http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPvqYK2JevI

http://www.atomicnerds.com/?p=501

I personally found this essay very informative not only on why Socialism ultimately fails on the national level, but why people still insist on trying it over and over again despite this.

A few things to keep in mind about the “experiment”.

First, the Christian expected Christ to come back soon and was not preparing for the long haul.
Second, it was voluntary but peer pressure to give was strong. (Note: I can not find where Jesus told them to do this)
Third, the Church became broke and Paul had to take up offering in other churches to help
them out.
Fourth, they had a problem with laziness and people taking advantage of the second. Orders had to be given that if people didn’t work they didn’t eat.
Fifth, it did not become common practice in the rest of Christianity.

Next case of have things in common and shearing the wealth was the Pilgrims in 1620 who each had a plot to farm but then shared the results. That didn’t work out too well for them either. They prospered when they abandon that idea.

Communism has failed every time it has been tried. It doesn’t work for humans.

Socialism is just another form of feudalism. The King/Lord/State protects and take care of the masses while setting the rules and tax rates.

Seems he would be ok with it. He is after all advocating exactly such behavior.

There’s plenty of wealth that is the product of the interaction of society and the individual. Like the wealth of the people who get pork-barrel projects funded. Or the new jobs in law and accounting from Sarbanes-Oxley. And so on.

Jim Hu:

You are, of course, correct that these things exist. However, the source of the financing for those projects came as a result of taxation. You can hardly correctly redistribute what was taken through theft. The correct answer is to return the money to the rightful owner.

So if you think that these government programs are unfairly distributing wealth, I think the answer is to give it back to those who created it in the first place.

True, without protection from domestic/foreign aggression, a court system to adjudicate disputes, maybe infrastructure, and a few other things, it would be hard for a market economy to flourish. The problem is that over half the federal budget is spent on transfer payments (SS, medicare, medicaid, welfare, & unemployment). Add in unnecessary national defense spending (as opposed to justified defense spending), and most regulations/subsidies/corporate welfare, and well over a majority of federal money spent is not spent on things that help you make a buck, but rather it is spent on things that take your bucks away.

I’m all for a limited government, and I am even amenable to a welfare state (though one different from our current irrational system) but until we have limited government, I will continue to dislike paying taxes to support so much waste.

There’s plenty of wealth that is the product of the interaction of society and the individual. Like the wealth of the people who get pork-barrel projects funded. Or the new jobs in law and accounting from Sarbanes-Oxley. And so on.

Let’s start by redistributing that wealth.

These are not new ideas. They are the ideas of socialism and communism and have been around for nearly 200 years. All of these ideas have been put to the test before and all of them have failed (big surprise, since they are rooted in an economic fallacy – lump of wealth). The fact that we have become complacent as we have become more prosperous and that a significant portion of the population now believes that they are entitled to things they have not earned is not surprising. What surprises me is the inability to learn from history.

The history of the 20th century teaches us that if we encourage the belief that everyone has a right to the pie without creating any of it and that creators of he pie have an obligation to share with strangers an ever larger portion of their creation, the pie will get smaller until there is no pie at all.

Make them go live in one of these socialist utopias. If wealth were created by “society”, then the Soviet Union would have had the most productive economy on earth. Instead of Mitterrand’s socialism tanking the French economy, France would have surpassed the United States in economic growth by now. Instead of ushering in a long and strong bull market, Reagan’s policies would have made stagflation worse.

These socialists are too stupid to learn from history. How do you teach an idiot anything – especially that theft is bad?