Home > Work > The Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism
1 " The difference between communism and socialism is that under socialism central planning ends with a gun in your face, whereas under communism central planning begins with a gun in your face. "
― Kevin D. Williamson , The Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism
2 " It was not for nothing that Adam Smith wrote that “people of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” The romantic notion of politics holds that Big Business is synonymous with capitalism and the archenemy of socialism. In fact, Big Business is reliably against most of what must go into any modern definition of capitalism: free trade, free enterprise, free markets, and the impartial rule of law. Big Business reliably seeks to use the state to seek advantages in trade and to crush smaller (and often more innovative) competitors. "
3 " Idealistic socialists in the West usually will tell you that 'socialism' is anything other than what actual socialist governments have achieved in the real world. What is important to keep in mind is that socialism is not a particular set of political conditions, but a specific kind of economic arrangement. Socialism is not identical with left-wing politics, and socialism is not confined to the Left. The various kinds of political systems that have arisen from socialist economies, from Soviet authoritarianism to India’s 'license raj,' are in no small part responses to the inadequacies and contradictions inherent in socialist systems of production and distribution—systems that seek to ignore or to subvert the laws of economics. "
4 " It would be difficult to find in the United States any profession so dedicated to socialism as that of educators, and difficult to find any argument for socialism as popular as the cause of public education. "
5 " The United States in the twenty-first century is not very much like nineteenth-century Prussia (Prussia today isn’t much like Prussia then, either), but we still use its educational methods. We would never think of using its transportation methods (horsepower was literally horsepower), its communication methods (telegraphs), or its military technology (muzzle-loaders and bayonets). But government-run systems have a way of preserving themselves well past any rational point, which is why the United States still maintains the helium reserve it established for dirigible warfare—presumably to fight those nineteenth-century Prussians. "
6 " O problema do capitalismo são os capitalistas. O problema do socialismo é o socialismo.” — Willi Schlamm, ex-socialista austríaco "
7 " the necessary thing from the socialists’ point of view is not egalitarian economic outcomes, but state control. "
8 " Notably, far from being a proto-socialist, Bolívar was a man who traveled with a copy of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, a man who so admired Thomas Jefferson that he sent a favored nephew to study at the University of Virginia, which Jefferson had designed. "
9 " the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development estimates that American families pay 26 percent more for milk than they would pay if they paid real prices, i.e. the prices set by a free market. Whoever’s interest is being looked after, it isn’t the interest of the guy on a tight budget staring down a dry bowl of Count Chocula. "
10 " Margaret Thatcher dizia que o socialismo dura até acabar o dinheiro dos outros. "