Iain Murray - The Socialist Temptation

Praise for The Socialist Temptation

The Socialist Temptation explains the inexplicable: Why have so many people over so many generations come to believe that a government monopoly of power and control will improve life? Why has repeated failure not dissuaded them? Freedomreal political and economic freedomdelivers all that socialism has promised but never delivered over the centuries. The Socialist Temptation explains why so many painfully refuse to learn.

Grover Norquist, founding president of Americans for Tax Reform

Socialism does not come offering bread lines, secret police, or gulags. It sells itself as a decent and uplifting creed. It appeals to our belief in fairness, in kindness, in standing up for the little guyeven, sometimes, in patriotism. Iain Murray takes those claims seriously. Instead of using socialism as a swear word, as conservatives sometimes do, he properly analyzes its appeal. When a lot of people, even on the right, are falling for arguments that ought to have been discredited long ago, this is a vital taskespecially so, perhaps, during the authoritarian spasm that has followed the coronavirus infections. Restoring freedom is going to be a grueling and arduous task. Here is the instruction manual.

Daniel Hannan, former Member of the European Parliament and founding president of the Initiative for Free Trade

Several volumes could be written about the failures of socialism, but Murray has artfully condensed the argument to two hundred pages.

Daniel Mitchell, president of the Center for Freedom and Prosperity

America needs this book! The Socialist Temptation provides a reasoned and sympathetic critique of socialism that appeals to values that most Americans hold, whether they identify as left, right, or center. I would have liked to write a book like this if I hadnt spent my time drinking in commie countries.

Benjamin Powell, co-author of Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World

Why is Karl Marx more popular than Frdric Bastiat? Because Marx promised people something for nothing, while Bastiat explained that something for nothing is a scam. In The Socialist Temptation, Iain Murray explains why the scam is making a comeback, and why it is still a scam.

Glenn Reynolds, Beauchamp Brogan Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Tennessee and founder of InstaPundit

Iain Murray has written a book that is horrifyingly essential. Socialism was a backward idea in the nineteenth century and a catastrophe in the twentieth, and yet it somehow limps on among the worst sort of political cretins in the twenty-first. As Murray shows, socialisms promises of justice and liberation are a lie and always have been. It is a philosophy of domination and brutalityit always has been and always will be. It is our good fortune that Iain Murray is around to write this bookand our tragedy that we need him to.

Kevin Williamson, reporter, columnist, and author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism and The Smallest Minority

Iain Murrays The Socialist Temptation is a much-needed reminder of the tragic toll that socialist and interventionist policies have taken on the lives of the very people they claim to help.

John Berlau, senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and author of George Washington, Entrepreneur

Iain Murrays The Socialist Temptation is just the current of fresh water needed to transform the swamp. Twenty years of poor economic policy from both Democrats and Republicans have caused the American economy to stagnate. The punk growth rate caused the U.S. economy to be vastly poorer ($20T instead of $30T) than what free markets could have generated for all of us to enjoy. What to do? Populist conservatives, whom Murray astutely calls out, are tempting us with socialist remedies dressed up in red, white, and blue bunting. They, along with left-wing reformers like Elizabeth Warren, do not understand that you cannot drain a swamp. (A founding owner and manager of The Dismal Swamp Company, George Washington almost went broke trying in 1763.) The one and only solution is to flood the fetid swamp with the fresh waters only free enterprise can provide, turning it into a vibrant, thriving, life-filled wetlands. The sweet intellectual waters of Iain Murrays The Socialist Temptation to the rescue!

Ralph Benko, chairman of The Capitalist League and co-author of The Capitalist Manifesto

With the rise of belief in socialism among young people, we need a book about it that theyll read. This is it. Iain Murray has written a masterpiece of concise evidence-based argument that demolishes socialism in every particular. Its short. Its highly readable. And it packs an intellectual punch.

John OSullivan, president of the Danube Institute and author of The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister

For Fred Smith

B Y ILVINAS ILNAS P RESIDENT , F OUNDATION FOR E CONOMIC E DUCATION

W hen I watch the videos of crowds of cheering Lithuanians toppling statues of Lenin in every city, town, and village in the 1990s, I am filled with both joy and regret.

I rejoice that the Berlin Wall, the Soviet Union, and its physical artifacts have been destroyed. It brings a smile to my face to know that countless statues of Communist dictators have been torn down and sold for scrap. I take glee in the fact that an aluminum bust of Lenin is now a can of Coca-Cola or a car.

Because neither Coke nor cars were available to us living in the Soviet Union. Of course Pepsi opened a plant in the USSR in 1974, and in the late eighties the Soviet Union exchanged warships for syrup, but thats a story for a different time.

Its not as if the Soviet Union lacked resources to produce cars or cans. After all Russias natural resources were (and still are) vast. In the minds of central planners, who view the economy as a function of natural resources, Soviet citizens should have lived in material abundance. But in reality everyone wallowed somewhere close to povertyespecially by todays standards.

I dont think anyone starved to death in the Soviet bloc in the late 1980s, but there was a constant shortage of things that people likedfrom meat to mayonnaise to canned green peas to toilet paper. Which is especially telling of socialist central planning, because it is not difficult to produce toilet paper.

Shortages in the Soviet Union are not really newsalthough watching the Democratic Socialists, I begin to doubt that. What may be less known is that even when consumer goods were available, their cost was astounding. Imagine spending the equivalent of four months pay for a TV, two months pay for a refrigerator, or two weeks pay for a raincoat! Americans pay five to ten times less for a much better model. These were the actual prices for consumer goods, if you were lucky enough to get them.

And you needed luck. For things like color TVs you had to wait for a year or so to get the right to buy it. Or you could win a right to buy a TV at a trade union raffle (thats how we got ours). The queue to buy a Soviet automobile, which was an inferior knock-off, was seven years or more.

Dont think that Ladas were cheap and that queues were a way to ration super affordable automobiles to the masses at below-market prices. You were expected to fork out at least five years of wages for it. Thats like paying supercar prices for a clunker without air conditioning!