November 8, 2018
Dear Friends and Family,
This segment discusses the characteristics of the socialist promise and the reality of the socialist regime, plus providing multiple definitions of the term socialism.
My Takeaways:
Most of this segment is in reference to socialism as an economic ideology of a country. Typically, is starts with a promise of great, enticing benefits for the citizenry. The regime or process of implementation which follows has led to economic crises at the least and economic disaster in most applications throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Examples cited include the Soviet Union and most of its “satellite” countries – e.g. Ukraine, Romania, Czechoslovakia and East Germany; Great Britain; Argentina; India; many of the post-colonial African countries; China; Cuba; Venezuela; North Korea; and the European Union.
Socialism has taken many different forms throughout the world; from the totalitarian regimes of North Korea, Soviet Union and Cuba, to the nominally democratic government of Venezuela, to the social democracies of Sweden and India. Other nations are almost entirely dependent on a single socialized industry such as the Arab oil emirates.
Some of the characteristics of socialism highlighted in this segment include:
1. Central economic planning and control.
2. Partial or complete nationalization of private corporations via takeover or very controlling regulations.
3. Using political agencies to provide goods and services that otherwise would be provided by private enterprise.
4. A preference and enactment of collectivism versus individual control of assets and property.
5. Government control of parts of the economy typically controlled by private business.
6. Redistribution of wealth and/or income.
Also often associated with the implementation of socialism is the destruction of civil liberties (individual freedoms) such as free choice and free speech – a seventh characteristic.
I will be testing each of these seven and adding to it or deleting from it as we go through the series. I welcome your challenges to my conclusions based on the excerpts as we proceed. The next segment is entitled “Understanding Socialism.”
Happy Learning,
Harley
Dear Friends and Family,
This segment discusses the characteristics of the socialist promise and the reality of the socialist regime, plus providing multiple definitions of the term socialism.
My Takeaways:
Most of this segment is in reference to socialism as an economic ideology of a country. Typically, is starts with a promise of great, enticing benefits for the citizenry. The regime or process of implementation which follows has led to economic crises at the least and economic disaster in most applications throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Examples cited include the Soviet Union and most of its “satellite” countries – e.g. Ukraine, Romania, Czechoslovakia and East Germany; Great Britain; Argentina; India; many of the post-colonial African countries; China; Cuba; Venezuela; North Korea; and the European Union.
Socialism has taken many different forms throughout the world; from the totalitarian regimes of North Korea, Soviet Union and Cuba, to the nominally democratic government of Venezuela, to the social democracies of Sweden and India. Other nations are almost entirely dependent on a single socialized industry such as the Arab oil emirates.
Some of the characteristics of socialism highlighted in this segment include:
1. Central economic planning and control.
2. Partial or complete nationalization of private corporations via takeover or very controlling regulations.
3. Using political agencies to provide goods and services that otherwise would be provided by private enterprise.
4. A preference and enactment of collectivism versus individual control of assets and property.
5. Government control of parts of the economy typically controlled by private business.
6. Redistribution of wealth and/or income.
Also often associated with the implementation of socialism is the destruction of civil liberties (individual freedoms) such as free choice and free speech – a seventh characteristic.
I will be testing each of these seven and adding to it or deleting from it as we go through the series. I welcome your challenges to my conclusions based on the excerpts as we proceed. The next segment is entitled “Understanding Socialism.”
Happy Learning,
Harley
SOCIALISM – SEGMENT 1
WHAT IS SOCIALISM? – EXCERPTS
PROMISE OR REGIME? For most people the word “socialism” conjures up two very different images in their minds. Either:
THE PROMISE: John Lennon’s enormously popular song, Imagine, illustrates the first idea – his beautiful ideal of nothing for people to fight over; no religion, no countries, no possessions, no wars, and no worries – what a great life.
Source: The Naked Socialist by Paul B. Skousen
Bernie Sanders' Promise/Agenda for America
A 2016 Pew Foundation poll found that 69% of voters under the age of thirty expressed “a willingness to vote for a socialist president of the United States”; and literally millions of millennials voted for self-described “democratic” socialist Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries. Sanders won majorities of the under-thirty vote in several major state primaries campaigning on a platform of “free” higher education, “free” healthcare, and a vastly increased welfare state.
