A good piece on the strange revenant relevance of socialism:
And this leads to the question I want to address, namely, Why isn’t socialism dead?
The Peruvian economist, Hernando de Soto, has argued in his book, The Mystery of Capital, that the failure of the various socialist experiments of the twentieth century has left mankind with only one rational choice about which economic system to go with, namely, capitalism. Socialism, he maintained, has been so discredited that any further attempt to revive it would be sheer irrationality. But if this is the case, which I personally think it is, then why are we witnessing what certainly appears to be a revival of socialist rhetoric and even socialist pseudo-solutions, such as the nationalization of foreign companies?
It is not only a flaw in economics, but most analysis of Man and human endeavor. Many economic formulations begin “assuming a perfectly rational market….” and then proceed into detailed and irrelevant conclusions.
Man is not a rational creature, he is a rationalizing one. This explains a whole host of seeming irrationalities such as why conservative women will vote for Hillary Clinton, why people pay $495 for Microsoft Office, why men date foreigners without green cards, why women who want to get married and have children go to law school and why parents go into debt to send their child to get a Sociology degree.
It also explodes the atheist’s argument against the reality of Man’s free will given by God. Who would knowingly choose Hell? is a question often asked, ignoring the copious evidence set before us every single day by millions of people putting themselves through Hell on Earth.
Socialism will survive its many proven absurdities as long as there is a single fat man on the planet who, when faced with a choice between a candy bar and a piece of jerky, picks up the candy bar.