A Beginner’s Guide to Socialist Economics

Communism, and all Socialism, is an aristocracy that reduces the rest of the population to the status and rights of serfs.

by Marian L. Tupy
September 17, 2016

In recent years, I have given a number of presentations to high-school and college students on the importance of economic freedom and persistent threat of socialism – as witnessed, for example, by the recent economic meltdown in Venezuela. One problem that I have encountered is that young people today do not have a personal memory of the Cold War, let alone an understanding of social and economic arrangements in the Soviet bloc, which, I suspect are either downplayed or ignored in American school curricula. As a result, I have written a basic guide to socialist economics, drawing on my personal experience growing up under communism. I hope that this – somewhat longer piece – will be read by the millennials, who are so often drawn to failed ideas of yore.

As a boy growing up in communist Czechoslovakia, I would, for many years, walk by a building site that was to become a local public health facility or clinic. The construction of this small and ugly s…