Source: The Problem with Socialism by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
THE REGIME:
We must forget (or be oblivious to) an awful lot of not-so-ancient history to have a “favorable” view of socialism. We must be unaware of how it is a form of economic poison that destroys prosperity and is the biggest generator of poverty the world the world has ever known. On the early 20th century it turned Ukraine from “the breadbasket of Europe” to a desolate, barren land where people could hardly feed themselves let along export food elsewhere. It had the same effect all throughout the world in countless countries that adopted socialized agriculture.
The Soviet economy was so dysfunctional, thanks to 70 years of socialism, that by the time the entire system collapsed in the late 1980s it was most probably only about 5% of the size of the U.S. economy. This was despite the Soviet Union’s vast natural resources, unrivaled by any other country or political empire. All of the socialist “satellite” countries suffered a similar economic fate, from Romania, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany to Cuba and beyond. In socialist country after socialist country, the common people were equal in their poverty while the political elite lived privileged lives.
Great Britain adopted its brand of “democratic” socialism, known as “Fabian socialism,” after World War II as it nationalized many key industries, imposed very high rates of taxation, established a massive welfare system, and adopted socialized medicine and government-funded pensions. By the 1970s some 30 years later the British had had enough. They elected Margaret Thatcher prime minister who privatized many of Britain’s nationalized industries. For decades, Great Britain had been falling behind other European democracies in terms of per capita income. That trend was reversed by Thatcher’s desocialization programs.
Argentina embraced socialism in the late 1940s during the Juan Peron regime. Peron restricted international trade, imposed wage-and-price controls, seized private property, nationalized some industries, and spent lavishly, much of which was financed by the government simply printing money. The predictable result was economic ruination and hyperinflation that led to Peron’s ouster in 1955. Argentina, however, remained socialist. Its economy continued to stagnate and several coups late, by the late 1980s, it was suffering from 12,000% inflation from years of trying to cover up the failures of socialism by printing money to pay for all the socialist programs. Argentina was once the world’s 10th largest economy, but by 2016 it was barely ahead of Kazakhstan and Equatorial Guinea.
In 1947, India adopted a home-grown version of Soviet-style central economic planning. It developed a series of “Five-Year Plans” modeled after the notoriously failed Soviet Five-Year Plans. It was no more successful in India than it was in the Soviet Union as India became synonymous with “poverty.” In the 1980s, Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi essentially gave up on socialism and cut taxes and deregulated and privatized industries. The result was that India’s economy finally became revitalized and started to create wider prosperity.
Socialism destroyed the economies of many post-colonial African countries.
For most of the Cold War years the starkest difference between a capitalist and a socialist economy was the comparison of Communist China and nearby Hong Kong. Hong Kong was one of the freest economies in the world with a modest flat income tax and very little government regulation of business. The recipe made Hong Kong, with no natural resources, one of the most prosperous countries on earth. By contrast, socialist China experienced the usual economic stagnation and backwardness that is the hallmark of all socialist economies. China abruptly liberalized a large part of its economy beginning in the late 1970s by allowing private enterprise and even private banks to some extent exist. The creation of a free enterprise segment of the Chinese economy began to produce prosperity.
It is impossible for socialism to be anything but impoverishing as an economic system because of the nature of socialism. Every imaginable type of socialism was tried in the 19th and 20th centuries, producing nothing but economic stagnation – or much worse.
What also must be forgotten if one is to have a “favorable” opinion of socialism is that government control of an economy, whether done in the name of equality, environmentalism, or anything else, has long been associated with the destruction of civil liberties, especially freedom of speech.
Source: The Problem with Socialism by Thomas DiLorenzo
Examples of the Regime image – the actual concrete structure and formation of socialism – can be found in North Korea where malnutrition has stunted the growth of its children, where large ghost cities stand as empty mirages and facades to fool the world, where three million people starved to death in the mid-1990s because of their government’s stupefying polices. Or Cuba, where 50 years of socialism have produced a scourge of crime, corruption, prostitution, drugs, and white-collar crimes. Where the country has to rely on other socialist nations for such basics as food, medicine, and energy. Or, Red China, where Mao’s great leap forward created a famine so intense that it killed at least 30 million people. Or, the former USSR, where Stalin and his successors eventually killed more than 60 million people over seven miserable decades to establish a socialist state. Or, the European Union, where the massive treasuries of the world’s mightiest trading partners regulated under socialistic ideals, began imploding with uncontrollable spending, borrowing and debt. By 2010, the circumstances were so desperate they made a last ditch attempt to rescue their excessive welfare entitlement programs with loans, bailouts, and austerity programs. Europe’s highly touted dream of “with socialism, we can do better,” became painful proof they couldn’t. Such examples show that socialism in the “here and now” never achieves the beautiful promise, the dream, the pathway to a different life as suggested by Lennon’s Imagine.
