My Comments: To me, it’s both pathetic and amusing to hear political candidates rail against the idea of ‘socialism’ and declare it’s mankind’s greatest threat.

Like so many of the ‘…isms” applied to economic models of all stripes, socialism is no more a threat to the health and welfare of any society than is capitalism or communism. Well, maybe communism, but certainly not capitalism.

Unfettered capitalism, as some would have it today, is not far from the feudalism of long ago in that the masses would be under the thumb of a wealthy elite whose only motivation is the preservation of their power. Does any of that sound familiar to you?

by Noah Smith \ October 26, 2018

When President Donald Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers released a 55-page report called “The Opportunity Costs of Socialism,” many economists scoffed. But the report is important, because it shows that big, systemic economic issues are again being considered. And it provides an interesting jumping-off point for those important discussions.

Two decades ago, it seemed as if capitalism had decisively won the battle of ideas. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the grinding poverty of Mao’s China and communist Vietnam and North Korea clearly demonstrated that the most extreme versions of socialism were disastrous. But even in non-communist countries, attempts at regulation, nationalization and redistribution suffered big setbacks. The License Raj, a system of heavy-handed business regulations in India, was repealed, and the country’s growth leapt ahead. Privatizations and other market-oriented reforms in the U.K. helped the British economy make up ground it had lost. Sweden made its fiscal system much less progressive, and North European countries deeply reformed their labor market regulations.

But as inequality of income and wealth steadily rise in countries like the U.S., and as populism and political discontent roil nations across the globe, some are beginning to question the consensus that emerged at the end of the Cold War. Polls show an increasing number of young Americans responding favorably to the word “socialism”:
Openly socialist candidates are starting to win a few elections in the U.S., and calls to end capitalism are starting to appear in the mainstream news media with increasing frequency.

The CEA’s new report should be seen in this light. It’s an indication that both socialism’s proponents and its opponents have begun to take the idea seriously again. With the world troubled not just by inequality but also by productivity stagnation and the threat of climate change, it’s time to ask whether there are big systemic improvements that could be made.

The CEA report shows just how long it has been since such a discussion was held. A key explanation of socialism is taken from “Free to Choose,” a 1980 book by Milton and Rose Friedman. The economics profession has shifted decidedly to the left since those days, but most economists now concern themselves with highly specific topics rather than the grand sweep of political-economic systems. The people spending their time thinking about socialism, capitalism and other really big ideas are now more likely to be the writers of Teen Vogue or activists on Twitter. Let’s hope the CEA report will prod more economists, who tend to have more empirical knowledge and theoretical depth, to think bigger.

But although it’s an important conversation starter, the report doesn’t do a good job of comprehensively debunking socialism in all its forms. Some of the examples it invokes are particularly inapplicable to the modern day, and it overlooks much of the evidence in favor of an expanded role for government.

For instance, the report highlights collectivized agriculture as a prominent example of a socialist failure. Collectivized farming is indeed a disastrous policy, failing essentially everywhere it has been tried, and leading to widespread famine and death. But modern-day socialists in Western countries are — wisely — not calling for this. Instead, the industries they want to nationalize are health care and (possibly) finance.

Socialized health insurance exists in many countries — for example, France, Canada, and Japan. The costs and benefits of government health insurance systems don’t have to be assumed — they can be observed. The U.S., with its unique hybrid of public and private insurance, pays much more than other rich countries for the exact same medical services — and achieves similar health outcomes. Meanwhile, the U.S. biggest government health insurance system, Medicare, holds down prices much more effectively than its private counterparts: