Why socialism sucks

Yukong Zhou:

Upon winning the Nevada Caucuses on Saturday, Senator Bernie Sanders, a socialist from Vermont, declared on 60 Minutes his admiration for Cuba under the late dictator Fidel Castro.

This romanticizing of socialism by the current frontrunner of the Democratic presidential race is dangerous and delusional. I know, because I have experienced firsthand the human tragedy of socialism in China. Real socialism is cruel, dehumanizing and even deadly; there is absolutely nothing romantic about it.

I was born in 1963, under the reign of Mao Zedong. Sanders and his intellectual comrades, such as New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, like to invoke socialism as the cure to economic inequality in America. Under real socialism in China, however, I saw “equality” firsthand -- everybody lived equally in extreme poverty.

All economic activities were controlled by the government in Maoist China. Private enterprise and market transactions were banned. Profit incentives did not exist. As a result, technological progress stagnated and the economy collapsed.

This is because the state thought it knew how to allocate resources better than the market, but it did not. In Chinese cities, rice, meat, vegetable oil, and even clothing for citizens was rationed. Each urban citizen only had one or two pounds of meat to eat for an entire month. There were frequent supply shortages. On numerous occasions, I had to rise at 4 o’clock in the morning to wait in line for hours to buy meat.

From 1958 to 1962, Mao’s Great Leap Forward, a gargantuan collectivization movement, led to mass famine and more than 20 million dead. Born in the aftermath of this disastrous social experiment, I escaped famine and death, but I could not escape another core element of socialism: political control and repression.

When I was three, Mao launched the Cultural Revolution. He mobilized tens of millions of naive college and high school students and called them Red Guards. They labeled Mao’s political adversaries as traitors to socialism and at times tortured them to death.

In order to suppress opposition, Mao intensified a nationwide class struggle by dividing Chinese people into two groups: the poor against the rich, revolutionaries against counter-revolutionaries. Classified as an counter-revolutionary, my father was persecuted for five years. He endured torture, public humiliation, and forced labor. He lost his personal freedom. My family could only see him a couple of times each year. Subsequently, my grandparents and I were forced to move out of our hometown -- a city with relatively fair living conditions -- to a poor remote village where there was no tap water, no electricity and no medical clinic nearby. A few months after moving to the village, my grandmother passed away from a heart attack.
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Socialists like Sanders and AOC have this fantasy that socialism has never been done correctly and that is the reason for its failures.  But they can't really tell you what Venezuela did wrong and Bernie seems to think that Cuba's literacy program makes up for Castro's despotism. 

Under socialism or communism a command economy has a bureaucrat making decisions about things large and small.  Just deciding how many eggs and slices of bacon are needed in New York City every day becomes a challenge, that the market solves on a daily basis without government interference. 

It also explains part of the problem of the shortage of goods and services in socialist countries.  Imposing unrealistic prices on toilet paper means people will not be able to buy it because manufacturers will not make it and sell it for less than it costs them to do so.  Imposing price controls lead to a lack of goods.  That is why the shelves are empty in Venezuela.