and the average Chinese person was only consuming two-thirds as many calories as the average person in a developed country.”
― Robert Lawson, Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World

“As economists, we believe that the American government’s half-century-long embargo on Cuba is bad policy, and that without it, we could bring the Cubans more freedom. The embargo has done nothing to undermine Cuba’s abusive Communist regime. Indeed, the Castros have used the embargo—they call it a “blockade”—to blame the United States for Cuba’s poverty rather than admit that socialism doesn’t work. Trade not only promotes economic development, it can open a society to other ideas—in this case, capitalist ones.”
― Robert Lawson, Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World