The decline and fall of the evils of socialism

NY Times:

A specter is haunting Europe — the specter of Socialism’s slow collapse.

Even in the midst of one of the greatest challenges to capitalism in 75 years, involving a breakdown of the financial system due to “irrational exuberance,” greed and the weakness of regulatory systems, European Socialist parties and their left-wing cousins have not found a compelling response, let alone taken advantage of the right’s failures.

German voters clobbered the Social Democratic Party on Sunday, giving it only 23 percent of the vote, its worst performance since World War II.

Voters also punished left-leaning candidates in the summer’s European Parliament elections and trounced French Socialists in 2007. Where the left holds power, as in Spain and Britain, it is under attack. Where it is out, as in France, Italy and now Germany, it is divided and listless.

Some American conservatives demonize President Obama’s fiscal stimulus and health care overhaul as a dangerous turn toward European-style Socialism — but it is Europe’s right, not left, that is setting its political agenda.

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The situation in France is even worse for the left. Asked this summer if the party was dying, Bernard-Henri Lévy, an emblematic Socialist, answered: “No — it is already dead. No one, or nearly no one, dares to say it. But everyone, or nearly everyone, knows it.” While he was accused of exaggerating, given that the party is the largest in opposition and remains popular in local government, his words struck home.

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The problem with socialism is that its extremes demonstrate the ultimate failure of its philosophy. Communism is socialism on steroids and it has been an abject failure everywhere it has been tried. It fails because the command economy is flawed beyond repair. Cuba cannot provide toilet paper for sale and it cannot pay farmers for the produce they have delivered even though the island cannot feed the people.

Just as no one can tell how many eggs and slices of bacon New York city needs every day, no one can make decisions that are anyway as efficient as the free market. That is why there is so much resistance the the Democrats attempts to take control of the health care business. Control freakl government is not efficient.

One of the other problems with liberalism is that those responsible for it never accept responsibility for its failures. The article talks about a failure of the markets that caused the housing and finance problems but those failures were caused by the intervention of the government in the mortgage markets requiring institutions to loan to people with bad credit.

People like Barney Franks and Chris Dodd as well as Jimmy Carter and the Clintons all pushed bad loans on the leders and the federal mortgage buyers. The market was not able to manage the risks that were being imposed on them and the devices they tried to use to do so were inadequate to the task, but more sane lending practices would have prevented the problem.