Source: The Naked Socialist by Paul B. Skousen
WHAT SOCIALISM IS, AND WHAT SOCIALISM ISN’T
“Socialism” is a word that means many things to many people, and socialism has taken many forms in the world. Socialism applies, with equal accuracy, to the totalitarian regimes of Kim II Jong, Joseph Stalin, and Fidel Castro, the authoritarian but nominally democratic government of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, and the social democracies of Sweden and India.
Some countries practice limited socialism within the context of an otherwise liberal democracy, with the pre-Thatcher United Kingdom being a typical example. Some nations are almost entirely dependent on a single socialized industry, such as the Arab oil emirates and their state-owned petroleum corporations. In many Western European social democracies, the healthcare systems and some heavy industries are socialistic enterprises. In the United States; education, agriculture, and healthcare are to varying degrees operated by the state or subjected to socialist central planning through regimes of regulation, subsidies, and redistribution.
Our model of socialism will have two main parts: 1) The public provision of non-public goods, and 2) Economic central planning. First, socialism means among other things, using political agencies to provide goods and services that otherwise would be provided privately in the marketplace. In its most extreme form, socialism means government direction of the economy as a whole. Second, economic central planning will be crucial to identifying and understanding what differentiates real socialism from the normal mishmash of welfare-state policies typically found in Western liberal democracies. Socialism is not simply about the redistribution of wealth or income through taxes and government-assistance programs. Socialism means central planning. A food-stamp program is welfare; government-run farms and grocery stores are socialism. A government housing subsidy is welfare; government-run housing projects are socialism. A school voucher is welfare; a government-run school system is socialism.
Central planning is the defining feature of socialism. Under socialism the Plan is everything. When the Plan conflicts with the desire to redistribute income or to subsidize the poor and the working class the Plan always prevails. The failing government-school system does not guarantee that poor and minority students will escape the crippling, lifetime burden of receiving a shoddy education at exorbitant expense, but the opposite – it guarantees that the great majority of them are deprived of the educational opportunities enjoyed by the white middle class. Socialist central planning always works best for the class that produces the central planners, who can see to it that their own interests are relatively well served, which is why in the U.S. socialism is a phenomenon of the middle class, not the working class.
Source: The Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism by Kevin D. Williamson
Historically, socialism has been defined as “worker control of the means of production.” This means that the working class, or the bulk of the population, controls the economy. I will give three possible representations of socialism, noting that each has numerous sub-genres. First is Marxist socialism. This involves nationalizing industries and letting the people control them through democratic elections. Second, is Libertarian Socialism. This involves limiting state action, sometimes abolishing the state altogether, and converting to a society run by worker cooperatives. The third school is Democratic Socialism, the banner chosen by Bernie Sanders. This philosophy does not rest on a quick conversion to full socialism, but rather supports a state that fulfills the needs of its people through universal healthcare, while softening the edges of capitalism. What is uncertain about Bernie Sanders is whether he wants to transition to full socialism eventually, which is what separates democratic socialism from social democracy.
Source: What is Socialism and Why is it Important in America? By Ryan Rogers
DEFINTIONS OF SOCIALISM
What can be the best definition of socialism? The government controlling parts of the economy that typically are controlled by private business.
