IT FAILS EVERY TIME IT'S TRIED.

On the lighter side, Book Review N^o. 8 features Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World.  Although authors Robert Lawson and Benjamin Powell are academic economists, with degrees from Florida State and George Mason, and, as of 2019, institutional affiliations with Southern Methodist and Texas Tech, theirs is defiantly not an academic tome (use Google Scholar, dear reader, to check out their scholarly work, should you be so inclined) and it is not a spoiler alert to point out that the beer on offer in the remaining socialist countries (Less filling!  No taste!) makes even the colored water in blue cans I revel in mocking taste good.

Don't go looking for any serious academic analysis in Socialism Sucks.  The Foreword notes, "We have rich people over there, and things we'd like to do with their money over here, so what's the problem?  If there's an outcome we want, why, we simply legislate it into existence!"  Does that sound a little like Dementia Joe's platform?  I remind you: No. Academic. Analysis.  Well, maybe just a little, see page 88.  "I bet there's never been a guy who has been so wrong about every major thing he wrote about and who still has as many followers as Marx."  It's the same thing George Orwell diagnosed so well, nearly a century ago.  See page 129.  "Many of the conference attendees we asked thought socialism meant simply aspiring toward a world with better conditions for various marginalized groups.  Few correctly identified collectivism or state ownership of the means of production as the defining characteristic of socialism, and most had not come here to celebrate that."  Of course not.  Socialism remains the omnium-gatherum of the disaffected.  "The urgency is because of Trump, immigrant rights, Black Lives Matter, indigenous rights."  Plus free abortions.

That's from the end of their tour, when they looked into a summer 2018 gathering of the true believers in Chicago.  Their other stops were Sweden (not socialism, it's an industrialized tribal state with a history of colonizing Norway and parts of Finland, and who knows what effect Moslem immigration will have on its welfare states); Venezuela (currently in the starving socialism stage, having transitioned from a Prototype of the Glorious Future in 2013 to Not Proper Socialism according to attendees at the Chicago conference); Cuba (subsistence socialism, they predict Cuba might yet find a way to align with the United States once again, and bring freedom); North Korea (they didn't actually visit, choosing to interact with Chinese who did business across the river in the land of dark socialism); China (which they call "fake socialism" — bear in mind that China has four millennia to develop a mandarin class that adopts a cover the mandarinate can sell to the people, while Harvard dates only to the seventeenth century, and the current mandarin is advising his subjects to "eat bitterness"); Russia and Ukraine (they call it hungover socialism, and the two former fraternal republics were already in a warm war); and Georgia (their new capitalism is no doubt giving the shade of Comrade Djugashvili more worries in hell, and Tsar Vladimir's ambitions might only be pushing Georgia into the Atlantic Alliance).

They conclude, "We'd recommend a beer book to you, but unlike socialism, consuming the product is better than reading about it."  Genau.  Prost!

Cross-posted to Fifty Book Challenge.