Quotes from Robert Lawson

THERE IS ENOUGH FOR ALL.

Going to fetch Uncle Analdas. Have you been by the Hill? Just left there, Robin answered. Everybody's excited. Seems there's new Folks coming. Yes, I know, cried Little Georgie eagerly. I've just made a song about it. Wouldn't you like to hear it? It goes like - No, thanks, called Robin.

D'you know, Georgie, he said, settling back comfortably in the deep grass, that there song you've been a-singin' at all day - it ain't much of a song and it ain't much of a tune, but there's real good *sense* to it, though you probably don't know it. And I'll tell you why - because there always *is* new Folks comin', that's why. There's always new Folks comin' and always new times comin'.

In a capitalist economy, entrepreneurs create businesses to make profits, which they earn by pleasing their customers. But in a socialist system, a bureaucrat decides which businesses can open, where they can operate, and what they can sell, and he really doesn't care what the customer thinks.

The low rate of infant mortality is a product of data manipulation. At seventy-two abortions per one hundred births, Cuba has one of the highest abortion rates in the world, and Cuban doctors routinely force women to abort high-risk pregnancies so that Cuba's bureaucrats can brag about their health statistics. If you correct the data to account for these factors, Cuba's health statistics look a lot less impressive.5

Mao received many reports of starvation and suffering, but he and the Communist Party were unmoved. In late 1958 Mao's foreign minister, Chen Yi, acknowledged that "casualties have indeed appeared among workers, but it is not enough to stop us in our tracks. This is a price we have to pay, it's nothing to be afraid of.

Young adults across America prefer socialism (fairness) to capitalism (selfishness).' Socialism doesn't simply equal 'fairness.' What it really equals is the abolition of private property; in a socialist economy, the government decides what will be produced, how, and for whom." -p. 13

When Venezuela was a freer economy, it was relatively prosperous. But as the government became more involved in regulating the economy, it became progressively less free, less efficient, and less productive. When Chavez came to power, this process was already well underway; he only doubled down on it and turned economic regression into economic disaster." -p. 22

The massive movement of people from low-productivity rural areas to cities with private industry has spurred China's development… When Communist China was governed by socialist ideologues it was an impoverished, totalitarian police state that killed tens of millions of its own people. Now that Communist China practices crony capitalism, it is a prosperous and much more restrained police state.

That's Bernie's cognitive dissonance: railing against the evils created by too much government power, and then pushing for more government power to solve the problem. -p. 145

Groucho's definition of politics is Marxism in a nutshell: "Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies.

Famine, Robert Conquest estimates that eleven million people died of starvation in 1932–33 and that seven million of those deaths were in the Ukraine.18 Most other estimates vary between seven and fourteen million lives lost. This was a predictable consequence of Stalin's policies of agricultural collectivization and forced industrialization.

The young, naïve socialists who dream of socialism "from below" are caught in a conundrum. Non-state socialist communes can only work (poorly) on a small scale in an otherwise capitalist world. To replace capitalism with this system necessitates centralizing power in order to plan the economy. That ultimately results in state ownership, control, and tyranny. Society-wide socialism "from below" that doesn't entail state ownership is a contradiction in terms.

In 1988, the Chinese constitution was amended to officially recognize private property and private business. Before then, the Communist state had been China's only official employer, with small exceptions. By 1998, the state employed about 60 percent of the working population, and in 2010 it employed only about 19 percent.9 China had transitioned from socialism to a form of crony capitalism.

As Smith put it: "Every individual . . . neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it . . . he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention."5

records shows that at least two and a half million people were summarily executed or tortured to death during the Great Leap Forward. Millions more starved because they were intentionally deprived of food as punishment, or because they were regarded as too old or weak to be productive, or because the people ladling out the slop in the chow line simply did not like them.

In 1966, Mao and the Communist Party launched the "Cultural Revolution," inflicting a new hell on the Chinese people.