“Hard” socialism eliminates human freedoms, spreads mass poverty, and murders many of its citizens after they discover they must live with tyrants. Everywhere it has been the same where people deceived themselves or were deceived by socialist and communist parties that established totalitarianism to achieve social equality and eliminate poverty. Unfortunately they achieved only the equality of general, widespread poverty. It has always been the same, so far, but let us consider just three examples of this social phenomenon.: Venezuela, East Germany, and the Soviet Union.
Theoreticians, ideologues, philosophers and economists have long hoped for the arrival of a socialist utopia of justice and equity, triumphantly achieving a complete elimination of poverty. Karl Marx on the left of the political spectrum and Josef Schumpeter on the right, both felt that the ultimate destination of our social progress would be the achievement of a socialist economy. Marx thought it would come through a complete failure of capitalism, although he acknowledged that system to have been a great historical success in growing people’s incomes and improving their material conditions. But there had been too much of a downside in the exploitation of workers as capitalists pursued profit. Marx foresaw that the ultimate result would be a proletarian revolution which would bring the destruction of the bourgeoisie, the triumph of the working class, and the establishment of socialism.
Josef Schumpeter, a deservedly famous Austrian economist, saw that the continuously evolving capitalist system, which had done so well historically, would gradually mature into a bureaucratized system (and socialism is notably bureaucratic). In the course of its social development, capitalism would lose the support of society. Academics, who are isolated from market forces and their cultural implications, are inclined to criticize and repudiate markets. Along with non-economists, they are no longer impressed with the freedom, incentives, and responsibilities associated with the market economy.* Thus, Schumpeter opined, over time we will simply and inevitably drift into socialism.
Many observers are concerned that socialism, whether the result of revolution or ballot-box naiveté, will not yield happy results. Socialists are too often more like Marx than Bernstein. When the government has not only all the challenges of governance, but burdens itself with planning and managing the entire economy as well, the over-reach turns out to be destructive. Under capitalism, everyone is motivated by the need to succeed and even to get ahead in the “ordinary business of life.” Everyone – consumers, workers, and business managers – has an economic plan. Under Socialism, the government cancels all those plans and must develop its own humongous economic plan (like Stalin’s five-year plans). Socialists have never yet succeeded in managing and implementing such a plan successfully.
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*See Josef Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, 3rd Edition, (New York, Harper & Row, 1950).
The intent here is to investigate the results of the attempt of nations to tell every worker where they are to work, how much they are to be paid, what to produce, in what cities that output is to be sold, and everything else that is to happen in millions of firms, with millions of workers, in all of the nation’s cities, and all that is to happen between the firms of that country with all the other countries of the world in international trade.
Let us now consider three examples of this problem. We consider first, Venezuela, then go to the German Democratic Republic, which (in)famously built the Berlin Wall to keep East Germans from escaping from their hundred thousand square kilometer prison to the very successful capitalist country next door, the Federal Republic of (West) Germany. The third example of socialist life will be Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union, the first Marxist-Leninist socialist economy. Few people really understand how life looks and has looked in current and past socialist countries.
Life in Contemporary Socialist Venezuela
The U.S. Department of State has published various Country Reports on Human Rights Practices. We will be interested in their report on Venezuela;* the following is taken from the Executive Summary of the Venezuela Country Report.
Venezuela is legally a multiparty, constitutional republic, but for more than a decade, political power has been concentrated in a single party with an authoritarian executive exercising significant control over the judicial, citizens’ power (which includes the prosecutor general and ombudsman), and electoral branches of government, and standing up a parallel, illegitimate legislative body alongside the existing elected one.
In Venezuela the rule of former president Nicolás Maduro was to end on January 10, 2019. He did not willingly relinquish power, however, claiming “victory” in the 2018 presidential elections. Those elections had been generally condemned as neither free nor fair. The democratically elected National Assembly (AN) rejected the claim. On January 23, Juan Guaido, as president of the National Assembly, officially assumed the role of interim
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See: https://www.state.gov/reports/2019-country-reports-on-human-rights-practices/venezuela/
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president on January 23rd, according to provisions of the constitution related to vacancies. President Maduro, however, supported by hundreds of Cuban security force members, refused Quietly to retire from office. He and his forces prevented interim president Guaido from exercising authority in Venezuela.
