Blog Post

AEIdeas

My colleague Mark Perry posted recently a great excerpt from Alan Charles Kors’ classic essay on the ghastly death toll caused by socialism, and the disgraceful willingness of so many “intellectuals” to avert their eyes from that tragic reality. I urge everyone to read Mark’s post; and let me add two observations.

First, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression should be required reading for every college student — and perhaps every high school student — everywhere. A rigorous and disturbing study of the number of deaths attributable to communist political systems around the world, most professors and teachers should read it as well.

Second: Famine is a disproportionately prevalent outcome of socialist systems, as illustrated in the following table summarizing the thirty famines of the 20th century.

Famines are the tragic result of many conditions: wars; insurrections; natural disasters and droughts; deliberate denial of food to specific populations by governments or by opposition groups, and so forth. But it is striking that famines under socialist systems are represented so heavily among the worst of the 20th century in terms of excess mortality as a proportion of the total population: six of the worst ten, and seven of the first fifteen.

Apart from intentional famines directed at particular parts of the population — the Cambodian and Ukrainian famines are good examples — it is likely to be the case that famines less intentional are more likely under socialism, because of incentives inherent under that system. Socialist economies must collectivize agriculture because without a system of market prices and profits driving resource allocation and production decisions, urban areas would starve: They have no means of inducing food production for urban populations. But collectivization tends to dampen production incentives, and certainly private incentives to store food in advance of adverse conditions; accordingly, famines are more likely to result under socialism when droughts or other events interfering with food production emerge.

Anyone who believes that socialism, or policies subjecting ever-greater proportions of the economy to collective control, can yield salutary outcomes for the great mass of ordinary people should take a hard look at reality. In this context, past performance really is a guarantee of future results.