Review of Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World by Robert Lawson and Benjamin Powell
By Gretchen A. Fritz
When someone gives you a book and says it’s an easy read about economics, the temptation is to write him off as a frustrated academic, both supercilious and delusional. But wait: give him—and it—a chance. Come presidential election time, you may be grateful for this knowledge of what socialism is and what it is not.
Socialism Sucks seeks to set the record straight on socialism, since one-third of 18-29 year olds say they support it, according to a 2016 Harvard survey. But the 2017 Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation survey also found that only one third of millennials could correctly define socialism and about that many don’t seem to be fully educated on the often-murderous results. “The Victims of Communism survey found that 31 percent of millennials had a favorable view of Che Guevara; 23 percent thought well of Vladimir Lenin; and 19 percent approved of Mao Zedong…”
The authors’ disclaimer: “This book is a truthful accounting of our travels, and so includes our sometimes excessive drinking, low-grade misogyny, and salty language. We are white, middle-aged, American males who are not ‘woke’ and don’t even know what ‘intersectionality’ means.” They also admit they wanted to get drunk in Cuba and be able to write it off as an expense. Pretty much right out of the gate (in the third sentence) is a word I never thought I’d see in a book about economics, and I realized: this is not your granddad’s economics book.
But they have the street cred to back it up. “Bob” Lawson is the director of the O’Neil Center for Global Markets and Freedom at the Cox School of Business at Southern Methodist University (which does not neatly fit on a business card, I bet). “Since the mid-1990s, Bob has worked with Professor James Gwartney of Florida State to put out the Fraser Institute’s annual economic freedom index.” Ben Powell is an economics professor and the director of the Free Market Institute at Texas Tech University.
They begin their tour of socialist countries in Sweden because, well, most people think it is. As it turns out, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other self-proclaimed socialists are probably just plain lying: Denmark, Sweden and Norway are not socialist. “Sweden does have a big welfare state, government-provided health care, and generous unemployment benefits, and the drinks at Duvel Café were indeed highly taxed. But welfare and entitlement programs…are not the defining components of socialism.”
The true definition of socialism “is the abolition of private property; in a socialist economy, the government decides what will be produced, how, and for whom.”
“The economic freedom index that Bob helped create is probably the best way to measure whether a country has a more capitalist or socialist system. The index uses a zero-to-ten scale…If a country earns a high score on the index, that generally means that country keeps government taxation low, respects private property rights, maintains the value of its currency, lets people trade freely, and keeps regulations to a minimum.”
So it turns out that Sweden has a capitalist economic system with very high taxes and a generous welfare program. It scored 7.54/10 on the economic freedom index. Lawson and Powell detail how Sweden went from dirt poor in the 1800s to one of the richest countries in the world in 1950 by listening to reformer Lars Johan Hierta, who “championed free speech, equal rights for women, business freedom, free trade, small government, and the repeal of public drunkenness laws…”
Powell and Lawson go on to visit Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea (well, they get close enough to make some observations but are too smart to actually go there), China, Russia, Ukraine, Georgia and Chicago, where they crash the Socialism Conference, the largest annual gathering of American socialists, to attempt to answer why so many Americans say they support socialism.
“Many of the conference attendees we asked thought socialism meant simply aspiring toward a world with better conditions for various marginalized groups. Few correctly identified collectivism or state ownership of the means of production as the defining characteristic of socialism…indeed, abortion and environmental activism seem to be common gateway drugs to socialism.” Later the authors observe, “Socialist leaders see that they have an opportunity with young people if they identify socialism as an ideology that is pro-abortion and pro-environment…neither issue is central to socialism.”
Laced throughout the narrative are references to classical economists like Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises and Adam Smith with brief, easy-to-understand explanations of their tenets, thereby conferring an education within an education. They also use practical indicators, like infant mortality, life expectancy, abortion rates, unintentional weight loss (aka starvation), lack of choices, and things that don’t work (like plumbing and air conditioning) to compare countries and how well (or unwell) their people are doing.
A few countries can’t be scored on the economic freedom index because of a dearth of reliable economic data: North Korea, Cuba, and Belarus. To see the full report, go to www.fraserinstitute.org/studies/economic-freedom-of-the-world-2020-annual-report.
Socialism Sucks is indeed an easy way to educate yourself about the basics of economics, the actual definition of socialism versus the popular understanding of it, the advantages of capitalism, the sad histories of nations that have tried socialism and current events. Socialism Sucks is the perfect antidote for the average conservative with a young socialist wannabe in his or her life.
Reprinted from The Illinois Shooter