We have observed the once prosperous country fall into many of the economic problems that destroy the hopes and optimism of socialist advocates. Bureaucratic inefficiencies, fiscal incompetence, and inept policies have brought the country hyperinflation, shortages, declining production and rapidly increasing poverty. The populace is now suffering from the effects of food and medicine shortages, the failure of companies, unemployment, declining productivity, authoritarianism, human rights violations, gross economic mismanagement and excessive dependence on oil.
Socialists invest a great deal in seizing power and taking control of the economy. They establish institutions that must remain viable if the socialist regime and the single-party political system is to remain in control, so they are not bashful about strict enforcement of authoritarian policies. So-called colectivos (regime-sponsored, armed security forces) have been responsible for forced disappearances of individuals, torture of victims, arbitrary detention; harsh and life-threatening prison conditions and the implementation of their own political policies. In Venezuela, significant human rights issues are observable. These include unlawful, sometimes arbitrary killings as well as extrajudicial killings by the security forces of the Maduro regime prisoners; and lack of judicial independence. The former Maduro regime restricted free expression and freedom of the press by blocking signals, interfering with media operations, or shutting down privately owned television, radio, and other outlets. “Libel, incitement, and inaccurate reporting” were subject to criminal charges. The Maduro regime used violence to repress peaceful demonstrations and freedom of assembly. Members of the congress (AN) were subjected to intimidation, harassment, and abuse, including denial of due process and parliamentary immunity.
The Maduro-aligned security forces have enjoyed impunity for their pervasive corruption. In other national and state offices, including those at the highest levels of the regime, there has been trafficking in persons; violence against indigenous persons; and the “worst forms of child labor,” which the Maduro regime made minimal efforts to eliminate before the 2018 elections. As the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor of the Department of State indicated:
There were continued reports of police abuse and involvement in crime, particularly in the activities of illegally armed groups, including illegal and arbitrary detentions, extrajudicial killings, kidnappings, and the excessive use of force, but the former regime at the national, state, and local levels took no effective action to investigate officials who committed human rights abuses, and there was impunity for such abuses.
The Office of the Human Rights Ombudsman provided no information on human rights violations alleged to have been committed by police and military personnel. Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have observed that many victims failed to report violent crimes to police or other regime authorities. This was doubtless because they feared retribution or lacked confidence in the police, especially after the Maduro regime, backed by Cuban security forces, refused to cede power, thus preventing the interim government from taking action.”
Life in the German Democratic Republic
The German Democratic Republic (Deutsche Demokratische Republik, or DDR) was a state in central Europe from 1949 to 1990. It arose from the division of Germany by the Allied Powers after 1945. After East Germany’s Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, or SED) was formed in the Soviet Occupation Zone as a dictatorial government. It existed until the peaceful revolution in the fall of 1989. The official national ideology was that of Marxism-Leninism.*
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*See Wikepedia, Die Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Demokratische_Republik
Social justice in the GDR was, according to the Marxist conception of the State, an independent construct. Rights of individuals to their own political viewpoints were neither protected nor tolerated by the government. Torture or “disappearance,” the administering of bodily and psychological pain and suffering were daily business until the end of the SED regime in 1989. The GDR also conducted from the beginning a more or less adversarial policy against the churches. Christians were systematically expelled from governmental institutions, from the media, and other public places. Finally, the GDR violated fundamental rights of liberality and of life. Between the thirteenth of August, 1961 and the 9th of November, 1989, at least 98 people lost their lives in the attempt to traverse the Berlin Wall. Another 30 people lost their lives at the Wall without having any intention of escaping over the wall.**
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**Deutscher Bundestag, Menschenrechte und Verfassungswirklichkeit in der DDR. 2009, Wissenschaftliche Dienste. See the website: https://www.bundestag.de/resource/blob/411698/671f7828891e9b599bf349fd0545ab1a/WD-1-060-09-pdf-data.pdf
What Life was Like in the GDR.
Many East Germans were cut off from their family, relatives, and friends once the wall was built. Travel was only with the permission of the state, and it was not given to travel in West Berlin, West Germany, or other capitalist countries to visit relatives. It was possible to travel to other communist countries in the East for a vacation, but even that required permission. The state determined where East Germans lived, where or if they attended school, the rent they paid, where they worked, what they earned, and on and on. Because there was a general uprising of the population against the communist regime early on in 1953, Walter Ulbricht had imposed strict limitations on political activity, especially on speaking out against the SED. One could have no contact with westerners, nor was one permitted to listen to West German radio or watch West German TV.
