...of Zimbabwe:

Zimbabwe, once the breadbasket of southern Africa, is crippled by foreign currency and fuel shortages, unemployment of over 80 percent and the highest rate of inflation in the world.

"Year-on-year inflation, which stood at 1,072.2 percent in October last year, rose to 1,281.1 in December and has risen to 2,200 percent by March," Gono said in a televised statement.

Emphasis mine. It doesn't take long for socialist thugs to destroy breadbaskets. The Venezuelans may be on the verge of learning the same lesson.

But hey, what's the problem? Just print more money!

Seriously, this is a tragedy, in which the neighbors, particularly South Africa, are culpable, in their unwillingness to isolate and denounce Mugabe, who is vying to become one of the worst leaders in the world.

At least the rich and poor are on equal footing now, and there is probably a safety net for the very poor... Yeah socialism!

Course: Wasteland 101.

Instructor: The Hon. Robert Mugabe.

How to take a country brim full of potential and turn it into an absolute and total disaster.

Bloody complete idiot and vicious moron.

What a tragedy, and Venezuela is next. Russians used to tell the joke about when they introduced socialism to the Sahara. 2 years later there was a shortage of sand.

Same thing happened in Tanzania in 1970's -- and even without brutality. As a result of forced collectivization, it went from Africa's biggest food exporter to its biggest food importer -- exactly what collectivization did to USSR. Unlike Joseph Stalin (and Mugabe) Julius Nyerere was unwilling to shoot people in order to keep them in collectives, so people just walked away. And unlike almost (?) every other socialist leader, Nyerere had the courage to say "We had failed" and resign in 1985.

For an interesting historical review of the dangerous myth of socialism, I can recommend this book (Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism by Joshua Muravchik). It was, I believe, made into a documentary on PBS, of all places. It traces the socialist theme from 19th-century utopias (all failures) to the dying Israeli kibbutzim, and includes Nyere and the Afromarxists.

What's interesting is that it's told from a sympathetic viewpoint; Muravchik himself was raised by passionately socialist parents, and took part in socialist youth programs in his, well, youth. In adulth0od he came to realize that the socialist myth, while fundamentally attractive in its apparent humanity, was fatally flawed.

Why it's flawed he doesn't quite know, but it would seem, if I can read between the lines, that most people are attracted to the ideals of socialism (we should make the just needs of others a high priority in what we do). However, people of good character merely employ those ideals in what they do already, every day, in whatever system they have. Thus any system populated by people of good character who have choice in how they act already exhibits many "socialist" tendencies, such as charity towards the poor and justice towards the weak.

But those who feel it's necessary to chuck a whole system and drastically restrict the freedom of people to act as they see fit are, almost inevitably, either ineffective dreamers or men of bad character who merely prize the opportunity for unlimited personal power. (Socialism lends itself to the latter for the same reason religion does: the wonderful and obvious rightness of the ends -- justice for all, or the salvation of your immortal soul, respectively -- tend to make it much easier to justify or at least accept drastic, even brutal means. In short, the more attractive the ends, the easier it is to accept ugly means.)

In the first case, seen in the utopias, separatist colonies, and well-meant Afrosocialisms, things merely collapse. In the second, more virulent case, seen in Russia and elsewhere, you get a vicious totalitarianism.

My view is that socialism is the collective equivalent of getting fat by overeating. As long as you can easily get more food than you need, the temptation to eat too much and get fat will exist. Only a lifetime of discipline (for most) will prevent you from getting fat. It's not the kind of temptation you can defeat once and never face again.

Similarly, I think that as long as the opportunity exists for a society to fall under the spell of socialism -- and it exists as long as society is wealthy enough to turn its mind to goods like justice and equality for all, and away from merely scrapping to survive -- society needs to be on guard of falling into the temptation. An eternity of social self-discipline is necessary. It is not a myth that will be defeated in the 20th and 21st centuries and never recur.

The Oklahoma Dust Bowl was done by capitalists

"The Oklahoma Dust Bowl was done by capitalists"

Chernobyl was done by Socialists, along with massive amounts of other Soviet and Eastern European environmental catastropies that make love canal look like Disneyland.

Again you compare paper cuts to amputations and are too stupid to understand why your simplistic arguments are rejected.

The Oklahoma Dust Bowl seems to be a combination of adverse environment conditions and overfarming with bad farming techniques. Neither is unique to capitalist societies. Compare the Dust Bowl with the Ukrainiane famine of 1932-33. In the former case hundreds of thousands of people lost their farms (in the US alone) and had to migrate however they could to other places to find work. In comparison, somewhere around 3 million people died in the USSR.

It's not a complete comparison simply because I can't find an estimate of the death toll from the Dust Bowl, but as I see it, it'd have to be a lot worse before the Dust Bowl would reach the level of the Ukraine famine. Note also that Canada was affected just as severely, and both countries had significant socialist aspects at the time.

A contributor to the overfarming of the immediately pre-Dust Bowl era was agricultural commodity price supports which were introduced during WWI IIRC. Not exactly laissez-faire.

I re-posted the article you linked to another board. Thanks for the tip.

I re-posted the article you linked to another board. Thanks for the tip.

Yeah, Mugabe has got it all wrong. As all good communist dictators know, if you want to run a socialist paradise while fighting inflation, what you need to print is US dollars.

Carl says: ...men of bad character who merely prize the opportunity for unlimited personal power. (Socialism lends itself to the latter for the same reason religion does.

I agree, but in the case of religion the chance at power is markedly greater than a government. The effect is the same though, ruling sheep.

The notion that socialism fails because it attracts the wrong kind of people is a dangerous error.

Socialism fails because it can't work, regardless of who is running it. Socialism means replacing economic transactions in the marketplace with dictated transactions. Without the feedback of price signals the free market provides, it becomes impossible to coordinate economic activity.

It should be no surprise that, having pithed the distributed nervous system that was making things work, that truly socialist societies collapse so quickly.

"The Socialist Paradise of Zimbabwe"

Isn't that a bit like saying the Capitalist Paradise of Ethiopia?

Well, in spite of the many advantages in climate and natural resources that Zimbabwe possesses over Ethiopia, it is starting to make Ethiopia look like a paradise in comparison.

Of course Ethiopia decided to reject the benefits of Socialism some time ago so that could be somewhat causal in the curently widening disparity.

Ethipoia does have a positive GDP, not a double digit negative GDP like the Gun Free Socialist Workers paradise of Zimbabwe.

Mike: "Well, in spite of the many advantages in climate and natural resources that Zimbabwe possesses over Ethiopia, it is starting to make Ethiopia look like a paradise in comparison."

God, stop making shit up, Mike. You don't know a damn thing about either country, you're just taking cues from Rand's snide rant.

"Ethipoia does have a positive GDP"

Not that the overwhelming majority of Ethiopians notice. Guess what--Sweden has a positive GDP too, and a comfortable social-welfare state. You people will come up with any excuse for ideological raillery.