Intermediate Conservative Studies
Required Courses – Socialism 101 / 201 = 2 hours credit
Study Program: So, What’s wrong with Liberalism?

Socialism 101 – Why Welfare is Only Temporary

An economics professor at a local college made a statement that he had never failed a single student before but had once failed an entire class. That class had insisted that socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer.

The professor then said, “OK, we will have an experiment in this class on socialism. All grades would be averaged and everyone would receive the same grade so no one would fail and no one would receive an A.

After the first test, the grades were averaged and everyone got a B. The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy.

As the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too so they studied little. The second test average was a D! No one was happy.

When the 3rd test rolled around, the average was an F. The scores never increased as bickering, blame and name-calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else.

All failed, to their great surprise, and the professor told them that socialism would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great but when government takes the reward away, no one will try or want to succeed.

Could not be any simpler than that.

What a profound short little paragraph that says it all:

“You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom.

What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving.

The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else.

When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is about the end of any nation.

You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it.”  Source.

Socialism 201 – The End of Democratic Socialism

By Monty Pelerin
The end of democratic socialism is at hand. The welfare states of the U.S. and Europe are financially out of control, spent and unsustainable. They have reached the point that Margaret Thatcher defined as the end of socialism: They have run out of other people’s money. These areas of the world are about to change dramatically.

Victor Davis Hanson has a piece in National Review Online focused on Europe. His comments, while directed at Europe, are also applicable to the United States. Hanson states:

Five years ago, the European Union’s account of itself resonated with end-of history triumphalism. In organic fashion, democratic socialism would spread eastward and southward, recivilizing the old Warsaw Pact and the Balkans through cradle-to-grave entitlements, state unionism, radical environmentalism, and utopian pacifism.

How quickly the dreams of just a short time ago have been shattered. Now the once-smug EU struggles desperately to survive. The financial problems of Greece and several other countries threaten its very existence. Incredibly, in spite of this experience, the U.S. marches in double-time toward the goal that Europe is now being forced to abandon.

The myth of Socialism should have been abandoned long ago. In the 1920s, Ludwig von Mises demonstrated that Socialism and its close relative, Interventionism, were not capable of long-term management of an economy. The Soviet Union and a host of other highly socialized economies provided subsequent empirical support for Mises’ theoretical argument.

Read it all.