The economy and its poor performance imposed severe limitations on the general well-being of East Germans. International currency markets valued the East German Mark as of little worth, since there was little foreign demand for East German products. Their best products were shipped off to the west so the state could acquire some hard currency, thus the East Germans had no access to those things produced of value in the GDR, but which were produced only for export.
they could go all the way around the block.
There were shortages of many, many products. The stores were basically empty, so you had to be in a store when some product was brought in and put on the shelves. If that happened, a long line would immediately form. “What are we waiting for?” the people in line asked each other. Once in October I had such an experience. It turned out that some winter gloves had become available. I got in line because I wanted to see what the quality of the gloves was; unfortunately, they sold out before I got to the front of the line. Because desirable products were so rare, people carried excess cash. If they had the good fortune to find something worth buying, they would keep the sizes of children and relatives stashed in their pocket or purse and would buy not only for themselves, but take the advantage of buying for several others as well when the rare opportunity presented itself. It would have been embarrassing for a good,
socialist state-owned firm, I presume, to hang out a sign saying “One per Customer,” so the unexpected appearance of a desirable purchase was always accompanied by its expected immediate disappearance. Many queue participants ended up frustrated after their fruitless wait. Here I could write a lot more about the consumer’s life, were there space for it. I once did a year-long study of this problem.*
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*See Phillip J. Bryson, The Consumer Under Socialist Planning: The East German Case, (1984, Praeger, New York)
In both the East German and Soviet economies, productivity was low because workers couldn’t really work a full day. In the afternoon, they would simply leave to go browse through the shops hoping to find something to buy. Their bosses would have doubtless forced them to stay on the job and put in an honest day’s work, but alas, the bosses needed to get to the stores and shop too. When Yuri Andropov became the First Secretary of the Communist Party he had been known as strict and austere; he had previously served as the leader of the KGB. He ordered people to be arrested if they were wandering around town away from their workplace on unofficial business. For a month or two, productivity soared and it appeared that productivity would really improve. But ultimately, productivity dropped back to normal as the workers had their supervisors fill out papers that claimed the workers were on official business away from the plant when they were doing their shopping.
Just about everything a person did in East Germany by way of work, travel, study, participate in cultural or sports activities, be involved in politics, buy a home (a rarity experienced only by the elites), receive medical care, or whatever else, it was only with the approval of the state or the (Communist) Party. Toward the end of the East German history, the state became more lenient. The government was insecure, because the leaders and the bureaucracy knew that the East German people were not generally committed socialists. They would have loved to join the citizens of West Germany and to share in the prosperity that they enjoyed. The East German government did what it could to improve the economy and make life better for their citizens, but it was never even close to enough to satisfy the people. Along with the shortages and lack of technical progress in information technologies and most other kinds of technical progress, there were serious ecological problems with rampant pollution, and at the end, after the government had quit trying to stop the citizenry from tapping into West German television, there was a morale problem when East Germans could see that their loss of freedoms was linked to a loss of the benefits of a modern (i.e., capitalist) economy. In the final analysis, socialists know they must keep their followers in line. The East German version of the KGB was the Staatssicherheitsdienst (State Security Service) or “Staasi.”
In all the Marxist-Leninist countries of East Europe and in the Soviet Union, these secret police zealously kept order by spying on and sanctioning people who viewed life differently and could not be relied upon to conform. They employed people to help the Staasi keep track of people and their activities. A file was kept on just about everyone and information collected about their interests and activities. (A file was also kept on me, since I lived and did research in East Berlin and attended occasional conferences on the GDR economy.) People all over the Soviet Bloc were alienated from their neighbors and remained tight-lipped about their interests, viewpoints, and hopes, since secret police were always listening. People did not want visitors coming to their apartments, except for family and close friends of long standing.
The principal political party was the Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutchlands, SED), which made the political rules and supplied the personnel for the government agencies and ministries. A small number of other political parties existed, but they followed the SED rules. The government provided a Civil Law Code that spelled out people’s “rights,” which were just those that the SED was willing to let them have. Clearly, there were many civil rights and human rights that were restricted.* Alexandra Richie has described the GDR as a 100,000 square kilometer prison.
