Editor’s note: Dr. Anne Bradley was recently featured in an interview with Praxis Circle. Below are a few highlights of that conversation that center around love in celebration of Valentine’s Day.
Is socialism making a comeback in the USA?
I’m not sure I can answer why socialism is experiencing a comeback because as somebody who thinks about economic systems a lot, it’s very bizarre to me from an efficacy standpoint. In other words, it doesn’t have a lot of capabilities.
Here’s what I think. I have come to this conclusion: it sounds good on paper. I have a list of a lot of things, and I always say, “This sounds good on paper.” It sounds really good to say there are some people who are really rich. Bill Gates has a bunch of billions of dollars, right. We could take a billion from him and he would barely notice. That may be true — doesn’t mean it’s right — but it may be true that we could take a billion or two from him, George Soros, and all these rich guys, and give it to poor people. It sounds good on paper! But it’s not addressing the underlying issues of why people are poor.
Societies that have economic freedom liberate people, and liberate many people permanently. So that redistribution I just talked about, here’s all it’s doing: we’re taking money from one place and we’re moving it to another place. And then what happens when all of that’s gone? Well, then they need more. The poor stay poor and they just depend on the redistribution.
So the fundamental root problem is that it’s kind of dealing with the symptom and not dealing with the cause of the disease. The cause of the disease is that people are poor because they’re excluded from market trade, they’re excluded from entrepreneurship. So that’s what we need to fix, and economic freedom does that — socialism does not.