“Socialism is that policy or theory which aims at securing by the action of the central democratic authority a better distribution, and in due subordination thereunto a better production of wealth than now prevails.” Encyclopedia Britannica
“Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom, socialism restricts it. Democracy attaches all possible value to each man: socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. Alexis de Tocqueville, defender of freedom
“An economic theory which holds that ownership of property should be in the group and not in the individuals who make up the group. Collectivism may be partial or complete. Partial collectivism is exemplified by public ownership of schools, hospitals, recreational centers, etc., in a capitalistic system. Complete collectivism exists under communism where all wealth is owned in common.” Paul Hubert Casselman, Labor Dictionary
“State Socialism, which may be described as the doctrine that all the affairs of men should be managed by the government, regardless of individual choice. Under socialism, there are no unalienable rights, no choice, and no property. Benjamin Tucker, publisher and proponent of socialism.
“The social ownership of property, the abolition of the propertied class, and the sole control of those who produce wealth. Communism is, of course, the goal. Communism does it by abrupt force – socialism does it by gradual infiltration and change. Both aim for the same goal.” Roger Nash Baldwin, a founder of ACLU.
“In short, socialism is government force to control and change society.”
Source: The Naked Socialist by Paul B. Skousen
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
WHAT IS SOCIALISM? – EXCERPTS
PROMISE OR REGIME? For most people the word “socialism” conjures up two very different images in their minds. Either:
- A Beautiful Promise: A utopian promise of a fair and simpler world, a longing for some rapturous path toward a different way of living – it is socialism of wishful thinking, of make believe, it is the socialism of the future, or
- The Regime: An actual structure or formation of socialistic ideas in society, in a government, in a nation – it is real socialism, the harsh and brutal socialism of today
THE PROMISE: John Lennon’s enormously popular song, Imagine, illustrates the first idea – his beautiful ideal of nothing for people to fight over; no religion, no countries, no possessions, no wars, and no worries – what a great life.
Source: The Naked Socialist by Paul B. Skousen
Bernie Sanders' Promise/Agenda for America
- Income and Wealth Inequality: The issue of wealth and income inequality is the great moral issue of our time, it is the great economic issue of our time, and it is the great political issue of our time. The grotesque level of inequality is immoral. This type of rigged economy is not what America is supposed to be about. This has got to change.
- Economics: Today, shamefully, we have forty-five million people living in poverty, many of whom are working at low-wage jobs. These are people who struggle every day to find the money to feed their kids, to pay their electric bills, and to put gas in their car to get to work. This campaign is about those people and our struggling middle class. It is about creating an economy that works for all, and not just the 1 per cent.
- Climate Change: There is nothing more important than leaving this country and the entire planet in a way that is habitable for our kids and grandchildren. The debate is over. The scientific community has spoke in a virtually unanimous voice. Climate change is real. It is caused by human activity and it is already causing devastating problems in the United States and around the world. We must not, we cannot, and we will not allow that to happen.
- Jobs, Jobs, Jobs: We need a major federal jobs program which puts million of Americans back to work at decent-paying jobs.
- Raising Wages: A living wage, which means raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour.
- Health Care for All: Guaranteed health care to all is a right
- Protecting Our Most Vulnerable: Expand Social Security benefits
- College for All: To make tuition in public colleges and universities free
- War and Peace: We must be part of an international coalition, led by Muslim nations, that can not only defeat ISIS but begin the process for a lasting peace.
A 2016 Pew Foundation poll found that 69% of voters under the age of thirty expressed “a willingness to vote for a socialist president of the United States”; and literally millions of millennials voted for self-described “democratic” socialist Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries. Sanders won majorities of the under-thirty vote in several major state primaries campaigning on a platform of “free” higher education, “free” healthcare, and a vastly increased welfare state.
Source: The Problem with Socialism by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
THE REGIME:
We must forget (or be oblivious to) an awful lot of not-so-ancient history to have a “favorable” view of socialism. We must be unaware of how it is a form of economic poison that destroys prosperity and is the biggest generator of poverty the world the world has ever known. On the early 20th century it turned Ukraine from “the breadbasket of Europe” to a desolate, barren land where people could hardly feed themselves let along export food elsewhere. It had the same effect all throughout the world in countless countries that adopted socialized agriculture.
The Soviet economy was so dysfunctional, thanks to 70 years of socialism, that by the time the entire system collapsed in the late 1980s it was most probably only about 5% of the size of the U.S. economy. This was despite the Soviet Union’s vast natural resources, unrivaled by any other country or political empire. All of the socialist “satellite” countries suffered a similar economic fate, from Romania, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany to Cuba and beyond. In socialist country after socialist country, the common people were equal in their poverty while the political elite lived privileged lives.