“The GDR was a totalitarian state. Like the Nazi regime before it, the communist government was highly centralized and every aspect of cultural life was planned and directed from Berlin. Nobody could make a film, publish a book, write a newspaper article or exhibit a painting without the express approval of the relevant official in the city and this control extended to the writing of history. In 1971 Honecker instructed historians to follow a ‘new course’; those who refused would lose their jobs. They were to cultivate the East German sense of identity, to foster individual initiatives and social engagement and love of the Vaterland… they created a version of history which proved that East Germans had not been involved in any of the terrible crimes of the Third Reich and that only those now in West Germany had any connection with Nazism. Of all the twentieth century attempts to rewrite history, this one must stand alone as the most ludicrous.” (pp. 734-735.) We have observed the same aspiration for the rewriting of American history, although in this latter case the objective is to denigrate history rather than glorify it.
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*See Alexandra Richie, Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin, (1998), Carroll and Graf Publishers, New York.
East Germans were not instructed by their historians that the bombing of their cities and civilians by the Allied Powers, including the United States, was undertaken well after the Nazis had initiated that practice earlier. So far as East Germans knew, only Germans were the victims of such suffering in the war. Moreover, “the persecution and murder of six million European Jews were virtually ignored in the East, despite the fact that the holocaust had been planned and directed from the very heart of Berlin.” (Richie, p.739.)
The Trials of Life in the Soviet Union
Human rights in the Soviet Union were severely limited. The Soviet Union was a one-party state until 1990 and a totalitarian state from 1927 until 1953 where members of the Communist Party held all key positions in the institutions of the state and other important organizations. Freedom of speech was suppressed and dissent was punished. Independent political activities were not tolerated, whether these involved participation in free labor unions, private corporations, independent churches or opposition political parties. The freedom of movement within and especially outside the country was limited. The state restricted rights of citizens to private property.*
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*See Wikipedia, “Soviet concept of human rights and legal system,”
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According to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, human rights are the “basic rights and freedoms to which all humans are entitled”, including the right to life and liberty, freedom of expression, and equality before the law. These also include social, cultural and economic rights, including the right to participate in culture, the right to food, the right to work, and the right to education.
Soviet conceptions of human rights were very different from those prevalent in the West. According to Soviet legal theory, the government is the beneficiary of human rights, which are to be asserted against the individual. Western law, of course, claimed just the opposite. Because the Soviet state was considered the source of human rights, the Soviet legal system regarded law as an arm of politics and courts as agencies of the government. Extensive extra-judiciary powers were accessed by the Soviet secret police agencies. In practice, the Soviet government curbed the rule of law significantly. The civil liberties taken for granted in the west – protection of law and guarantees of property – were considered no more than examples of “bourgeois morality” by Soviet law theorists such as Andrey Vyshinsky. According to Vladimir Lenin, the purpose of socialist courts was not to eliminate terror, but to substantiate and legitimize it in principle”.
Throughout the history of the Soviet Union, millions of people suffered political repression, a frequently used instrument of the state from the time of the October Revolution. It culminated during the Stalin era, then declined, but it continued to exist during the “Khrushchev Thaw”, followed by increased persecution of Soviet dissidents during the Brezhnev stagnation, and it did not cease to exist until late in Mikhail Gorbachev’s rule when it was terminated under his policies of glasnost and perestroika. At times, the repressed were designated the enemies of the people. Punishments by the state included summary executions, sending innocent people to Gulags, forced re- settlements, and stripping citizens of their rights. Repression was conducted by the Cheka and its successor organizations, as well as by other state organs. Periods of increased repression included the Red Terror, Collectivization, the Great Purges, the Doctor’s Plot, and others. The secret police forces massacred prisoners on numerous occasions. Repression took place in the Soviet republics and in the territories occupied by the Soviet Army during World War II, including the Baltic States and Eastern Europe.
Red Terror in Soviet Russia was a campaign of mass arrests and executions conducted by the Bolshevik government. The Red Terror was officially announced on September 2, 1918 by Yakov Sverdlov and ended in about October 1918. Sergei Melgunov, however, applies this term to the repressions of the whole period of the Russian Civil War, 1918–1922. Estimates for the total number of people executed during the entire period range from 100,000 to 200,000.
