Kevin D Williamson - The Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism

The problem with capitalism is capitalists .
The problem with socialism is socialism .
Willi Schlamm, Austrian ex-socialist

Socialists and communists themselves acknowledge that socialism is not separate from communism

It is risk aversion, not revolutionary fervor, that drives socialism

State control is more important to the socialist than egalitarianism

I n March 2010, North Korean president Kim Jong Il finished up a pet project of his: resolving economic difficulties resulting from his regimes failed attempts at currency reform. He accomplished this by abducting and torturing several high-ranking members of his Korean Workers Party, who were beaten so badly that they could not open their eyes or speak as they were lashed to a post on the firing range at a military school in Pyongyang. Just as well for them; there was nothing to see except gun barrels, and nothing they might have said would have made much difference. Each was shot nine times for the crime of committing treason against the people in the course of enacting unrealistic currency reforms. Hundreds more elite party officials were dismissed, very likely to be sent to labor camps along with their families.

This was not Kims first purge. In 1992, anticipating his assumption of power from his ailing father, Kim had organized the execution of twenty army officers and the expulsion of about 300 others. Hundreds more military officers were killed in a 1995 purge when Kim came to formal power. During the famine of 199598, which had been preceded by an intense propaganda campaign celebrating the healthful effects of subsisting on one or two meals a day, millions of North Koreans died of starvation due to the disastrous policies associated with Kims Juche Idea school of economics. According to the view from Pyongyang, the official state ideologywhich goes by the irony-proof name kimilsungismcannot fail, it can only be failed. So in reaction to the famine, the secretary of agriculture was denounced as an American spy and summarily executed, and thousands more officials were put to death, sent to camps, or otherwise disposed of. Kims political-economic misadventure left as much as 12 percent of his countrys population dead, and many more would have died had the famine not been alleviated by massive food aid from the hated capitalists in the United States of America.

If North Koreas experience is extreme, it is not alien to that of other similar nations, including those with more democratic systems than North Koreas.

A few months after Kims 2010 purge, Venezuela was engulfed in political scandal as its state-run groceries ran out of essential foodstuffs such as milk and flour, while huge stockpiles of food were left to rot in government warehouses. A disastrous blend of corruption and incompetence, as fundamental a part of Venezuelas system as red flags and workers slogans, had cost the hungry poor of that country as much as 75,000 tons of foodperhaps as much as one-fifth of the total annual imports of PDVAL, the main state-run enterprise tasked with distributing subsidized food to Venezuelas thousands of Soviet-style groceries. A former president of PDVALs board of directors, all of whom were hand-picked by Chvez and his advisers, was duly arrested and charged with corruption, while Chvez protected a close adviser also implicated in the case.

Why the food was left to rot was a mystery; the most likely explanation is that PDVALs political overseers, who fund their operations with revenues from Venezuelas state-run petroleum operations, were receiving kickbacks from the overseas suppliers and had never intended to distribute the food, which was stumbled upon by authorities working on an unrelated investigation. They had, the theory goes, simply placed the orders, collected their under-the-table commissions, and left the food to spoil, there being no further profit in actually distributing it.

Venezuelas experience is not entirely alien to the United States, either. And it is worth keeping in mind, for context, that Americans are only a few generations removed from the experience of real hunger. That has not stopped the U.S. government from adopting socialist policies that keep food off of Americans dinner tables. Consider this report from Ann Crittenden, writing in the New York Times in 1981: From afar, it looks like a red haze on the horizon. But... it [later] becomes clear that what lies in the distance is actually mounds of oranges. Stretching in all directions are millions and millions of navel oranges... all abandoned to rot under the California sun. The oranges have been dumped under what is known as a Federal marketing order.