Great Britain adopted its brand of “democratic” socialism, known as “Fabian socialism,” after World War II as it nationalized many key industries, imposed very high rates of taxation, established a massive welfare system, and adopted socialized medicine and government-funded pensions. By the 1970s some 30 years later the British had had enough. They elected Margaret Thatcher prime minister who privatized many of Britain’s nationalized industries. For decades, Great Britain had been falling behind other European democracies in terms of per capita income. That trend was reversed by Thatcher’s desocialization programs.
Argentina embraced socialism in the late 1940s during the Juan Peron regime. Peron restricted international trade, imposed wage-and-price controls, seized private property, nationalized some industries, and spent lavishly, much of which was financed by the government simply printing money. The predictable result was economic ruination and hyperinflation that led to Peron’s ouster in 1955. Argentina, however, remained socialist. Its economy continued to stagnate and several coups late, by the late 1980s, it was suffering from 12,000% inflation from years of trying to cover up the failures of socialism by printing money to pay for all the socialist programs. Argentina was once the world’s 10th largest economy, but by 2016 it was barely ahead of Kazakhstan and Equatorial Guinea.
In 1947, India adopted a home-grown version of Soviet-style central economic planning. It developed a series of “Five-Year Plans” modeled after the notoriously failed Soviet Five-Year Plans. It was no more successful in India than it was in the Soviet Union as India became synonymous with “poverty.” In the 1980s, Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi essentially gave up on socialism and cut taxes and deregulated and privatized industries. The result was that India’s economy finally became revitalized and started to create wider prosperity.
Socialism destroyed the economies of many post-colonial African countries.
For most of the Cold War years the starkest difference between a capitalist and a socialist economy was the comparison of Communist China and nearby Hong Kong. Hong Kong was one of the freest economies in the world with a modest flat income tax and very little government regulation of business. The recipe made Hong Kong, with no natural resources, one of the most prosperous countries on earth. By contrast, socialist China experienced the usual economic stagnation and backwardness that is the hallmark of all socialist economies. China abruptly liberalized a large part of its economy beginning in the late 1970s by allowing private enterprise and even private banks to some extent exist. The creation of a free enterprise segment of the Chinese economy began to produce prosperity.
It is impossible for socialism to be anything but impoverishing as an economic system because of the nature of socialism. Every imaginable type of socialism was tried in the 19th and 20th centuries, producing nothing but economic stagnation – or much worse.
What also must be forgotten if one is to have a “favorable” opinion of socialism is that government control of an economy, whether done in the name of equality, environmentalism, or anything else, has long been associated with the destruction of civil liberties, especially freedom of speech.
Source: The Problem with Socialism by Thomas DiLorenzo
Examples of the Regime image – the actual concrete structure and formation of socialism – can be found in North Korea where malnutrition has stunted the growth of its children, where large ghost cities stand as empty mirages and facades to fool the world, where three million people starved to death in the mid-1990s because of their government’s stupefying polices. Or Cuba, where 50 years of socialism have produced a scourge of crime, corruption, prostitution, drugs, and white-collar crimes. Where the country has to rely on other socialist nations for such basics as food, medicine, and energy. Or, Red China, where Mao’s great leap forward created a famine so intense that it killed at least 30 million people. Or, the former USSR, where Stalin and his successors eventually killed more than 60 million people over seven miserable decades to establish a socialist state. Or, the European Union, where the massive treasuries of the world’s mightiest trading partners regulated under socialistic ideals, began imploding with uncontrollable spending, borrowing and debt. By 2010, the circumstances were so desperate they made a last ditch attempt to rescue their excessive welfare entitlement programs with loans, bailouts, and austerity programs. Europe’s highly touted dream of “with socialism, we can do better,” became painful proof they couldn’t. Such examples show that socialism in the “here and now” never achieves the beautiful promise, the dream, the pathway to a different life as suggested by Lennon’s Imagine.
Source: The Naked Socialist by Paul B. Skousen
WHAT SOCIALISM IS, AND WHAT SOCIALISM ISN’T
“Socialism” is a word that means many things to many people, and socialism has taken many forms in the world. Socialism applies, with equal accuracy, to the totalitarian regimes of Kim II Jong, Joseph Stalin, and Fidel Castro, the authoritarian but nominally democratic government of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, and the social democracies of Sweden and India.