Collectivization in the Soviet Union was a policy, pursued between 1928 and 1933, to consolidate individual land and labor into collective farms (kolkhozy). The Soviet leaders were confident that the replacement of individual peasant farms by the kolkhozy would immediately increase food supplies for the urban population, the supply of raw materials for processing industry, and agricultural exports generally. Collectivization was thus regarded as the solution to the crisis in agricultural distribution (mainly in grain deliveries) that developed after 1927 and became more acute as the Soviet Union continued its ambitious industrialization program. As all but the poorest of the peasants resisted the collectivization policy, the Soviets applied extremely harsh measures to force collectivization. In a conversation with Winston Churchill, Stalin gave his estimate of the number of “kulaks” repressed for resisting Soviet collectivization as 10 million, including those forcibly deported. Recent historians have estimated the death toll from six to 13 million under collectivization.
Previously secret reports released from Soviet archives in the 1990s placed the victims of Stalinist repression at roughly 9 million. On the basis of demographic analysis, some historians claim that the death toll was around 20 million. American historian Richard Pipes noted: “Censuses revealed that between 1932 and 1939—that is, after collectivization but before World War II—the population decreased by 9 to 10 million people. In The Great Terror (2007), Robert Conquest observed that exact numbers may never be known with complete certainty, but at least 15 million people perished under the Soviet regime’s terrors. Rudolph Rummel in 2006 said that earlier, higher victim total estimates are correct, although he included those killed by the government of the Soviet Union in other Eastern European countries as well. Conversely, J. Arch Getty, Stephen G. Wheatcroft and others insist that the opening of the Soviet archives has vindicated the lower estimates put forth by “revisionist” scholars.
After Stalin’s death, the suppression of dissent was dramatically reduced and new techniques were employed. The internal critics of the system were convicted for anti- Soviet agitation, anti-Soviet slander, or as “social parasites”. Others were labeled as schizophrenics and mentally ill; they were incarcerated in “psikhushkas“, i.e., mental hospitals used by the Soviet authorities as prisons. A number of notable dissidents, including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Vladimir Bukovsky, and Andrei Sarkharov, were sent into exile.
Solzhenitsyn was born into a family of Cossack intellectuals and brought up primarily by his mother, his father having been killed in an accident before his birth. He attended the University of Rostov-na-Donu, graduating in mathematics. He also took correspondence courses in literature at Moscow State University. Fighting in World War II, he achieved the rank of captain in the artillery. He was arrested in 1945 for writing a letter critical of Joseph Stalin and spent eight years in prisons and labor camps, after which he spent three more years in enforced exile.
The most famous of his many works was The Gulag Archipelago, (1973–75), which is a three volume history and memoir of his life in the Soviet Union’s prison camp system. The word Gulag is a Russian acronym for the Soviet government agency that supervised the vast network of labor camps. Solzhenitsyn used the word archipelago as a metaphor for the camps, which were scattered through the sea of civil society like a chain of islands extending “from the Bering Strait almost to the Bosporus.”
The Gulag and the Target System
It would be far more difficult for American millennials to be socialists if they had lived in the age in which Solzhenitsyn was publishing his great works. Reading them lent the conviction that the world could have many more Stalins if more socialists were just vouchsafed the opportunity to become one. I have never forgotten Solzhenitsyn’s explanation of the use of targets and meeting the planning targets in the Gulag system.
In Soviet economic planning, state-owned firms were given targets for each production period. The target was a goal for the gross amount of production it could deliver in a plan year. It was broken down into months, so that each month the firm had to produce a given amount. In the course of the month, there was much malingering and shopping that would take place among the labor force of the state-owned firms. It was the general practice of such firms to request more workers than they actually needed for normal operations. They did so because most of the time, precious little work was achieved. Breaks, talking, going through motions was about the best that could be hoped for. No individual workers dared to work seriously in hopes of getting ahead, since that would bring down ridicule and persecution from the other workers. Afternoons, of course, it was necessary to go shopping for scarce goods needed at home.
At the end of the month, however, production could not be put off longer, so the “storming” period began about the last week of the month. In that week, because the firm’s managers had successfully negotiated a low target for the firm and because the workers were willing to work seriously for a week, enough could be produced so that officials were placated and bonuses could be earned. After the week of storming, everyone stayed at home for a few days to sleep off the extra effort before returning to the plant.
The people who ran the Gulags, like the workers in state-owned firms also had targets. The targets were the numbers of people needed to fill the ranks of workers needed in the Siberian work camps. Of course, the police and the courts provided almost enough victims for the “recruiters” to meet their targets. If the end of the month came and targets were still not met, however, recruiters would go out onto the streets or into the subway looking for people. If you were catching a subway home after a long day at the plant, two tall, strong gentlemen might walk up to you and, one on each side, accompany you to a train station where you would be loaded into a cattle car and find yourself on the way to Siberia. Voila! Target met! That was unfortunate for the “recruits” who were simply kidnapped and shipped out, of course. Solzhenitsyn described life and work in the Gulags and you may accept that it was not the preferable way to spend five or ten years.
