Socialism sucks

Socialism is communism-lite and is economically destructive. Burnham will make the UK’s economic outlook even worse. It is unavoidable.

The UK’s next prime minister, Andy Burnham, was schooled in old fashioned socialism, hobnobbing with London’s Labour elite since leaving university, first becoming an MP in 2001. This King of the North stuff is just an act.

While politics is always about image, it is particularly so with socialists. They promote themselves as representing the downtrodden masses at the expense of evil capitalists. But it always turns out to be impossible to improve on capitalism, for one simple fact which was exposed in the socialist calculation debate triggered by Ludwig von Mises’s 1920 article pointing out the impossibility of economic calculation in the socialist state.

Mises demonstrated that Marxist dogma about the state owning and distributing the means of production was nonsense, because the economic calculations to make the division of labour work for society’s benefit could only be made by businesses in free markets. The less the intervention from the state, the more effective the economic delivery and progress both become. Socialism travels in the opposite direction.

You only had to compare the free market success of Hong Kong with communist mainland China under Chairman Mao. John Cowperthwaite was instrumental in Hong Kong’s recovery from the economic and monetary ruins left by the Japanese army and is a story well told. He oversaw this recovery by refusing to intervene, kept the state small, and kept taxes low.

Contrast that with China’s misery under Mao which led to an estimated 40 to 70 million deaths attributable to his communist policies. Same ethnic people, just different politics.

The truth about communism, which is simply a severe form of socialism was fully revealed when the Berlin Wall fell, and the corruption in Eastern European states was revealed. Honecker, Jaruzelski, Husak, Kadar, Zhivkov, and Ceausescu — all Warsaw Pact leaders living high on the hog while their populations were suppressed and starved. It is a characteristic of socialism that while it fails, those deemed “more equal than others” become increasingly divorced from economic reality and personally corrupt. Hark! Did someone say Brussels?

Over fifty years ago, there was another King of the North called T. Dan Smith aka Mr Newcastle, leader of that city’s council, who along with bent architect John Poulson and another council leader Andrew Cunningham in nearby County Durham were jailed for corruption. Mini-Honeckers and Ceausescus all of them.

I recall discussing this with an acquaintance back in the seventies. He was in the business of developing car parks in city centres, negotiating with planning departments and Labour councillors all the time. He was clear that the further left a councillor, the easier he was to bribe. His cynical observation appears to be confirmed by the facts.

Imagine you have a social conscious and become a socialist politician. You rapidly find that everything you do suffers from unintended consequences, but lobbyists come to you simply because you have power. Dinners, visits to the races, fact-finding missions and conferences in luxury resorts all paid for, and finally some deals on the side are quietly offered. The chances are your head is turned. The Brussels elite which doesn’t even have to face a plebiscite is a supreme example of a socialist political class which in terms of luxury and indulgence gives the Warsaw Pact leaders a close run for their money.

Burnham and his appointees may or may not succumb to the most obvious forms of bribery, but when things don’t pan out too well, almost certainly he will follow Starmer for the photo opportunities, the dinners, and all the other trappings of NATO, EU, and G7 meetings whose attendees meet to simply reassure themselves of their importance.

Importance abroad offsets impotence at home. Nothing changes, because socialism doesn’t deliver. As Mises correctly observed, there’s no such thing as economic calculation in a socialist state. Formally the most powerful nation in the world, Britain under socialism is now becoming a third world country. It is extraordinary that no one seems to think that the problem is too much government and regulation. Instead, the solution is to double down: more government, more regulation, more taxes, more Burnhams. Any complainer is an enemy of the state and his right to a contrary opinion is vigorously denied.