Why Socialism Is Bad (2018)

"Why Socialism Is Bad" (5 August 2018), ArcDigital

• [S]ocialism violates economic freedom, destroys incentive, muffles innovation and entrepreneurship, and undermines meritocracy.

• Socialism is a bad idea because it is naïve about power, which is the worst thing to be naïve about in politics.

• What’s wrong with empowering government? When you give government new powers and responsibilities, you are also increasing its police power. If we put government in charge of a thing — say, ensuring income equality — we are also handing it the power to police that thing nationwide, to impose penalties for breaches of its new regulations, and ultimately to coerce citizens into compliance. At the limit, we grant the state the power to take our money, imprison us, and even execute us if we violate its laws.

• Any time you want to grant the government new authority, imagine it in the hands of the worst statesmen in American history.

• The Soviet Union was the largest, longest, and most ambitious effort to implement socialism in human history. It was also an evil, totalitarian slave state that survived only by militarizing all of society and sustaining a permanent state of emergency for seven decades. As soon as it began to relax, it collapsed. If socialism failed in its biggest and most intensive effort, there is no strong reason to believe it will succeed elsewhere.

You Are All Misusing "Neoconservative" (2019)

"You Are All Misusing 'Neoconservative'" (24 June 2019), ArcDigital

• Neoconservatives were disillusioned liberals who defected from the Democratic Party and the progressive movement in the 1960s in part because of the waste and bloat of the Great Society. As good liberals, they favored civil rights and an active role for the state in promoting them.

• Many of the famed New York intellectuals of the 1930s and 1940s who later shaped neoconservatism, including Norman Podhoretz, Nathan Glazer, and Irving Kristol, were either immigrants or first-generation Americans whose families had direct experience with the totalitarian movements then wracking Europe.