Why Marxism-Leninism is authoritarian by its very nature. (Why Marxist-Leninist Socialism is “hard” socialism.)
Marxist-Leninist socialism (which we outsiders usually and erroneously call “communism” calls for a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” so yes, of course it is authoritarian. Marx called for the state to own the means of production, which means all business owners must have their property confiscated. Stalin started by telling the peasants they must turn their animals over to the state farms, but the peasants preferred simply to slaughter their animals instead. Stalin answered in kind, slaughtering the reprobate peasants.
The big worry for the socialists is that the people see their rights taken away and their property confiscated. The danger of a counter-revolution is stark, so of course socialists feel they must be very strict. The incentive incompatibilities built into the economic system result in a decline in production. There is much slacking, and workers leave their jobs in the afternoon to search for anything they can find on the usually empty shelves of the state stores. The Soviets originally tried to combat the negative attitudes of disillusioned workers and consumers by shipping people off to the Siberian labor camps for the slightest offense against the system. Gradually, they decided it wiser to make a tacit deal with the citizenry. If they would not speak and fight against the Soviets, but remain silent, people would not be sent off to Siberia for slacking. That promoted even lower productivity.
If a worker decides to pursue political or employment progress by working hard on the job, his fellow workers will enforce labor equality; they will ridicule and bully the diligent worker into submission and employment passivity.
A favorite slogan of the Soviet workers was: “They pretend to pay us, so we pretend to work.” The socialists are not about to be voted out of power after having spent so much time and effort to establish a (disastrously inefficient and incomplete) national economic plan for their planning bureaucracy and establishment of state-owned firms, so they establish a one-party state with only communist party candidates appearing on the voting ballots. Any less authoritarian kind of socialism wouldn’t reflect the hatred of the Marxists-Leninists and could easily be voted out quickly. Lasting, “hard” socialism is usually a harsh dictatorship. It is authoritarian to say the least.
America’s Likely Dictatorial and Inflationary Socialism
When socialism of the Marxist-Leninist variety is installed in a country, you are on your way toward a “dictatorship of the proletariat” that is vicious indeed. Some forms of “socialism” are not so dictatorial; they simply redistribute incomes and perform very poorly in economic terms. If they make no effort to nationalize and take over the private sector, they do not develop the anti-human characteristics you
experienced. But when a democratic country decides to give socialism a try and the socialistic leadership is already harsh and hateful (full of bitter, ideological people not unlike Adam Schiff, Bernie Sanders, Nancy Pelosi, Jerrold Nadler, Charles Schumer, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her “Squad,” and Senator [and now IVP] Harris), that hatred can very soon translate into a nasty dictatorship. Dictatorship is more likely to be imminent if people are already out on the street burning, looting, and beating people up. Hello, Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea! Hello Amerika?!!
A softer socialism, such as IP Biden would readily embrace, simply wants to spend money to make people more prosperous and to “save our planet.” They have no notion of budget constraints. They never think about or ask where money for oversized projects is to come from. They want to take over massive projects that the market itself would perform efficiently and independently in time. The government’s super- and hyper-bureaucratization will waste much money and perform as inefficiently as it did in the Affordable Care Act from roll-out to the drastic increases in costs, charging people the Roberts “tax” if they had no insurance. They turn to the printing press, which has already been encumbered by huge bailouts from the Obama era to the even more dramatic expenditures of the Covid era. Nancy Pelosi still wants to use the excuse of the pandemic to spend additional trillions to bail out states that have mismanaged their finances, overspent, and put their politicians and civil servants on easy street with unfunded, more-than-generous pensions. No wonder financiers are predicting bad things for our economy. It has only grown worse since Biden’s confirmation. The socialists believe a Biden-Harris socialism will never become a dictatorial, Soviet-style regime. I’m not so sure. But even if Biden’s is a soft socialism, the kind of government waste and mismanagement we are experiencing as he follows his leaders and the inflation that follows might make your savings disappear and your paycheck basically valueless. In the summer of 2021 we can only take hope in the tightening gridlock in Washington, D.C. Many appear to be recognizing that political things are beginning to go downhill and they must begin to put on the brakes.