Some countries practice limited socialism within the context of an otherwise liberal democracy, with the pre-Thatcher United Kingdom being a typical example. Some nations are almost entirely dependent on a single socialized industry, such as the Arab oil emirates and their state-owned petroleum corporations. In many Western European social democracies, the healthcare systems and some heavy industries are socialistic enterprises. In the United States; education, agriculture, and healthcare are to varying degrees operated by the state or subjected to socialist central planning through regimes of regulation, subsidies, and redistribution.
Our model of socialism will have two main parts: 1) The public provision of non-public goods, and 2) Economic central planning. First, socialism means among other things, using political agencies to provide goods and services that otherwise would be provided privately in the marketplace. In its most extreme form, socialism means government direction of the economy as a whole. Second, economic central planning will be crucial to identifying and understanding what differentiates real socialism from the normal mishmash of welfare-state policies typically found in Western liberal democracies. Socialism is not simply about the redistribution of wealth or income through taxes and government-assistance programs. Socialism means central planning. A food-stamp program is welfare; government-run farms and grocery stores are socialism. A government housing subsidy is welfare; government-run housing projects are socialism. A school voucher is welfare; a government-run school system is socialism.
Central planning is the defining feature of socialism. Under socialism the Plan is everything. When the Plan conflicts with the desire to redistribute income or to subsidize the poor and the working class the Plan always prevails. The failing government-school system does not guarantee that poor and minority students will escape the crippling, lifetime burden of receiving a shoddy education at exorbitant expense, but the opposite – it guarantees that the great majority of them are deprived of the educational opportunities enjoyed by the white middle class. Socialist central planning always works best for the class that produces the central planners, who can see to it that their own interests are relatively well served, which is why in the U.S. socialism is a phenomenon of the middle class, not the working class.
Source: The Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism by Kevin D. Williamson
Historically, socialism has been defined as “worker control of the means of production.” This means that the working class, or the bulk of the population, controls the economy. I will give three possible representations of socialism, noting that each has numerous sub-genres. First is Marxist socialism. This involves nationalizing industries and letting the people control them through democratic elections. Second, is Libertarian Socialism. This involves limiting state action, sometimes abolishing the state altogether, and converting to a society run by worker cooperatives. The third school is Democratic Socialism, the banner chosen by Bernie Sanders. This philosophy does not rest on a quick conversion to full socialism, but rather supports a state that fulfills the needs of its people through universal healthcare, while softening the edges of capitalism. What is uncertain about Bernie Sanders is whether he wants to transition to full socialism eventually, which is what separates democratic socialism from social democracy.
Source: What is Socialism and Why is it Important in America? By Ryan Rogers
DEFINTIONS OF SOCIALISM
What can be the best definition of socialism? The government controlling parts of the economy that typically are controlled by private business.
“Socialism is that policy or theory which aims at securing by the action of the central democratic authority a better distribution, and in due subordination thereunto a better production of wealth than now prevails.” Encyclopedia Britannica
“Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom, socialism restricts it. Democracy attaches all possible value to each man: socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. Alexis de Tocqueville, defender of freedom
“An economic theory which holds that ownership of property should be in the group and not in the individuals who make up the group. Collectivism may be partial or complete. Partial collectivism is exemplified by public ownership of schools, hospitals, recreational centers, etc., in a capitalistic system. Complete collectivism exists under communism where all wealth is owned in common.” Paul Hubert Casselman, Labor Dictionary
“State Socialism, which may be described as the doctrine that all the affairs of men should be managed by the government, regardless of individual choice. Under socialism, there are no unalienable rights, no choice, and no property. Benjamin Tucker, publisher and proponent of socialism.
“The social ownership of property, the abolition of the propertied class, and the sole control of those who produce wealth. Communism is, of course, the goal. Communism does it by abrupt force – socialism does it by gradual infiltration and change. Both aim for the same goal.” Roger Nash Baldwin, a founder of ACLU.
“In short, socialism is government force to control and change society.”
Source: The Naked Socialist by Paul B. Skousen
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
| 1_soc_what_is_socialism.pdf |