Socialism: Origins, Expansion, Decline, and the Attempted Revival in the United States

Description

This book is an attempt to address all the important economic aspects of socialism - the concepts and theories, the historical attempts to implement socialist economic systems, and the endeavor to establish socialism in the United States. The origins and ideas of socialism reflect an aspiration radically to transform the market system, the great advantages of which were explained by Adam Smith.

Part II reviews the establishment of Marxist-Leninist economic systems in the USSR and the East European countries. The movement featured central economic planning, which survived from the 1920s until about 1990; its failure was the attempt of statist organizations to crush the market system and replace it with Stalinist "command" planning. Central planning was meticulously copied in the bloc countries of East Europe, in China, in India, and elsewhere. The national replications of central economic planning always produced the same disappointing, usually disastrous results. Efforts to reform the system always failed. Meanwhile, the democratic countries of Western Europe established socialist parties and policies, but in less than a century after Marx, the great hopes of socialism to achieve successful and productive nationalization of industries on the basis of a national economic plan had been recognized as unproductive and undesirable.

Part III reviews the failed attempt to establish a viable socialist party in the United States. The real thrust toward socialism, originally launched by the New Deal of Roosevelt, came when Barak Obama, a thoroughly indoctrinated and dedicated socialist, ascended to the U.S. presidency. This socialism is an attempt to expand income redistribution and social welfare policies and to pursue massive industrial regulation and unconstitutional interventions in the private sector. The implications of these policies are discussed together with the associated loss of market freedoms and personal liberties.