The Difference in How Socialism and Free Markets Work in the Real World

by Sebastian Gorka,

If the future of the nation were a function of logic, then conservatives would have a very easy job.

No debate would be needed, really. In the choice between the two competing models …, with socialist arguments for “big government” on the one side and a market-oriented system that favors the freedoms of the individual over the powers of the state on the other, there would be no contest.

In fact, it would indeed be a formal “no contest,” as only one of the models has ever been realized in the real world in which we live.

Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Milton Friedman may have had impeccable credentials in terms of theory, but the whole point of their work is that it occurred within the reality of functioning free markets.

The ideas of these philosophical and economic greats were deployed in real time, in the real world, by democratically elected statesmen and leaders such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

These ideas actually worked in practice. The same cannot be said of the theories of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, or Mao Zedong.

Since “The Communist Manifesto” and the later “Das Kapital” were published, nowhere on the planet has the system therein envisaged ever actually been implemented as designed.

Oh, yes, more than 40 countries as culturally diverse as the Soviet Union, Venezuela, and Vietnam have called themselves “socialist” states or said they were implementing the theories of Marx, Mao, and Lenin.

But not one of them ever achieved the vaunted goal of the “Workers’ Paradise.” Not one of these experiments ever resulted in the objective Marx declared for his theory in 1875: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”

Not one.

Instead, wherever socialism was tried, from Moscow to Beijing, from Havana to Pyongyang, the world witnessed the same result: oppression of the masses, power and wealth for the party nomenklatura, and most often an eventual economic collapse. This was so even in the country of communism’s birth, the Soviet Union, which imploded on Christmas Day 1991 under the weight of Marxism’s inherent contradictions.

As a result, Marxism and socialism have just remained theories, while democracy and capitalism became unbelievably vibrant realities from Great Britain to Poland, from America to Japan, from Estonia to India.

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