Scroll all the way down for blogs on socialism.
Many of us are unsettled as we see protesters in the street chanting for cops to be shot, or because we see political promises not being kept. Some are a little frustrated because they want to respond according to their own convictions and not according to someone else’s. The uncertainties about which candidates are honest ones or about which party is less threatening, can take a lot of joy out of political participation. You shouldn’t feel badly if you find it difficult to sort out legitimate political assurances from routine political hype.
The Purpose of this Website
This website is designed to bring knowledge and peace to those unsettled with today’s political landscape. Both parties have their inadequacies and failings, but one has pursued a growing flirtation with socialism. The democrats who have withstood or avoided that tendency, unfortunately a relatively small share of the party, are doing fine. But having made a career-long study of socialism’s theories, history, and implementation, I can warn you that socialism presents issues that have proved disastrous in numerous countries.
The book, Socialism: Origins, Expansion, Decline and the Attempted Revival in the United States is all about the economics of socialist society, how it is organized and how it functions. The book is over 800 pages because it addresses all aspects of socialism. It first reviews the original ideas, sometimes ancient ones, in socialism’s history before and after Karl Marx. It also investigates the countries that have adopted socialist or Marxist-Leninist theories – the Soviet Union, some of the Soviet bloc countries, India and China.
It also reviews the attempt to establish socialist economies in the democratic countries of Western Europe in the century after Marx, down to the time that nationalization of industry and the centralization of economic decision making proved ineffective and an abject failure. It was then that socialism as an economic system disappeared.
Finally, the book investigates socialism in the United States, discussing the reasons why it always failed at the ballot box; Franklin D. Roosevelt introduced a number of socialist policies and such policies were revisited with the presidency of Barack Obama. One can laud the good intentions of socialists, but this book explains why socialism has never succeeded and why it cannot succeed in the real world.
Reviews. The book’s reviews were very positive and are found on this website.
The Author, Phillip J. Bryson. In 1961 I was living in Berlin when the wall was built! I saw the concrete, the barbed wire, and read of the people shot trying to escape to West Berlin and freedom. I went home to the United States to continue my studies, hoping to find out why a country must build a wall to keep its people from fleeing. I took courses in Marxism as an undergraduate, and studied comparative economic systems, then went on for a PhD in economics at Ohio State. I became a professor at the University of Arizona where I taught economic systems, and international trade and finance. Twenty years later I transferred to the Marriott School at Brigham Young University. Over that forty plus years of my career I researched socialist systems, spent sabbaticals and research time living in West Berlin, in communist East Berlin (Karlshorst), and in Marburg, Munich, and Duisburg Germany, Vienna, London, and Moscow.
for their graffiti.
In November of 1989 I attended a conference in West Berlin on German Unification in the 1800s. During the week of the conference, the Communist Politbuero in East Berlin announced on the radio that the Wall open. So I was present at the construction of the Wall and almost thirty years later for the opening and the subsequent demise of the Wall.
The second task of socialism is to tax money away from those who have it and to give it to those who do not. These twin methods of nationalization and income redistribution constitute socialism. But historically, when nationalization failed to work, there was nothing left for socialism but redistribution. Nationalization and economic planning and centralization attempt to replace millions of individual, private economic plans with one over-reaching, overly ambitious government plan that becomes a bureaucratic nightmare unable to account adequately for the innumerable economic variables involved in an economy’s functioning. Socialism thus exhausted its unique economic initiatives, since the other, non-socialist political parties also adopted income redistribution and welfare policies. Nothing original remained for the socialists to advocate in the field of economics except pushing redistribution to the extreme of financial failure.
- The Huge Financial Problem that Socialism Ignores. Socialism provides many subsidies, but there will never be enough funds to take care of all social needs over the long haul– the funds required to take care of a whole country from cradle to grave are far more than the total incomes of all the rich. lf we taxed away their entire incomes, receipts would not be enough to fund “Medicare for all!”, let alone all the proposals (including the “Green New Deal”) socialists will promote henceforth. For detailed evidence of the assertions I make here, scroll down from “Welcome, Friends” to the list of blogs that have been posted. There, see “Socialist Spending Plans and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC)” and “The Seventy Per Cent Income Tax of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.”
National Fiscal disaster waits at the end of the socialist road. But there are additional unintended consequences of socialism. Dependence, frustration, and the loss of dignity and freedom are also the consequences of the tyranny required to establish and maintain control of the socialist system over time. A look at Venezuela today shows that socialism’s consequences can include poverty, hunger, hyperinflation, tyranny and violence.
Chavez and President Obama.
Both hoped to transform their countries.
