Socialism isn’t fair

President Trump was right. On Tuesday when he spoke in front of the UN General Assembly he said, “The problem in Venezuela is not that socialism has been poorly implemented but that socialism has been faithfully implemented.”

There is a common retort which comes from the Left when a socialist regime collapses. It is something along the lines of, “The [Soviets] just didn’t implement it quite right, but socialism is still superior because it’s fair.”

There are two questions that need to be answered about socialism if we really are doing an honest comparison. One, is it more fair, and two, does it work?

Is it more fair?

The moral idea behind socialism is that making sure everyone has the same amount is the most fair. Even in theory this is flawed because people simply are not equal. Some people are really smart, while others are really good at basketball. Therefore, any attempt to make them equal results in inequality. As Jim Peron of the Institute for Liberal Values explains so eloquently:

“Not everyone can be a nuclear physicist or a physician. And no amount of education will change that. So how do we achieve equality of results – if that is our goal? The only method left is to tear down the great. Those who are intelligent thus become victims of the mob violence of the least intelligent in their society.”

Does it work?

In practice, socialism is flawed because when you force the most successful people to pay unreasonable percentages of their earnings, they lose the incentive to work. This understanding is crucial for the comparison between socialism and capitalism.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, there were entire socialist libraries devoted to the confiscation and division of wealth, but barely even an article on how people were motivated to create wealth. Socialists do not know how to make a society work, nor how to prevent the producers (aka job creators, aka Atlases) from quitting or moving to a new country. Mark my words: If you force them to surrender such large portions of the fruits of their labor, the Atlases will shrug.

The implementation of socialism is nothing more than the suppression of human nature and human diversity. It’s not just the implementation of socialism that is flawed, but the ideal as well. Don’t ever let anyone get away with saying that the ideal is fair. It is not.