Why Redistribution Stops Economic Growth and produces an equality of poverty. Society’s very wealthy and even its relatively affluent households are continually saving for their future, for retirement and to leave something for their children. These savings are a pool of money available to individuals and firms wanting to invest in new industrial equipment, new innovations, new technologies, and the things that produce new jobs and economic growth for the whole economy. If society decides to confiscate through socialistic taxation all those savings for the purpose of free education, a universal income for those unwilling to work, and new, green housing, etc., all the funds available for investment and growth are simply consumed. They disappear. It’s like eating the seed corn! The resources consumed in socialist programs totally eliminate savings and investment for new innovations, new firms, new technologies, new factories and equipment — and growth screeches to a halt. In the meantime, consumers, who get what they need through subsidies, no longer have an incentive to work hard, get training and education, save, and build for a bright future. They are prepared to relax and share an equality that turns out to be one of stark poverty.
Borrowing Money for Current Socialist Expenditures. But that’s not all! In the United States, if there is not enough money for a social project, the government simply borrows in the Obama fashion, spending more than they could possibly pay back. But we reach a point where people and countries do not trust the U.S. Treasury and they will only loan to us at high interest rates. Gradually, most of our budget goes for paying the interest on our loans, which amounts currently to about $500 billion per year, and when the government can no longer meet its payments, the whole financial system collapses.
Printing Money If the government follows the American socialist idea of simply printing money, as Venezuela has done, you soon find that you have to pay a million dollars for a loaf of bread. This we call hyperinflation. On occasion the European Union has nightmares about this outcome as countries like Spain, Italy, Greece, Portugal, Ireland start to drift toward insolvency and financial collapse. Venezuela is even further down the socialist financial path than Europe.
Consider now the loss of Freedom in socialism. In the rebuilding period in Europe after the Second World War, Friedrich Hayek and others observed how the socialist attempt to implement economic planning and tight control over their formerly market economies leads to a loss of freedom. The Nobel Prize winning Hayek called this The Road to Serfdom.
Socialists take over because of their loathing of markets and capitalists. They confiscate the property and wealth of the so-called bourgeoisie, the wealthy and affluent, then they install an economic planning regime in which a large government bureaucracy makes all the decisions. A dictatorship of the proletariat has the task of maintaining control and preventing a counter-revolution by those who don’t want to give up all their wealth, property and businesses to the government. People also complain about the arbitrariness and extreme inefficiency of the central economic planning. Then, when the party’s media have to control thought and speech, we find ourselves on the way to a virulent dictatorship. In the United States this will be a little different, since even before the revolution (or coup) the media have given themselves over to be a voluntary propaganda ministry for the socialist party. This occurred even before the main broadcasting stations and newspapers devoted themselves to full-time Trump hating.
If you observe the attitudes of socialists, their body language and their public statements, in their resistance of the office of the President of the United States today, you cannot help but see the hostility and hatred they exude. Can you doubt that such individuals will fail to use power, if they can get it, to enforce their own will without compromise – dictatorially?
What is my objective?
I would like to give encouragement to the talented and creative young people struggling with student debt and many others who are often discouraged about their future prospects. Many have been struggling with joblessness and low wages. But there is hope in this wonderful country as employment opportunities have increased surprisingly under President Trump. It will also become increasingly possible for people to get education and training and to qualify for jobs. Many are striving to seize the opportunity to work and to make something of their lives. Socialism offers to subsidize us with someone else’s money and with government goodies to take care of us. I want people to realize that happiness does not come from a handout – it comes from having worked and succeeded in making something of our lives. And Americans want that. As the economy has recovered in the past couple years, people have been fleeing the welfare rolls, anxious to go back to work.
Finally, all of us need to learn what socialism is and the hazards it presents to our nation’s treasury, to our personal freedoms, and to our prosperity.
Friends, as you can see from the menu at the top of the page, this website has a link to “Order a Copy” of the book. I turned down a prestigious publisher, who offered to publish my work as three separate volumes and charge $120 for each volume (or $360 for the whole set). Instead, I published all three volumes as one massive book with Xlibris so you could buy an electronic copy at a very low price. Check it out. If you buy, your friends may think you are a genius.
The book addresses every aspect of socialism and documents its serious issues. The pages of the website introduce various aspects of the book. Also included in this website are a series of essays I have recently written about current policies and problems in the public discussion. These include the following:
Life in Socialist Countries: Losing Freedoms, Gaining Economic Failure
Racism and the Legacy of the Democratic Party
The 2020 Nationwide Demonstrations: Part One
The 2020 Nationwide Demonstrations. Part II
What is the Difference between Socialism and Communism?
